Editorial

Order Won’t Resolve Immigration Issue

Posted

Some Americans think President Barack Obama went too far with his executive order offering some protections to families of immigrants who came here illegally. Others think he did not go far enough.

We think that members of both parties should find a way to sit down and dialogue on this very important issue, and to come up with a comprehensive immigration reform plan to address it in all of its facets.

We need to hear the voices of our elected representatives engaged in dialogue that will lead our country forward, rather than getting caught up in fruitless posturing and diatribe.

An executive order, of course, can be reversed at any time. More importantly, it does not allow for the kind of consensus-building that should be a key component in formulating national policy.

Nevertheless, the president’s Nov. 20 order is a welcome development in that it will help keep immigrant families together by deferring deportations of as many as 5 million low-risk immigrants—expanding to eligible adults the same relief granted to young people under a previous executive order inspired by the so-called DREAM Act (Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors).

The latest order, like the one for minors, does not provide a pathway to citizenship and does not confer legal status. In other words, no one will get a green card under this order, and no one will receive benefits available to legal residents such as food stamps, unemployment payments and health insurance under the Affordable Care Act.

What the order will do is grant temporary three-year work permits to adults with children born in this country prior to Nov. 20. They must pass criminal background checks, and register to pay taxes.

They’ll also be able to breathe a little easier, without the threat of deportation hovering over their every move.

Bishop Eusebio Elizondo, M.Sp.S., auxiliary bishop of Seattle and chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) Committee on Migration, welcomed the president’s action, saying that the U.S. Catholic Church and its social service agencies witness daily “the human consequences of the separation of families, when parents are deported from their children or spouses from each other.”

“We’ve been on record asking the administration to do everything within its legitimate authority to bring relief and justice to our immigrant brothers and sisters,” he said.

Msgr. Kevin Sullivan, executive director of archdiocesan Catholic Charities, tells of one of those “human consequences,” a situation he personally witnessed in his parish church, where a father, mother and two children appeared one Sunday at Mass, but only the mother and children the following week. The father, who was the breadwinner, was deported for a minor infraction that occurred almost a decade earlier.

The wife is now alone and the children are without their father. “No one benefited—not the family and not the nation,” Msgr. Sullivan said.

But he, like Bishop Elizondo and the bishops’ conference, recognize that an executive order as a fix to a severely broken immigrant system is a Band-Aid solution at best.

That’s why we join the bishops and Catholic Charities in the archdiocese and nationally in their support for comprehensive, bipartisan immigration reform that is fair and humane, protecting the rights and dignity of newcomers to our country while, at the same time, protecting the safety and security of our borders.

As always, Pope Francis put it best when he said, “We ourselves need to see, and then to enable others to see, that migrants and refugees do not only represent a problem to be solved, but are brothers and sisters to be welcomed, respected and loved.”