It is anticipated that President Obama will announce his long awaited executive action on immigration in an address on Friday afternoon. From the various semi-official leaks that are coming out, a tentative picture of its provisions is emerging. It seems that the most realistic way to view this matter is as a stopgap and not a basic solution to a complex and controversial problem. The New York Times is reporting the likelihood of limitations that will be regularized status that will be granted to a bloc of the people who are presently here on undocumented status.
Obama’s Executive Order on Immigration Is Unlikely to Include Health Benefits
Millions of undocumented immigrants who are set to be granted a form of legal status by President Obama as early as this week will not receive one key benefit: government subsidies for health care available under the Affordable Care Act.
Mr. Obama is preparing to use his executive authority to provide work permits for up to five million people who are in the United States illegally, and to shield them from deportation. But an official familiar with the administration’s deliberations said on Tuesday that such people would not be eligible for subsidized, low-cost plans from the government’s health insurance marketplace, HealthCare.gov.
The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the president has not announced details of the plan, said the immigrants would most likely be treated the same way that so-called Dreamers — undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children — were under a similar executive action in 2012. The Dreamers did not receive health care benefits.
Some advocates said this week that they saw a paradox in the president’s policy. On one hand, they said, Mr. Obama plans to provide relief to millions of undocumented immigrants so that they can come out of the shadows and be better integrated into American society. On the other hand, they said, the administration is shutting them out of the health care system that would help them become productive members of society.
The president's position has been that he lacks the legal authority to extend health care and other social benefits by executive order. There are specialist in immigration law who are taking the position that he does have such authority. However, it is clear that whatever Obama does is going to be a temporary fix. Without getting legislation through congress, anything that he does could be reversed by the next president. There are certain to be legal challenges to his actions.
The action that is being contemplated is to grant relief from deportation and work permits to undocumented residents who have children born in the US and are thus citizens. This is estimated to affect about 5 million people. However there appears to be a loophole that could leave the parents of the young people who have previously been granted status as dreamers out in the cold. The dreamers are people who came to the US as minors and are not birthright citizens.
We will see how all of this plays out politically. Latino immigration advocates reacted quite negatively to Obama's decision to postpone executive action until after the midterm election. This clearly is not going to bring them everything that they like to see. However, it will be more than enough to send right wing opponents of any immigration reform into attacks of outrage.