Obama’s Immigration Plan B: Similar To Comprehensive Reform
Somewhere in a White House West Wing strategy room there must be an outline of an immigration policy plan scrawled on a whiteboard. And I imagine that the plan is as straight forward as anything that the Obama administration has conjured in the last three years.
If the president has gotten any push-back on his immigration ideas it may not be because of the plan but because of how it translates in the minds of the American public. Obama’s immigration policy problems are not so much issue driven as they are political.
This is what I mean, follow the policy line (as I imagine it looks on the strategy room wall): Obama’s call for immigration reform has been met with stiff resistance. He promised action on the immigration front in his first year in office; here we are three years later and he has little to show in the way of a comprehensive reform. And yet, at the same time, he has racked-up record breaking deportation numbers. According to the Associated Press:
The U.S. deported nearly 393,000 people in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, half of whom were considered criminals. Of those, 27,635 had been arrested for drunken driving, more than double the 10,851 deported after drunken driving arrests in 2008, the last full year of the Bush administration, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement data provided to The Associated Press.
To the left it looks like he’s pandering to the right and to the right it looks like he’s blowing smoke. Several state legislatures, most notoriously Arizona’s, went on a state’s rights rampage enacting laws that they claimed did what the federal government was remiss in doing. To them Obama’s almost 400,000 deportations in one year was not enough.
Meanwhile, the cry from the left was to give workers a respite from persecution, especially the DREAMers who were in a residency limbo through no fault of their own. The right was pushing for stronger action against immigrant criminals, stronger border protection and repudiating anything that mildly looked like amnesty.
So what does Obama do? He re-focuses his immigration policy and orders a review of 300,000 pending deportation cases in order to sift out those charged with felony crimes and deal with them first. In the mean time, while the non-felons wait for their cases to be reviewed, they are to be given work permits – a sensible move considering they’ve been forced to stay in this country by federal officials.
But this efficiency move has run cross-winds with every and all known anti-immigrant group and politician. They say it amounts to back-door amnesty, that the president is pandering to Latinos, that he’s running the White House with only the 2012 election in mind. Homeland Security Chief Janet Napolitano framed the issue in another Associated Press report: she said
she didn’t consider the shift a major evolution in the federal government’s policy, but rather a clarification.
“Nobody’s getting a free pass. Nobody’s getting free admission to citizenship or anything like that under this system,” Napolitano said. “Nobody is getting exempted.”
The problem is that it doesn’t look that way, or maybe it does, depending on who is dong the looking.
The immigration plan scribbled on the White House wall is definitely a plan “b.” Plan “a” being the reform Obama has yet to deliver. And as plan “b’s” go, this hasn’t been the smoothest of roll-out’s. But what was it that the comprehensive immigration reform idea called for to begin with? A path to citizenship, stronger border enforcement, persecution of undocumented felons?
Isn’t that what we have already, watered-down and piecemeal? I think that’s what the White house white board plan pointed to all along.
Follow victor Landa on Twitter: @vlanda
[Photo by Gerald L. Nino]
