President Barack Obama said in a CBS interview broadcast on Sunday he had waited long enough for Congress to act on immigration reform, and he will use his executive powers to implement some reforms before the end of the year.

He said even when the U.S. Senate had passed an immigration reform bill, House Speaker John Boehner refused to take it up.

"Everybody agrees the immigration system's broken. And we've been talking about it for years now in terms of fixing it," Obama told CBS on "Face the Nation" Sunday. "We don't have the capacity to deport 11 million people -- everybody agrees on that."

Obama said the U.S. borders need to be secure, the legal immigration system needed to be more efficient, and there needed to be a path to legal status for the 11 million undocumented immigrants.

He said he had told Boehner if he could not get it done by year's end, the White House was going to have to take steps to improve the system.

"The minute they pass a bill that addresses the problems of immigration reform, I will sign it, and it supersedes whatever actions I take," Obama said in the interview. "But if in fact a bill gets passed, nobody's going to be happier than me to sign it because that means it will be permanent rather than temporary."

He said without any changes, the government will continue to misallocate resources, deport people who should not be deported and not deport those who are dangerous.

Republicans attended a post-election luncheon at the White House on Friday on President Obama's invitation. They asked him for more time to work on legislation, but the president said his patience was running out. He said it was his intention to act on his own by the end of the year if they didn't approve legislation to ease deportations before then and send it to him to sign, reported The Associated Press.