Immigration Activists Plot to Pass Amnesty, With or Without Obama

by Joe Guzzardi
April 25, 2011

Last week, a group of 70 pro-immigration activists met under the radar at the White House to complain that President Barack Obama has been two-faced about what it calls “comprehensive immigration reform.” Included were the usual suspects: immigration lawyers, labor leaders, New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, and the ever-present Al Sharpton. For show, Obama also invited former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Los City Council President Eric Garcetti.

They’re mad at Obama because their amnesty agenda didn’t move forward during the last Congress and it’s nowhere today. In his blog at Immigration Daily, lawyer Greg Siskind wrote that while Obama gave amnesty plenty of lip service during his first term, he accomplished nothing. Siskind charged Obama with presiding over “the most anti-immigrant White House we’ve seen in a long time.”

Siskind’s colleague, Matthew Kolken, was even angrier. According to Kolken, the White House event was nothing more than a photo-op that included familiar faces but was absent any legislators who might be able to push immigration forward. Kolken added that Obama’s rhetoric about immigration hasn’t fooled any one. He threatened Obama with the often heard charge that his Hispanic allies may abandon the president in 2012. Obama defended himself the same way he always does. He reminded the crowd that “this is not going to be easy…I’m going to be beside you. But I can’t do this by myself.”

Siskind and Kolken are wrong about Obama who has done as much for comprehensive immigration reform as anyone in the Executive Branch could. Obama promoted amnesty in his speeches, campaigned on behalf of incumbents that supported it and, during the final crucial days of the lame duck session, gave his blessing to hundreds of organized phone banks that called influential individuals and organizations pressuring Congress to vote for the DREAM Act. Those efforts failed. Now immigration enforcement-minded Republicans control the House, the Senate is poised to flip to Republicans and the White House is up for grabs. Despite what his advisors may be telling him and no matter what the polls show, Obama faces an uphill climb.

If Obama were to make immigration his number domestic issue, as Siskind and Kolken would like, he’d commit political suicide. The nation registered its opinion about immigration last November. Americans want enforcement. Whatever Obama’s failures are, he’s skilled at getting elected. Anyone who can lift himself up from an obscure Illinois state Senator to the White House within a decade mostly on the gift of gab isn’t going to make the foolish mistake of promoting amnesty on his campaign trail.

Look, for example, at Obama’s recent swing through friendly California, a state he’ll carry in a landslide even if he never steps foot in it again. Obama preached to the choir, but not about immigration, at a $38,500-a-plate Brentwood dinner. Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, Senior Fellow at the USC School of Policy, Planning and Development and a contributing editor for the Los Angeles Times, summed Obama’s trip up precisely. Wrote Jaffe: “Right now, the state likes Obama more than the nation does.”

That’s Obama’s problem. He’s popular among liberal, wealthy Californians. But in the swing states he needs to carry, voters equate Obama with negatives like sustained high unemployment, soaring gas and food costs, three costly wars, and his heavy-handed health care program that he rammed through over American’s objections. What worked for Obama in 2008—”Change you can believe in”–is a non-starter.

The bottom line, and what must make Obama nervous, is that John Q. Public’s vote counts as much as Michael Moore’s.

Joe Guzzardi has written editorial columns—mostly about immigration and related social issues – since 1986. He is a senior writing fellow for Californians for Population Stabilization (CAPS) and his columns have frequently been syndicated in various U.S. newspapers and websites. He can be reached at [email protected].