High Hurdles for Immigration Reform

President Obama’s promised executive actions to fix parts of the immigration system will not come until after the Nov. 4 elections, but some analysts are predicting anything he does will be treated contentiously, with legal challenges and calls for impeachment. Nevertheless, the possibility that Republicans will in January hold a majority in the Senate as well as in the House solidifies the reasoning for Obama to use executive orders to change administrative policies and enforcement priorities, said panelists at an immigration law and policy conference at Georgetown University Law Center on Oct. 21. The president has promised fixes to what many call the “broken” immigration system, preferably with a bipartisan piece of legislation, since his first campaign for president in 2008. Multiple efforts to pass a comprehensive immigration reform bill have failed in Congress. The likelihood of passing comprehensive immigration reform in the next 10 years “is increasingly remote,” said Simon Rosenberg, president and founder of the New Democrat Network, a think tank and advocacy organization, at the Georgetown conference. “We lost our shot.”