To the charge that President Obama isn't doing anything to address the illegal immigration problem.
As Ezra Klein says in this morning's Wonkbook, "I cannot guarantee that it is going to be in the first 100 days," then-candidate Barack Obama told Univision's Jorge Ramos in May of 2008. "But what I can guarantee is that we will have in the first year an immigration bill that I strongly support and that I'm promoting." That didn't work out. Five months later, the economy collapsed, and so did a lot of the Obama campaign's hopes for its first-year in office. (Little known fact: the campaign's original plan for the first 100 days called for doing deficit reduction first in order to build credibility for health care and energy. It's interesting to "what-if" a world in which they'd gotten to implement that.) But excuses don't matter. Results do. And that comment is, to the Latino community, a key broken promise. Ramos, for one, is making certain it's not forgotten, and that the administration pays for breaking it.
But though "in the first year" failed, perhaps "before the next election" will do. Obama will head to Texas tomorrow to argue that the administration has made the necessary first steps in immigration reform: they've stepped up border security, workplace enforcement, and deportations. Now, he'll say, there needs to be a more permanent solution.
It's hard to imagine this Congress, at this moment, turning its attention towards a sober and successful discussion of immigration reform. The administration knows that, and so the president's speech will call for more outside pressure to force Congress to act. That's doesn't guarantee an outcome, either, of course. But even if it fails substantively, it could work politically, convincing the Latino community that their problem isn't with a president who wants to sign immigration reform, but with a Congress that doesn't want to touch it, and they should vote accordingly.
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