EXPERTS ADVISORY

The U.S. Supreme Court is considering arguments on President Obama’s immigration plan that would provide more than 4 million undocumented immigrants with a path to legalization.

University of Michigan experts are available to discuss the legal and political ramifications:

Ann Lin, associate professor at the Ford School of Public Policy, has studied the most recent federal efforts to reform immigration policies.

“The Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents is much more significant than Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals,” she said. “It would allow up to a third of the undocumented population to work legally, which would make it much more feasible for employers to stop hiring people who do not have work permits.

“DAPA, however, does have long-range consequences that immigration advocates should fear. Once the U.S. creates a population of immigrant workers that is ‘legally present’ but has no access to permanent residence and citizenship, it becomes easy to argue that low-wage foreign workers need, and deserve, nothing more. That would put the U.S. on the road to becoming Western Europe, where a history of treating Muslim immigrants as guest workers with no rights has led to a permanently poor, permanently excluded underclass. Even citizenship for the children of guest workers is not enough to reverse the trends that we see in Paris and Brussels.”

Contact: 734-764-7507, [email protected]

Margo Schlanger, the Henry M. Butzel Professor of Law, is a leading authority on civil rights issues and served as the presidentially appointed officer for civil rights and civil liberties at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

“Prosecutorial discretion is an unavoidable part of our current immigration system,” she said. “If President Obama and the Department of Homeland Security didn’t instruct immigration officials how to use that discretion, the result wouldn’t be more enforcement—it would be different, less rational enforcement. There’s nothing in the Constitution that requires that enforcement decisions be made by individual immigration officials rather than by their boss. Pending comprehensive immigration reform, which will hopefully come soon, DACA and DAPA are both good policy and well within the president’s legal authority.”

Contact: 734-615-2618, [email protected]

Silvia Pedraza, professor of sociology and American culture, studies the sociology of immigration as well as race and ethnicity in America. Her research seeks to understand the causes and consequences of immigration as a historical process that forms and transforms nations.

“Obama always told Congress that if they did not want his executive orders, they should ‘pass a bill,'” she said. “There is no doubt that Congress not passing the Comprehensive Immigration Reforms—twice—led Obama to issue his executive orders.”

Contact: 734-647-3659, [email protected]