Latinos May Be Key To Obama Win In Arizona

¿Como se dice “karma’s a witch?”

Latest case in point: The New York Times reports that because of a boom in the Latino population of Arizona, and because of a swell of Latinos reaching voting age that  coincided with Arizona’s immigration crackdown,

…Obama strategists and some residents see as a surprising opportunity to compete in a Republican state that was off the map for Mr. Obama in 2008, when it was the home of his opponent, Senator John McCain.

They think the President can actually win that state. And the Karma? Arizona has been particularly nasty to the president:

Republicans in the State Legislature here push a law that would require President Obama to provide his long-form birth certificate in order to get on the Arizona presidential ballot in 2012. The governor uses Facebook to denounce the president’s “backdoor amnesty plan.” Cars traveling on State Route 260 are treated to a giant billboard bearing Mr. Obama’s mug on a mock $100 trillion bill that asks, “But Who Will Pay the Piper?”

The Obama campaign has already opened field offices in Phoenix, Flagstaff and Tucson; the campaign plan seems ready-made, laid out be his opponents and detractors: mobilize Latinos, emphasize Obama’s work on their behalf, and remind them of the Republican anti-immigration laws, crackdowns and sentiment.

There’s a fine line in the plan, though. Obama also has an immigration record that goes beyond his rhetoric. A Christian Science Monitor report takes the administration’s declarations about criminal deportations to task, and it quotes “an independent clearinghouse for federal data:”

the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University in New York says the administration has been hesitant to release details behind a record 400,000 deportations in the past year.

The result has been growing concern among critics on the left and right that the Obama administration is playing politics – holding back data that might upset the Hispanic community, which is seen as crucial to the president’s reelection prospects.

The thing is, karma swings both ways. Before Obama’s campaign folks buy balloons and confetti they’ll have to figure out how to reconcile conflicting data. We go back to the CSM report:

So far, the Obama administration has been bold and specific in its assertions. The Department of Homeland Security “has implemented immigration enforcement priorities that focus limited resources on convicted criminals, repeat immigration law violators, fugitives, and recent entrants,” DHS spokesman Matt Chandler said in an e-mail.

As a result, Immi­gra­tion and Customs Enforcement (ICE) removed a record 216,000 criminal illegal immigrants in fiscal year 2011 – “an 89 percent increase over 2008,” Mr. Chandler added.

The problem is that immigration court statistics obtained by TRAC show that actual criminal deportation proceedings have dropped below Bush administration levels. So how are deportations of criminal aliens up 89 percent over 2008?

TRAC can’t get it’s hands on specific and detailed data; there is not enough transparency to determine how many people with minor infractions have been deported. We just have to take the Administration’s word for it?

How does this all play-out in Arizona? We’ll let the Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s own actions set-up the irony, from the CSM:

ICE Director John Morton announced the policy shift in June, and the administration on Nov. 17 also began a training program to show immigration agents how to block deportation cases against some noncriminal illegal immigrants.

But so far, it may not have protected many of those “just looking to scrape together an income.”

“The overwhelming conclusion is that most ICE offices have not changed their practices since the issuance of these new directives,” states a November study of 252 immigration cases by the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

Like I said, karma’s a witch, and things aren’t exactly what they appear to be.