Today President Obama announced that he plans to use his pen to sign Executive Orders that will try to ameliorate the lack of comprehensive immigration reform.  The U.S. Congress has failed to take action.  Or, rather, the U.S. House of Representatives — which is controlled by the Republican Party, via its majority control of the chamber and the leadership of Speaker John Boehner — has failed to even vote on the U.S. Senate Bill that was voted on an passed by the Senate last year.  Today’s speech by President Obama has not yet specified what type of immigration-based Executive Orders he will sign, but he has his options.  Quoting an editorial published in the Miami Herald, those options might be that the President:

• “…can extend the practical training granted to foreign graduates of U.S. universities, allowing U.S. employers to benefit from their talents. The administration has already done this for graduates in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields where their employers enroll in the e-verify program.  …Why not offer this option to all U.S. foreign graduates? Doing so would free up the professional H-1B work visa, which Congress has capped so that the total number of visas available to foreign professionals is exhausted on the first day that the visa becomes available.”
• “The administration can grant work permission to spouses of H-1B professionals and O-1 extraordinary workers, further alleviating pressure on the H-1B quota. Executive authority has already been used to grant spouses of other nonimmigrant visa categories the right to work.”
• “Obama can mandate the use of favorable prosecutorial discretion in certain deportation cases and cease deportations of spouses and children of U.S. citizens with no criminal records.”
• “He can find, as did the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals, that those with Temporary Protected Status (TPS) are eligible to apply for permanent residence if they are the beneficiaries of approved visa petitions. Certain citizens of Haiti, Syria, El Salvador and Honduras, among others, have TPS because of war or natural disasters back home.”
• “He can instruct immigration officials to apply more discretion to favorably adjudicate waivers for undocumented immediate relatives of U.S. citizens. These individuals would be eligible to legally process their residence papers, if granted a waiver. Under a previous administration, immigration agencies exercised discretion favorably to stop deportation of certain Central American refugees under a law called NACARA.”
• “He can grant the undocumented spouses and children of U.S. citizens “parole in place” (already available for undocumented immediate relatives of U.S. military and Cuban arrivals), thereby permitting them to apply for lawful permanent residence.”
• “Although he cannot increase the number of family and employment-based immigrant visas without Congress, he can alter the way family units are counted against the worldwide visa quota, counting only one number per family unit against the quota, instead of counting each member of the family against the quota.”

Ultimately, we will have to wait and see what the President will do — because the U.S. House of Representatives has refused to try to take real action towards reform.