http://www.vox.com/cards/immigration-re ... on-in-2014
Will the House take action on immigration in 2014?
No.
On June 30th, the White House said that House Speaker John Boehner told President Barack Obama that the House wasn't going to vote on immigration in 2014. In response, President Obama announced that he's going to see what he can do on immigration via executive order — in particular, shifting resources on immigration enforcement from the interior of the US to the border.
Since President Obama said as late as May that he'd wait to pursue executive action to give the House time to vote — making him more optimistic than most politicians about the prospects of legislative reform — this means reform is essentially dead. That's especially true because Republican members of the House have said that if the President takes executive action, they won't support any immigration reform bill.
Boehner repeatedly said he "wants" to take action on immigration in 2014, but any time he tried to pressure his caucus to take up the issue, the backlash caused him to back down. Boehner also warned it would be impossible for the House to pass any immigration bill unless it could start trusting President Obama to "enforce the law" — a phrase that could refer to Obama's policies of using prosecutorial discretion in immigration policy, or could refer to GOP distrust of Obama more generally. In response to these concerns, Obama delayed his planned review of deportation policy until the end of the summer. Boehner initially dismissed the delay as "playing politics."
What could Obama do on his own by executive action? What can only Congress do?
What Obama can do on his own
Restrict deportations. There's no Congressional mandate to deport a certain number of immigrants per year. Some House Republicans have accused Obama of refusing to "enforce the law" by not deporting enough immigrants from the interior of the country, but it's broadly acknowledged that the executive branch has the authority to decide who to deport.
The Obama administration has defined its "priorities" for deportation in such a way that 98% of the people it deports fall into one of those categories, but even former ICE officials say that their "priorities" are overly broad, and that immigrants living in the US who have old deportation orders, or who were deported and returned years ago, should not be "priorities" for deportation.
Expand deferred action, including work permits. Policies that restrict deportations don't always protect immigrants from the fear of deportation — especially when ICE agents don't go along with directives to deport fewer people. So many advocates have called for the administration to extend affirmative protection from deportation to unauthorized immigrants. The White House has already done this for some immigrants — the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which started in 2012, has given 2-year protection from deportation and work eligibility to over 550,000 young unauthorized immigrants, or "DREAMers."
Some advocates call for deferred action to be expanded to the parents of US citizen children, or the parents of DACA recipients. Some call for a broader expansion of deferred action to millions of unauthorized immigrants.
End prosecutions. Decisions by US Attorneys to prosecute unauthorized immigrants for "illegal entry" or "illegal reentry" are making those immigrants vulnerable to deportation and disqualifying them from future immigration reform or relief. If US Attorneys stopped choosing to prosecute "illegal reentry" cases, especially in the interior of the country, thousands of immigrants could be protected.
Develop better border-security plans. The administration's authority on immigration enforcement applies to tighter enforcement as well. The border-security bill the House Homeland Security Committee passed last year calls for the Department of Homeland Security to produce a plan that will allow it to meet certain border-security "effectiveness" metrics within a certain amount of time — but DHS could do that without the bill, too.
What only Congress can do
Allow unauthorized immigrants to apply for legal status. The administration can protect unauthorized immigrants from deportation temporarily, but it can't create a new kind of legal status for them — and it can't get rid of Congressional restrictions on letting people here without papers "get legal." So any permanent solution for the unauthorized, including any form of broad legalization or eventual citizenship, would have to happen through Congress.
Expand, or shift the focus of, legal immigration. Only Congress can change the number and types of visas that are available for legal immigrants. So only Congress would be able to allow more high-skilled immigrants to come into the country, for example, or expand low-skilled immigration so that fewer low-skilled immigrants come illegally. By the same token, since the current years-long "backlog" of family visas is due to legal restrictions on how many visas can be issued, only Congress can reduce the backlog by raising those caps. If, as many House Republicans have advocated, Congress expanded visas for high-skilled workers by reducing the number of visas available to family members, the backlog would be lengthened.
On global warming earlier, now on immigration; the President is doing the GOP congressional leaderships' job.
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