Seven years after a junior senator from Illinois took over the Oval Office, President Barack Obama on Tuesday will deliver the final State of the Union address of his tenure.

The president will address a very different America than the one he inherited in the midst of the worst domestic economic downturn since the Great Depression. During his tenure, the U.S. health care system was revamped, China continued its rise to economic prominence and the Islamic State group emerged as a global threat whose violence in the Middle East has spurred an influx of international militaries and an exodus of civilians.

There will be no shortage of subjects to cover when Obama takes the podium, but based on the presidential guest list released by the White House, immigration policy is expected to be a focal point.

Among those in attendance for Obama's final address will be Refaai Hamo, a Syrian refugee who fled to Turkey before receiving refugee status and traveling to the U.S., and Oscar Vasquez, whose family brought him from Mexico to Arizona without authorization when he was 12 years old. Vasquez eventually earned a mechanical engineering degree from Arizona State University but was forced to return to Mexico and apply for a visa after he graduated. He then served in the U.S. Army, with a tour in Afghanistan, and is now a full-fledged U.S. citizen.

Immigration policy, and the related executive actions the administration has taken over the last few years, has been a point of contention throughout Obama's presidency. U.S. News recently spoke with Doris Meissner, a former immigration official under the Clinton administration and a director at the Migration Policy Institute, about the contentious policy arena under Obama and what Americans should expect heading into the 2016 election. Excerpts:

Obama in 2008 touted immigration reform as one of his major presidential platforms. Eight years later, how has he shaped the immigration policy landscape?

Obama came into office talking about immigration as one of his key legislative priorities, and with the other things that were competing for Congress's time and the administration's time in the first year or two, that didn't happen.

We have to remember we were pulling out from the recession, had budgets to pass and health care was a major priority. But the fact that an immigration reform bill didn't go forward at the beginning of the administration has been something that has plagued Obama ever since. Some of the core constituencies that brought him into office expected that and have been very unhappy that it didn't happen in the early years.

And, at the same time that that didn't happen, the administration was also pursuing an aggressive enforcement agenda, and the numbers of people being deported each year in the early years of the administration were continuing to go up. Within the first two or three years of the administration, they went over 400,000 a year, which is a historic high.

The laws that were on the books were heavily enforcement-oriented laws. So that really continued to put the administration at odds with lots of constituency groups and Congress, because Congress was increasingly divided on where to go with immigration reform.

The balancing factor with that has been executive actions that the administration has taken in an effort to create a more balanced policy and compensate for the fact that it's been increasingly clear that Congress would not be able to successfully grapple with this issue.

Some speculate the recent deportation raids and increased enforcement activity in border states are not coincidental. The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to hear arguments later this year in relation to a collection of state lawsuits against the Obama administration's executive actions and there's speculation that the strict enforcement of immigration and deportation laws will improve the administration's standing. Do you think there's any truth to that?



I don't have any kind of an inside track. But those points that you've raised – one has to speculate that they're in play and relevant. There are a couple of other relevant factors also. The administration has been concerned about a [recent] court decision that curtails its ability to detain families that are coming to the U.S. [in detention centers]. It is believed that that reduces its ability to bring about deterrents, especially where these flows [of migrants] from Central America are concerned. And so [last week's enforcement actions] are probably somewhat related to that.

The administration has also been very clear that among its enforcement priorities are recent border-crossers. The people who are now part of these enforcement actions are people who came during the surge from Central America in 2014. They've now been here a year or more, and their applications for asylum in the [U.S.] have been able to work their way partially through the system. But these are people who have not been granted asylum, and the administration has said people need to return to their own countries.

Unfortunately, it seems like some of those cases were not completed, and the rights to appeal that some of those people may have had seem to have not taken place. So it's really murky what's going on with this current enforcement.

At the end of the day, at least so far, the numbers have not been that large. But it does represent a shift. These are people that, up until now, have been in the process of pursuing their claims. We'll just have to see how it plays itself out and if the numbers really do turn out to be substantial, or if they're just an effort to send a message.

In 2014, you co-authored a report called "The Deportation Dilemma: Reconciling Tough and Humane Enforcement." How exactly do you go about doing that?

Well, that's why we chose the title that we did. It pretty much raises the question: How can they be reconciled? At the end of the day, they really cannot be fully reconciled. This administration has made an effort to balance seemingly competing goals, as we've seen. But no matter what, when you deport people, you create disruptions in families, in communities, in workplaces. And that's definitely the case with an unauthorized population that's sizeable and a very large portion of which has been here for a very long time. More than 60 percent of the people in the unauthorized population of 11 million have been in the country for more than five years. They have ties. They're settled. They live in mixed households where some are legal citizens or lawful permanent residents or people who can legitimately apply for status, or people who cannot apply for status and have no hope of doing so. That's a very complicated social policy situation.

What the administration has tried to do to work with that is focus on people recently coming to the country illegally, because those are people with fewer ties and fewer established roots in the U.S., although many do have family in the U.S.

So it's people who have recently come as well as people with criminal backgrounds. I think most people would agree that people who have a criminal background are considered targets for deportation. The difficulty with that though is that some of these criminal backgrounds are not what one might consider the most serious kinds of crimes. Even when you involve criminal backgrounds, there's a good deal of controversy that surrounds the definition of a criminal background.

The executive branch agencies charged with these missions are in a really difficult place, because we have a very large undocumented population. This needs, ultimately, to be the subject of legislative solutions. And they just do not seem to be in reach anytime soon. So these agencies in the meantime need to look for ways to enforce the law that are consistent with their missions but also reduce the harmful corollary effects of immigration enforcement under these situations.

Can you talk about the demographics of America's immigrants today, both from an authorized and unauthorized standpoint? Who is coming into the U.S. each year?

The United States remains the major immigration country in the world. We have about a million people who come here under our immigration laws legally each year. About two thirds of them come because they have a family tie in the United States or a family connection that makes them eligible for immigration. Our system needs to be updated. There haven't been any major changes made since 1990, when we had a completely different economy and different global realities. But our system continues to move forward, and we continue to get the infusion of legal immigrants that are very important to our economy and important to families and communities and important to us demographically. We are now an aging society, and we are in many ways cushioned from some of the aspects of being an aging society by immigration bringing in a generation of newer and younger workers.

We continue to have unauthorized immigration, but it's going down. The size of that population has dropped by more than a million over the last several years. And the scale of the numbers coming from Mexico, which has been our major source of illegal immigration, has been going down since the recession.

So what you have is a situation where the recession in 2008 really changed the job picture in the country. There was far less demand for immigrant labor, and that combined with very stringent, increasingly effective enforcement at the Southwest border based on 15 or 20 years of major investment by Congress through the budget to update and modernize border enforcement.

And you have structural changes in Mexico that have changed the picture for Mexican migration. The fertility rate in Mexico is now at the level of the U.S., so you don't have nearly as many younger people in Mexico. It's pretty much able to provide for its younger population coming forward, and Mexico is doing much better economically. There's a rising middle class there, and many people in Mexico see their future there rather than coming to the United States.

Mexican illegal immigration will continue to be a factor, but one that is manageable. Rather than that Mexican unauthorized migration, now we have these flows from Central America. But this is a different kind of issue to resolve, because the flows are coming about both because of economic need and because of violence, persecution and refugee-like circumstances in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador.

There's a share of those flows that really do deserve protection in the U.S. under our refugee and asylum system. That's a complicated effort, and that involves different decision-making and different procedures than we've used over the past 40 years with primarily Mexican migration. Putting in policies that recognize that changing nature is the business we need to be about now.

It should be apolitical but it's viewed as political. And there's certainly a political reaction that it generates.

What are your thoughts on the political discussion surrounding immigration policy heading into the 2016 presidential election?

I'm not surprised that it's an election issue, because the fact that Congress didn't act automatically made it an election issue. But what I'm concerned with is the toxic turn that the debate has taken. The debate is no longer the debate we had earlier about what kind of immigration reform or what are the preeminent concerns or how immigrants affect our future as a country. Those are tough and important questions, and there have been strong disagreements about them in the past.

But we are well beyond that now. We are at a point in the politics and discussion surrounding immigration policy where we're really not having an immigration policy discussion anymore. We're vilifying the foreign-born – creating fear about people from other backgrounds. And this predates the circumstances now with refugee resettlement, with the questions about Muslim refugees and immigrants. Even before that, the debate had taken a really hateful turn, and it taps into what's always been part of our history, which is nativism and scapegoating of immigrants for broader societal ills.