President Barack Obama’s executive order on immigration will affect the estimated 65,000 unauthorized immigrants in Louisiana, according to Pew Research Center’s “Unauthorized Immigrant Population: National and State Trends, 2010.”
On Nov. 20, Obama announced his plans to fix the country’s broken immigration system.
“The executive order itself made it so that parents of U.S. citizens who have been here for at least five years, they pass a background check, and they pay whatever taxes they owe and they are basically given the promise they will not be deported,” said public administration professor Roy Heidelberg.
Across the U.S., about 70 percent of undocumented immigrants’ parents were born in Mexico. Another 17 percent were born in other Latin American countries, according to Pew Research Center.
However, this order does not extend citizenship to all these people — the executive order promises a temporary stay in the U.S. as long as the order is enforced.
Though Louisiana’s undocumented population makes up 1.4 percent of the population and 2 percent of the labor force as of 2010, Heidelberg said he does not see the executive order affecting Louisiana’s job market.
Life for this portion of the population will remain the same.
“Things are going to continue going as they were. It’s just that a subset of the population is no longer going to be living under the threat of deportation,” Heidelberg said. “They’ll still be going to work. They’ll still be going to the stores and buying what they’re buying. It really won’t change much.”
Psychology sophomore Elizabeth Yanes said she believes the country as a whole will benefit from the executive order.
“Overall, these people are here to help,” Yanes said. “It would be their home, too.”
However, Heidelberg said he believes the rest of the population will remain unaffected by the executive order.
Heidelberg said presidents often use executive orders to clarify law passed by Congress, although they are sometimes controversial. Obama’s most controversial executive orders include his on the Affordable Care Act and now immigration reform, he said.
He said he suspects Obama is using his immigration executive order to tell Congress the responsibility falls on it to pass comprehensive legislation on immigration.
Presidents frequently have used executive orders similar to this one since President Theodore Roosevelt’s era.
“If this is taken seriously as an executive order — and time will tell whether or not it is — when a president uses an executive order in a controversial way, like this, the president is saying Congress needs to clarify the law on this matter because only Congress can form law,” Heidelberg said. “The president’s changes based on executive order have the force of law, but it’s not actually law.”
Provisions are put in place for the courts to review executive orders to ensure the president isn’t overreaching their authority, Heidelberg said, the most famous case being President Harry Truman’s executive order that placed steel production under federal jurisdiction.
Some Louisiana Republican politicians have publicly expressed anger about the executive order because they believe Obama is overstepping his bounds as president, Heidelberg said.
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