After years of playing defense, apologizing for while doubling down on his lies about the Affordable Care Act, President Barack Obama has chosen to go on offense. Not against the junior varsity terrorists of the Islamic State group in any sort of new, more meaningful way, but on the domestic front, by finally taking action to shield large numbers of illegal immigrants from deportation. Later today, in a prime-time address, the president is expected to announce that he will grant millions of undocumented aliens, seemingly mostly those with close family ties to U.S. citizens (often their children), reprieve from deportation and some sort of permission to work legally.
These actions appear to be wise ones, both on political and on substantive grounds. What the president is doing, in effect, is going from not enforcing federal immigration law (much like his predecessors) to announcing that he is not enforcing federal immigration law, and detailing more of the specifics of this non-enforcement. In other words, he’s gone from not deporting 11 million people to not deporting 5 million or 3 million people. For a number of reasons this is, along practically all dimensions, good and helpful public policy.
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