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PunditFact: Obama's immigration actions have precedent with past presidents

 
Republican presidential candidate, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum speaks during a rally at the Jelly Belly Candy Co., in Fairfield, Calif., Thursday, March 29, 2012. Santorum strongly criticized President Barack Obama in a foreign policy speech that suggested the United States has been weak on Iran, ignores ally Israel and rushes to engage America's enemies. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli) CARP104
Republican presidential candidate, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum speaks during a rally at the Jelly Belly Candy Co., in Fairfield, Calif., Thursday, March 29, 2012. Santorum strongly criticized President Barack Obama in a foreign policy speech that suggested the United States has been weak on Iran, ignores ally Israel and rushes to engage America's enemies. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli) CARP104
Published Nov. 24, 2014

As Republicans across the country and on cable networks decried his actions, President Barack Obama used an interview with ABC News to defend his decision not to deport more than 4 million immigrants living in the country illegally.

Republican officials in at least five states, including Wisconsin and Texas, are poised to launch a legal barrage after Obama's unilateral immigration move, but Obama says the law is on his side.

Fresh off a Friday speech in Las Vegas, Obama noted he is far from the first president to selectively implement immigration law. He spoke in an interview with George Stephanopoulos of ABC's This Week, which aired Sunday.

"Do you have the right to make that decision on your own?" Stephanopoulos asked.

"Absolutely," Obama replied. "If you look, every president — Democrat and Republican — over decades has done the same thing, as I mentioned in my remarks today."

His response is similar to a line from his Thursday address at the White House in which he likened his executive action to "the kinds of actions taken by every single Republican president and every single Democratic president for the past half century." That claim rates Half True.

A report from the American Immigration Council, a pro-immigration group, cites 39 examples since 1956 in which a president granted "temporary immigration relief to one or more groups in need of assistance." The group found at least one executive action from each president since (and including) President Dwight D. Eisenhower that either added exemptions to immigration law, extended protections or decided who will be subject to enforcement.

The largest single action before Obama's was made by President George H.W. Bush. In 1990, he forestalled deportations for an estimated 1.5 million undocumented immigrants after passage of a 1986 law that granted legal status for many, but not all, immigrants living here without permission. President Ronald Reagan took similar action, affecting about 100,000 families.

White House officials said other smaller actions included reprieves for Cubans in the 1960s, Southeast Asians in the 1970s and Nicaraguans in the 1980s.

But setting aside the actions of Bush and Reagan, critics say that what other presidents did differs in significant ways.

"The list reads like a study guide of post-war foreign crises," said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors reduced immigration.

Obama's plan is easily the biggest such action ever taken by a president, at least in raw numbers, with between 4 million and 5 million potential beneficiaries. Bush's action offers the clearest parallel as the second-largest action, with a similar percentage of the undocumented population potentially affected, no specific nationality being targeted and beneficiaries being allowed to qualify for a work permit.

Still, most of the actions taken by prior presidents were more limited in size, scope and benefits. So, even if you accept that the 1990 action is a close precedent, that's a much more limited claim than the one Obama made.

High-profile Republicans continued to criticize Obama on other shows, with former GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum saying the decision "slapped the face" of lawmakers. On CNN's State of the Union, Santorum called on the GOP to adopt an "immigration control" platform that favored legal, working Americans to counter an immigration wave.

"The last 20 years have been the largest wave of immigration in the history of this country," Santorum said. "There are more people living in this country who were not born here than at any time in the history of the country. And what the president is saying is, 'We need more.' And working men and women are saying, 'Hold on, what about us?' "

Santorum is correct in terms of the raw numbers of foreign-born people, but experts say it's not the best measure to use when comparing foreign-born populations over the years. We rate it Half True.

As of 2012, the country's foreign-born population was about 40 million, including immigrants here illegally. In sheer numbers, that's a record high.

However, the total U.S. population has grown significantly in the past 160 years. Foreign-born residents made up 12.9 percent of the total U.S. population in 2010. In this respect, today's foreign-born population is not the highest it has ever been — in fact, it was higher from 1860 through the 1920s, when it ranged from 13.2 percent to 14.8 percent.

The foreign-born population has steadily grown since the 1970s, and the 2010 figure is not too far behind the all-time highs.

Experts said comparing the percentage of foreign-born residents against the total population better reflects the country's ability to accommodate immigrants.

"As a historian, there is no reason whatsoever to focus on the absolute number over the percentage," said Kenyon Zimmer, an immigration historian at the University of Texas at Arlington. "The absolute number tells us nothing useful about the impact of immigration on the United States — an impact that is, today, less than it was during the age of 'mass immigration' around the turn of the (20th) century."

PunditFact staff writers Katie Sanders and Jon Greenberg contributed to this report. Read the full fact-checks at PunditFact.com.