lolgaxe wrote:
Remember when H.W. forestalled deportations for about 1.5 million illegal immigrants through executive action? And when Reagan legalized the status of unauthorized children in 1986 through executive action?
Yeah. Some of us remember that
those numbers weren't remotely accurate.
For those not willing to read the article, the upshot is that only about 40-50k people actually applied for the exemption. The 1.5 million figure did not come from the INS itself, but from a Democrat congressman during a hearing who tossed the number out (seemingly out of the blue) and asked it it was possible that many could be affected by the order, and got a positive response from an INS representative. Given that we can look at the actual numbers that were involved, it's odd that not only are the Obama apologists using an old estimate, they've grasped onto the most tenuous and inaccurate one possible. Well, not "odd", but more "intentionally deceptive".
Additionally, those executive orders were in association with actual changes to our immigration law passed by Congress. They did not create a new amnesty or change of immigration status out of thin air. They were targeted only at minors and spouses of those who were granted legal status by the 1986 law. Comparing those is a huge stretch, to say the least. Sure, they're all executive orders. And they all have to do with immigrants and deportation processes. But that's where the similarities end. Obama is not making a minor implementation change to an existing recently passed law to fill in a gap in said law. He's just deciding out of the blue that the law should work differently than it did before.