Bruce Morrison is a former Democratic congressman from Connecticut and was chairman of the House Immigration Subcommittee, a member of the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform - He explains why Obama has the key on Immigration

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Obama can do a lot on Immigration, even if there is a lot of opposition in Congress to his actions - He has discretionary powers

POLITICO.COM
Why the White House has the key on Immigration Reform
by Roger Simon
Roger Simon is POLITICO’s chief political columnist.
May 12, 2011


Why the White House has the key on Immigration Reform


Some excerpts :

Bruce Morrison has a fix. Morrison is a former Democratic congressman from Connecticut and was chairman of the House Immigration Subcommittee, a member of the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform and author of the Immigration Act of 1990. He is now an immigration attorney and lobbies on a wide variety of related issues.

He doesn’t agree with everything Obama says or does — Morrison was a Hillary Clinton supporter in the past presidential election — but Morrison believes the president “is sincerely trying to find a solution” to the immigration problem. Morrison also believes, however, the immediate solution must come from the White House, not Congress.

Right now, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement can cut some slack to illegal immigrants through a policy called “deferred action.” (ICE is a law enforcement agency under the Department of Homeland Security, which means it is part of the executive branch of government.)

Let’s say you are fighting in Afghanistan and your spouse gets picked up in a raid and is found to have entered the United States illegally years ago. Should we really deport her? While you are fighting for America? ICE has the discretion to leave illegal immigrants in the United States on a year-to-year basis.

Morrison wants more deferred actions, not for new illegal immigrants but for those already here. “What most Americans want is an end to large numbers of people coming into this country outside of the rules,” Morrison said. “They are saying, ‘We are sick of this crap. Fix it.’”

There are about 154 million people in the U.S. workforce, and about 60 million of them change jobs annually. Under Morrison’s plan, when you change jobs, you would get checked by a new electronic system to see whether you are in the U.S. legally. If you just arrived in the U.S. illegally, you would get sent back. If you are here illegally but have a work history, you would get to stay until Congress decides what to do with you.

This system would not change the number of illegal workers already in America, but at least that number wouldn’t grow too much.

This would not satisfy the people who want to add more alligators to the moat, but it would be an effective and compassionate response to illegal immigration. Morrison, who has worked in these trenches for 25 years and understands politics as well as he understands immigration, acknowledges that Obama has an easier path than the one Morrison suggests.

“He can just invite Republicans to beat him up for wanting to help Latinos, and that helps his Latino vote without doing much,” Morrison said. “But I think he wants more than that.”

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