Obama Administration Immigration Policy: Reform and Limits

Introduction: Contextualizing Obama's Immigration Legacy

The Trump Administration's immigration policies have been so damaging to immigrants that it is easy to idealize the preceding Obama Administration's attitudes toward legal and undocumented immigrants. In both rhetoric and policy, the Obama Administration attempted more positive and welcoming approaches to immigrants compared with President Trump. However, it is important to contextualize Obama's executive outreach within a wider historical frame and to avoid excessive idealization, as legal scholars have cautioned.

President Obama drew both critics and supporters regarding his immigration policy. According to Kristina Campbell (2010), a professor of immigration law, although policies toward immigration throughout the 21st century as a whole have been highly problematic for immigrants, the Obama Administration's actions still leave much to be desired — particularly in terms of how immigrants were actively detained at the border and the lack of meaningful legislation to protect immigrants and the children of immigrants. By contrast, Professor Michael Kagan (2016) argues that the Obama Administration's record is not as problematic as it might appear, but rather the result of political and bureaucratic forces and struggles for power and control.

Specifically, Kagan (2016) argues that by using a mixture of executive actions and prosecutorial decisions, Obama's "aim has been to focus enforcement against immigrants caught at the border or with criminal records while easing the path toward integration for others" (p. 665). Critics have alleged that this creates a divide between so-called good and bad immigrants in a manner that is not constructive, while Obama's supporters argue that he was the first president in recent memory to take aggressive action to protect the rights of at least some immigrants who came to the country illegally yet made a meaningful contribution to American society.

Federal Authority and Plenary Power Over Immigration

Part of the divergence between these legal scholars may lie in the degree to which each views the federal government as powerful in shaping immigration policy. Campbell (2010) argues that the federal government holds a unique role in setting immigration policy for the nation. Although the U.S. Constitution does not explicitly address immigration — other than to establish rules for naturalization — federal courts have established a so-called plenary power on the part of federal officials to regulate immigration (Campbell, 2010). Under this view, a failure to act compassionately toward immigrants lies squarely in federal hands.

Kagan (2016) suggests, however, that the bureaucratic and political reality is far more complicated than this summary implies. President Obama, himself the child of an immigrant, was vocal in advocating for the expansion of DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) and DAPA (Deferred Action for Parental Accountability). These actions were promoted by the Obama Administration as stopgap measures resulting from Congressional inaction on the DREAM Act (Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors), which would offer more sweeping amnesty for children brought to the country by their parents as minors who lacked the technical qualifications for citizenship.

DACA, DAPA, and the DREAM Act

DACA was "built on the pre-existing legal mechanisms of deferred action, by which beneficiaries of prosecutorial discretion have been formally told that the government had decided not to deport them" (Kagan, 2016, p. 681). Not only would passing such executive actions have been an important first step in assisting the unintentional victims of immigration policy — since many children were unable to act on, or were unaware of, the ramifications of their parents' actions (such as crossing the border or concealing immigration status) — but it would also ensure a more consistent response to immigration, rather than leaving such decisions in the hands of prosecutors or other officials to apply in an arbitrary fashion.

In this respect, Obama's executive programs represented a meaningful, if limited, effort to address the situation of individuals who had little or no agency in their own immigration circumstances. Whether one views DACA and DAPA as bold leadership or as insufficient half-measures, their existence signaled a deliberate shift in how the federal government conceptualized culpability and enforcement priorities within the broader immigration system.

Conclusion: A Complicated but Meaningful Record

Rather than rendering a simple verdict on the Obama Administration's immigration record, it is more illuminating to view its policies within the context of an America where the political landscape was broadly opposed to using executive authority to enact reform. Although the Administration's record may still be problematic in certain respects, it did make genuine efforts to pass significant legislation — efforts that were stymied both by conservative state governments and by resistance from within ICE itself. Understanding this context is essential to any fair assessment of what the Obama Administration accomplished, and what it was prevented from accomplishing, in the realm of immigration policy.

References

Campbell, K. (2010). Imagining a more humane immigration policy in the age of Obama: The use of plenary power to halt the state balkanization of immigration regulation. St. Louis University Public Law Review, 415.

Kagan, M. (2016). Binding the enforcers: The administrative law struggle behind President Obama's immigration actions. Scholarly Works, 937. https://scholars.law.unlv.edu/facpub/937