Last week, President Barack Obama issued an executive orders relating to our nation’s immigration policy. The president’s move only hurts any chance of bipartisanship in this new Congress and sets a dangerous precedent in regard to how much power the president should have.

The executive orders apply to immigrants who entered the U.S. before January 2010, those who immigrated before they turned 16 and immigrants who have at least one child who is a U.S. citizen or green card holder, may be eligible for deferred action under a new program. This is designed to stop the federal government from breaking up families when deporting illegal immigrants.

Exclusion was the norm for our immigration policy for a large amount of our history. Much of our early immigration legislature was designed to keep Chinese immigrants out with the Chinese Exclusion Act in the 19th century, along with legislature keep the wrong types of European immigrants out — such as Italians, Jews, Greeks, Russians, Irish and Polish — also during the 19th century. Obama’s executive order is a positive change from history. However, the issue isn’t the policy Obama is creating; the issue is that Obama is creating policy.

The key difference is that Obama’s act greatly increases the power of executive branch at the expense of Congress. While many Democrats argue that the Republican Party was never going to pass a comprehensive immigration bill and that the president had to pass one, the ramifications of this unilateral move can’t be ignored. By doing this, Obama has royally ticked off the GOP and there is even talk of another government shutdown because of it.

What makes Obama’s move different is that he is creating, interpreting the law and acting on it. While this is perfectly legal according to constitutional lawyers, Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic broke this down and wrote in an article on Nov. 21, “I regard this executive order as the latest in a series of expansions of executive power that goes back at least to the Bush administration, a context that cuts two ways for me… Does this portend a future where presidents behave this way on foreign and domestic policy? What laws will President (Ted)Cruz one day stop enforcing?”

Undoubtedly, Obama’s move has helped at least 5 million people stay in the U.S. and they are now able to apply for citizenship and not have live and work in fear. This is to be commended, but at the same time, Obama has drastically altered how much power the office of the president has. This isn’t the first time he has done this either, if you remember his drone warfare program or the fact that we’re currently fighting ISIS illegally in the Middle East without Congress’s approval.

While this legislature helped 5.3 million people legally become citizens, this action will only hurt chances of bipartisanship going in to 2015 and will definitely be a major source of debate looking forward to the 2016 election.

Rami Jackson is a junior entrepreneurship and policy studies major. His column appears weekly. He can be reached at [email protected] and followed on Twitter @IsRamicJ.

Published on November 30, 2014 at 11:00 pm