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Immigration has been a hotly contested issue in recent years, touched off in 2006 by a proposal from then-President George W. Bush to grant undocumented immigrants guest-worker status. Subsequently, Bush was a proponent both of stronger policing of the border and of a path to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants.

In 2007, Bush supported a bill containing both measures called the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act, which stalled in the Senate, despite having bipartisan authorship.

Federal immigration reform has not yet been enacted during President Obamas tenure. The most recent effort is the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013, a bill whose sweeping provisions include stronger border enforcement and citizenship opportunities for undocumented immigrants. Though the bill passed the Senate in June 2013, the House of Representatives has not yet addressed it.

Meanwhile, the number of immigrants deported by customs officials has steadily increased under Obama, with more than 2 million removed from the United States in the last six years.

Immigrant advocacy groups have nicknamed the president the deporter-in-chief.

Yet in 2012, Obama issued an executive order that directed customs and border patrol agents to defer detainment and deportation for children who were brought to the country illegally, known as DREAMers. The order, called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, also authorizes DREAMers to work in the United States. DACA does not provide a path to citizenship, and, as an executive order, must be renewed by whoever follows Obama in 2017.

Earlier this year, a border crisis developed where thousands of Central American children flooded into the United States, accompanied by their mothers or by no one at all. Believing that they would receive special treatment as minors, the immigrants overwhelmed the American courts, which are obligated by federal law to provide due process to unaccompanied minors who are not from Canada or Mexico.

Spurred by legislative inaction, Obama said in June that he would issue new executive orders on immigration reform. Last month, with midterm elections looming and crucial Democratic seats in the balance, Obama announced that he would delay the orders until after November.

Through most of this time, immigration reform bills have included all or parts of the prooposed 2001 DREAM Act, a bipartisan bill intended to provide legal residency for foreign nationals who arrived as minors. DREAM, an acronym for Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors, eventually grew in the lexicon to refer to the people it proposed to sponsor: DREAMers.

Though Congress has passed no such bill, as of May, versions of the law that extend in-state tuition to undocumented immigrant students are in effect in 18 states. New Hampshire is not one of them, nor if Vermont. But the Green Mountain State did recently allow undocumented immigrants to apply for a drivers license.

Continued here:
Efforts to Reform Immigration Policy Have Faltered