President Obama’s Unilateral Immigration Reform: A Politically Contentious Move?

Even though the U.S. Republican Party has criticized him for acting like a king, does president Barack Obama’s executive order to unilaterally reform America’s current immigration system a “politically contentious move”?

By: Ringo Bones

For all intents and purposes, America’s current immigration system has been broken since the days of Ronald Reagan and for over 30 years has longing for a badly-needed reform. And yet when the U.S. President Barack Obama has recently made an executive order to unilaterally reform America’s broken immigration system, the U.S. Republican Party immediately voiced their “howls of derision” and calling president Obama’s action as akin to those of a king or an emperor as opposed to a democratically elected head-of-state. Given that for all intents and purposes any discussion of reforming the existing American immigration system is a politically contentious issue in itself, does President Obama’s recent move to unilaterally reform it do more good than harm despite of the contentious nature of the action?

Mexicans and other Hispanic groups in the United States had been unfairly bearing the full brunt of America’s dysfunctional immigration system. Not only Mexicans who are sneaking illegally across the border to America in the Arizona and Texas regions being harassed and murdered by white supremacists militias patrolling in that relatively lawless area but also “conservative” American’s are the main exploiters of illegal migrant labor by subjecting them to working conditions in violation of existing U.S. labor wage and safety laws due to their desperation to seek a better life that can’t be found in their native countries. 

“For over 200 years, America is a country of immigrants” – has been the salient theme of President Barack Obama’s speech on his executive action to prevent the deportation of up to 5-million undocumented immigrants, a majority of which are of Mexican and other Latin American ethnicity. Under the new reformed immigration law, if these undocumented immigrants pass the mandatory criminal background checks and qualify to the new reformed ruling then they will be eligible on the path to become fully naturalized American citizens. The immigration reform is primarily meant to benefit science and technology students and migrant workers with temporary visas to ease their path to become legalized American citizens. A semi legal Mexican immigrant and college student named Astrid Silva had become a recent – albeit according to her as an unwilling “cause célèbre” - on President Obama’s latest executive action to reform America’s broken immigration system.