I work with Congressman Lamar Smith on a great many issues.  He is a wonderful colleague, but the HALT Act is a terrible bill.

A little over ten years ago, I wrote a bill that is now known as the Dream Act. 

When the Dream Act came to the House floor last year—the only time it has ever come up for a vote in the House--  the House passed it. (216-198).  In the course of the debate on that bill, our colleague Lamar Smith and other Republican colleagues repeatedly called it an amnesty, even though the people the bill would help had, themselves, done nothing wrong. 

Yesterday, Mr. Smith introduced the HALT Act, a bill that he claims will take away President Obama’s ability to offer a “backdoor amnesty”   -- a term he uses to refer to the President’s discretionary authority to grant deferred action and other forms of temporary immigration relief to individuals. 

The Dream Act—amnesty!  Deferred action—backdoor amnesty!  TPS—administrative amnesty!  Our Republican colleagues like to throw that word around. 

The fact is that it is only in the absence of real reform that Presidents have used the tools and powers of the executive branch to inject some modicum of fairness and humanity into this broken system. They have done their best to make do.  President Bush did it, and now President Obama is doing the same.  And I think it’s the right thing for him to do.

But instead of just throwing around the word amnesty, let’s be clear about that this power is.  Deciding to grant deferred action is no different than what we call exercising prosecutorial discretion.  It is a calculation that we should not waste limited enforcement resources in order to punish, for example, young people who have done nothing wrong. 

This is the same kind of prosecutorial discretion that Lamar Smith called on Attorney General Janet Reno to exercise back in 1999.   But today, Lamar Smith has decided that this discretion constitutes amnesty. 

Now, I assume he only thinks it is amnesty when it’s the president who does it.  Otherwise, Chairman Smith has introduced a bill that, if it passes, will give amnesty to many thousands more people than both Presidents Bush and Obama combined have granted deferred action or TPS.

The employer verification bill that Chairman Smith has introduced would require employers to use the e-verify system, in order to keep them from employing undocumented immigrants who do don’t have work authorization.  His bill includes a special carveout — an exercise of prosecutorial discretion — for an entire class of employers: they are called “growers.” 

It says that any agricultural employer can keep their current employees without verifying their immigration status.  Since this is an industry known to employ a workforce that is by most estimates at least 75% undocumented, I can only assume that Mr. Smith intends to give those employers and those workers an amnesty. 

Or maybe he’s made a calculation that the current system has no meaningful path to lawful status for those workers, and if we want a domestic fresh fruit and vegetable industry in this country, then we need to exercise some discretion in our enforcement until we can fix the system.

The HALT Act, the e-verify legislation—these bills are the height of hypocrisy.  The President is cautiously exercising the small amount of discretionary authority he has in this area, because Congress has effectively abdicated its power to fix the problem. 

These bits and pieces of political messaging can’t be taken seriously when they’re offered by a party that is unwilling to come to the table to put together a comprehensive fix for an obviously inadequate system—a system that is at once inhumane, damaging to our economy, and harmful to our national security.  

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