Which president gave amnesty

With a portrait of Abraham Lincoln as a background, President Gerald Ford announces his order of conditional amnesty for thousands of Vietnam era draft evaders and military deserters. Act of Stat. However, because of concerns voiced by both employers and immigrant community leaders, the act compromised: it contained provisions for an amnesty giving citizenship to illegal immigrants who had been residents for a set period of time.

Though the Supreme Court has given the opinion that Congress can grant an independent amnesty, it has never expressly ruled on the issue. However, the president's power to grant amnesty autonomously has never been in serious question. The president always has recourse to the pardoning powers granted the office by the Constitution.

After the war, Lincoln issued a proclamation of amnesty for those who had participated in the rebellion. Though Congress protested the leniency of the plan, it was helpless to alter or halt it. Click here to learn more.

A leading-edge research firm focused on digital transformation. Good Subscriber Account active since Shortcuts. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. It often indicates a user profile. Log out. US Markets Loading H M S In the news. Politics Contributors. Andrew Taylor , Associated Press. Sign up for notifications from Insider! Stay up to date with what you want to know.

Loading Something is loading. We use cookies and other tracking technologies to improve your browsing experience on our site, show personalized content and targeted ads, analyze site traffic, and understand where our audiences come from. To learn more or opt-out, read our Cookie Policy. This week, the Obama administration is poised to enact some form of executive action to protect certain classes of unauthorized migrants to the United States from deportation.

These executive actions have been the subject of considerable preemptive criticism, with conservatives — but also liberal columnist Jonathan Chait — expressing concern for the erosion of norms that such action would represent.

A useful Congressional Research Service document establishes that legally speaking, the president has fairly wide latitude here. Specific historical precedents in this area are quite varied as well. The Clinton administration, for example, seems to have quietly but drastically scaled back INS raids on employers in the lates after members of Congress — including quite conservative ones — complained about difficulties immigration enforcement was creating for business.

But here are four occasions in which presidents formally suspended aspects of immigration enforcement in pursuit of foreign policy or economic goals. They are all pretty different from what Obama appears to be contemplating, but also pretty different from each other — illustrating that administrations have always used their discretionary authority in a range of ways.

Fidel Castro's Cuban Revolution and his growing embrace of Communism produced a mass outflow of anti-Castro unauthorized migration to nearby Florida. For various foreign policy reasons, neither President Eisenhower nor his successor John F.

Kennedy wanted to forcibly repatriate Cubans. Eventually, the Cuban Adjustment Act of was passed by Congress to legislatively establish Cubans' present-day right to immigrate in unlimited quantities to the United States.

But as this contemporaneous news bulletin from the Social Security Administration explains, the earliest iteration of this principle was established not by Congress but by Presidential fiat:.

It seems that Reagan would understand that his law failed to stop illegal immigration, not because we allowed people to stay, but because we refused to allow more to come — in his farewell address, he said he wanted an America 'open to anyone with the will and heart to get here,' " Bier wrote for the Daily Caller website.

In an email exchange with The Arizona Republic , Michael Reagan, the former president's son, said that his father never regretted the amnesty part of the compromise, but did regret that there was no follow-through on the enforcement measures or border security.

If you follow the Google development of this thing, somehow it ended up in Ed Meese's mouth, but he told us back in that that didn't come from him, that he never heard that from Reagan. The law's sanctions against employers who hired undocumented immigrants were never vigorously enforced and, when they were, received a strong backlash from business interests.

The law also didn't include a mechanism to allow for the legal entry of low-skilled foreign workers. So when the U. Future generations of Americans will be thankful for our efforts to humanely regain control of our borders and thereby preserve the value of one of the most sacred possessions of our people: American citizenship. Reagan, who died in , indicated that he considered the law's employer-sanctions program to be crucial in preventing future illegal immigration.

John McCain, R-Ariz.