President Barack
Obama’s unilateral move to lift the risk of deportation for millions of
undocumented immigrants has so incensed rank-and-file Republicans, their
leaders are actively tamping down potential cries for impeachment.
MSNBC host Rachel Maddow said that sort of outrage is "bogus," and
she went to the history of the immigration debate to prove it.
In 1990, President
George H. W. Bush, a Republican, by executive action forestalled deportations
for about 1.5 million illegal immigrants.
"What Obama
plans to do is roughly on the same scale as what Bush did," Maddow said on Nov. 17, 2014.
We know there’s a
vigorous debate whether the current move has the same legal standing as the
executive actions taken by Bush and by President Ronald Reagan for that matter.
Our focus here is simply on the numbers, with a hat tip to Vox for their work on this.
The count for Obama
According to reports, Obama plans to announce plans to stop deporting the parents of children who are
U.S. citizens. We’ve seen a couple of estimates of how many people that would
affect. The Pew Research Center said about 3.5 million. The New York Times put the figure at 4 million. Citing
White House sources, the New York Times said
an additional 1 million people would be touched by other facets of the new
policy, giving a total of 5 million. That’s very close to the Migration Policy Institute’s estimate of 5.2 million.
Since there are about
11.4 million undocumented immigrants, Obama’s order will change the rules for
about 40 percent of total population.
Again, this is based
on reports. But that’s all that Maddow would have had to go on when she made
her comments.
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