John Lennon, Barack Obama and Illegal Immigrants: The Case That Ties Them All Together

Everything is connected and when it comes to John Lennon, Barack Obama and immigration policy there's no Kevin Bacon required (but we're sure we could work him in with a few more steps). In truth the policy the president is using for his handling of more than 580,000 illegal immigrants is based on a precedent set by the case against Lennon during the Nixon administration according the the Associated Press.

Lennon of course spent the majority of his later life living in the United States, which apparently struck Richard Nixon's office as a bad thing. The office of Immigration and Naturalization services was basing its case to give the Beatle the boot on a marijuana conviction he had received in London during 1968. As you can imagine, the case of a major music celebrity got more undivided attention than that of your typical foreigner living in the United States, which Lennon's legal team pointed out had created a less-than-legal discretionary system where some individuals such as Lennon were "high priority" while others were "non-priorities."

That court shaming led government officials to pressure the INS into issuing official guidelines on how formal discretion would be handled. Lennon won his case and obtained "non-priority" status.

"That discretion exists," Lennon's lawyer Leon Wildes said. "Any agency which is so huge has to be concerned how they spend their money and what they concentrate on and they shouldn't be deporting people who are here for 25 years and never did anything really wrong...That is the message that we got from representing John Lennon."

How does this relate back to Obama? The president used the same policy of non-priority to delay deporting the immigrants in question. Media attention has obviously made the recent waves Central American immigrants conversation fodder but without some sort of serious criminal background, they'll have to wait in line. Whatever you think of the administration's actions on illegal immigration, you at least have to acknowledge that there was legal precedent.

Tags

John Lennon