Obama’s Immigration Miscalculation

Once again, the Obama Administration has backed off, catering to some of the less-reasonable elements within the GOP, scared of what happens if conservative voters get fired up and make it out to the polls in an off-year election. To be fair, judging from the “spitters” in Murrieta, there would be some lashback.

This view, however, discounts the fact that Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) helped push Latino, Asian/Pacific Islander and immigrant voters to the polls in 2012; the GOP has looked completed unreasonable; and it is inconsistent with what was supposed to be a bold announcement just a few months ago. As the Administration attempts to wait out elections, they are steadily losing support, and no advocate believes that Speaker Boehner will actually put an immigration reform to a vote.

While the Administration may have to duck for cover on the issue as they have in the past, they won’t have any immigrant rights organizations to hide behind. For example, while SEIU supported the President and continued to pressure Congress to put immigration reform to a vote long after most immigrant rights organizations, this is no longer the case: Eliseo Medina, outspoken leader within SEIU, penned the Op-Ed “Mr. President, It’s Your Time.”

Before Obama’s executive order announcement, they were the last high-profile holdouts asking Obama not to act to give Congress a chance: their stance now serves as proof that Obama will get no support from the immigrant rights community until he follows through with his promised order.

At the same time, Obama will have to deal with the fallout from bowing to a GOP that has been completely unreasonable in it’s opposition: the Steve Kings (IA) in the House of Representatives, with help from people like Ted Cruz (r-TX) and Sarah Palin, are controlling the narrative. Currently, they are running the House, and were able to force through a vote to end DACA just before the break.

Although Speaker Boehner has allowed the authorization of a lawsuit against Obama for executive overreach, he also said he could act on the border crisis “without the need for congressional action.” This was just before Marco Rubio started talking about impeachment if Obama does act on immigration, and Steve King was talking about a shutdown over a potential executive order: the House is a hot mess where all hope and rationality goes to die, the Senate GOP isn’t helping and it doesn’t seem that any of this will change soon.

Politics like this have lead to a lack of action on deportation relief. This will keep a lot of deserving people in legal limbo for months, years, even decades, for any kind of relief: DREAMers that just missed DACA; the parents of DACA recipients who have typically been here years to raise someone who qualifies for DACA; the children at the border who are having their due process challenged and being deported to their deaths; even those who rendered extraordinary service like undocumented 9/11 workers and undocumented veterans: they’re all waiting.

At this point, it seems the #DeporterInChief label is going to truly sink in and be tattooed on the Administration’s legacy: immigration wasn’t taken care of in the President’s first term as promised to make political room for the Affordable Care Act when Democrats controlled Congress; nor did Obama’s re-election rhetoric reflect in his actions since; nor can he seemingly be trusted on the topic when he makes a bold declaration that Steve King then publicly walks all over; nor can Obama seemingly make even basic fixes to a system that deports more immigrants than ever before: immigrants feel as though they have been politically sacrificed by a man who should understand their situation quite well on a personal level.

While this sacrifice may help to float a couple of Democrats, there’s no guarantee. Even if it does, Democrats may still lose the fight to keep the Senate. Even if they manage to keep it, the narrative on immigration is getting weaker amongst Democrats, and they will be less able to use it to divide the GOP on the issue: in many ways it’s a big risk wagering on bad long-term politics.

For immigration advocates, as well as those trapped in the broken immigration system, it seems as though the goal line drops further and further back the harder we press. All the while, the record-breaking deportation numbers continue to rack up, weakening a pro-Democrat narrative in the immigrant and Latino community. To those whose lives are implicated, Obama’s pro-immigration rhetoric is just starting to sound ironic.