The executive action that President Obama is expected to take this week could delay deportations for millions of undocumented immigrants, which is a fairly clinical way of describing any reprieve he might grant. Another way to put it is that he'll delay the deportations of millions of mothers or fathers, and stave off — at least for now — the breakup of millions of families.

However you feel about the legal basis of such executive action, that policy itself is pro-family. And anyone who believes that children thrive best with two parents at home — anyone who's lamented the decline in America of two-parent households — should recognize that while immigrants may come to the U.S. for economic opportunity, they often want and need to stay for their children.

Obama is scheduled to rally support for his plan on Friday in Las Vegas, in a state where nearly one in five children grades k-12 has a parent who's an unauthorized immigrant. That means nearly one in five children of school age in Nevada could lose a parent at any time — a single parent or a second one — without any movement from Washington on immigration. Without their parents, these children would also lose out on the things that are on average easier for two parents to provide: income, stability, reading time, attention.

Nationwide, a Pew Research Center report released this week found that 6.9 percent of all students enrolled in kindergarten through 12th grade, as of 2012, had at least one unauthorized immigrant parent. Those children are disproportionately clustered in a handful of states: Nevada, California, Texas and Arizona. The societal consequences of family breakup, in other words, would be magnified in those places, too.

According to the Migration Policy Institute, about 3.5 million of the 11.4 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. live with a child who is a U.S. citizen. Another 671,000 live with children who are undocumented, too. About 4.3 million are married — either to U.S. citizens, legal permanent residents or other undocumented immigrants.

If the scale of these numbers doesn't grab you, read this story by the Post's Eli Saslow about how deportation divided a single family.

National debates around immigration reform and poverty typically take place in separate spheres. But here they are intimately related. If children of poor, inner-city single mothers would be better off with two parents at home, the same is true of the children of immigrants. Likewise, as policymakers — and particularly those on the right — are trying to find ways to create stable families for children who don't have them, it makes little sense to pry apart families that currently exist.

None of this is an argument for whether Obama has a legal right to grant such deportation delays, or whether it's politically savvy of him to forge forward without Republican support. But to the extent that some conservatives oppose anything that looks like amnesty, it's worth noting that amnesty promotes another favorite conservative priority: family values.