New York, NY, November 20, 2014 … The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) today welcomed President Obama’s executive action on immigration, calling it “an important step toward fixing our nation’s broken immigration system.”
Barry Curtiss-Lusher, ADL National Chair, and Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director issued the following statement:
America’s failed immigration system has left immigrant families broken and put whole communities in crisis, plagued by uncertainty and fear.
While the country watches and waits for Congress to reform our dated immigration system, we welcome President Obama’s move to keep families together and to allow relief for some immigrants who pass background checks and pay taxes.
By focusing enforcement efforts on those who threaten national security and public safety, and by bringing more undocumented immigrants out of the shadows and under the rule of law, this move is also a boost to both security and accountability.
This executive action not only serves our common humanity, it is a step forward toward the more just and orderly immigration system we hope Congress will craft and pass. We hope the president and Congress will work together in a bipartisan spirit to enact reform that will fix the broader system.
The president’s executive action follows a 2012 measure to provide relief from deportation for immigrants brought to the United States as children, which ADL supported. The League has long advocated for fair and humane immigration policies and has helped expose the anti-immigrant bigotry and hatred that has been an undercurrent of the immigration debate in the past few years.