President Obama is having trouble keeping his story straight on immigration. Sometimes he says that he is merely exercising prosecutorial discretion, like many previous presidents. He talks this way when he is trying to make a legal or constitutional argument for his recent executive order reducing the risk of deportation for 5 million illegal immigrants. At other times, though, he forthrightly suggests that he has “changed the law” — as he did when suggesting to hecklers who wanted a bigger change that they should be grateful for what they got.
In his speech announcing his order, Obama said that it was only fair to give illegal immigrants a chance to “get right with the law.” Hours earlier, though, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel had made it clear, in an analysis providing a legal justification for the order, that the affected illegal immigrants would undergo no formal change in legal status.
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