Obama's immigration order does little to settle debate

For some, it means that the years of telling lies and keeping secrets are finally coming to an end. For others, nothing will be any different — except perhaps a renewed sense of being left out or left behind.

President Barack Obama's decision to lift the threat of deportation from nearly 4 million illegal immigrants, arguably his most aggressive use of executive power, has deeply divided the nation.

The latest poll, released Wednesday by CNN/ORC, indicates that the country broadly approves of the result. Of those surveyed, 26 percent said he went too far. Half said he got it right, and 22 percent said they think he should have gone further.

The order builds on Obama's 2012 executive action protecting those whose parents brought them to the country illegally when they were children. It will offer a legal reprieve to parents whose offspring are citizens or living in the country legally.

Where Americans have misgiving, it appears, is in the way Obama went about it. In the CNN/ORC survey, 56 percent said he should not have expanded protection unilaterally, with an executive action that did not give Congress a say in shaping the program. Obama said inaction on Capitol Hill forced his hand.

So he has set off another of the seemingly endless ideological and partisan battles that rage in Washington. And viewed from the perspectives of people who have waited a long time for any action on immigration, there seems to be an arbitrariness to setting policy this way.

That is what a group of Washington Post reporters discovered when they fanned the country to hear the stories of immigrants such as Guadalupe Arreola, who was working under a white tent at a swap meet in North Las Vegas.

Arreola, 50, is originally from Mexico and has spent exactly half of her life in the United States, working as a cook and a house cleaner, among other jobs. Her only child was not born in the United States and is in Mexico, so she will not benefit from Obama's order.

Is she any less worthy of a break than those who are getting one? "A lot of people living here for years, we are working hard. We are paying taxes. We are not [committing] felonies," she said.

"I'm very happy because all of our children, all of our young people, they sleep comfortable because they're not going to be separated from their parents," Arreola said of Obama's action. "I feel a little sad because I'm not qualified in this. . . . I'm happy. I'm sad. I'm mad all [at the] same time."

Politicians have been arguing about who should be allowed to come to the United States, and who should be allowed to stay, almost since the founding of the republic.

The first immigration law — the Naturalization Act of 1790 — was one that set a racist standard. It offered citizenship to any "free white person, who shall have resided within the limits and under the jurisdiction of the United States for the term of two years," provided he was "a person of good character."

So conflicted have been the country's views on the question that in 1886, the year the Statue of Liberty was dedicated in New York Harbor to welcome your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, mobs rioted in Seattle and forced more than half the city's 350 Chinese residents onto a ship to San Francisco.

Because immigration is driven by human impulse and desperation, not the dictates of statute, unintended consequences will always exist.

The last overhaul of the immigration system was seeded by President Ronald Reagan, who said in a 1984 debate, "I believe in the idea of amnesty for those who have put down roots and who have lived here, even though some time back, they may have entered illegally."

But that leniency, it is now widely agreed, amounted to an invitation for more to come. There were 3 million to 5 million illegal immigrants in this country when the 1986 law was passed. Now, that number is estimated at upwards of 11 million.

The unilateral action of a president — which can be undone by his successor — will not do much to settle the debate about immigration, and indeed, seems certain in the short term to inflame it.

But for millions of people now living in this country illegally — or worried about loved ones who are — the consequences will be profound.