Previous presidents who used their executive authority to shield undocumented immigrants confronted little of the fury that Mr. Obama now faces, in part because their actions affected fewer people and the issue was not as polarizing at the time.

“Back in the 1980s, immigration was controversial, but there was a bipartisan consensus that we had to reform immigration laws,” said Stephen W. Yale-Loehr, who teaches immigration law at Cornell University.

In 1986, Mr. Reagan signed the so-called amnesty bill passed by Congress that granted legal status to three million undocumented immigrants, and then acted on his own the following year to expand it to about 100,000 more. That action extended the amnesty to immigrants who had left the country and then used fraudulent documents to be readmitted, and shielded from deportation minor children whose parents qualified.

Mr. Bush moved in 1990 to allow 1.5 million undocumented spouses and children of immigrants who were in the process of becoming legal permanent residents to stay in the country and obtain work permits. At the time, that amounted to about 40 percent of the immigrants living without documentation in the United States. Mr. Obama’s order would affect about 45 percent of the undocumented immigrants.



http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/21/us/politics/obamas-immigration-decision-has-precedents-but-may-set-a-new-one.html?_r=0

An intellectually honest liberal