Bloomberg (Opinion)
By Joshua Green
September 8, 2014
Over
the weekend, the White House quietly conceded what had been rumored for
weeks: President Obama will not impose a mass deferral of deportations,
despite his showy
declaration on June 30 that if Republicans didn’t act on immigration
reform by summer’s end, he would. “America cannot wait forever for them
to act,” he scolded back then. Turns out we may have to.
Obama
is being roundly pilloried by liberals, especially immigration
activists. “We are bitterly disappointed in the President and
Democrats,” tweeted Frank Sharry, founder
of the immigration reform group America’s Voice. “We didn’t make the
reform promise; we just made the mistake of believing it.” The president
is being attacked by Republicans, too. On Saturday, House Speaker John
Boehner complained that the delay “smacked
of raw politics.”
You
have to marvel at Obama’s capacity for issuing stern warnings and
drawing red lines, only to shrink or backtrack when his admonitions
don’t have their desired effect.
But in this case, Obama’s big mistake was issuing a threat he wasn’t
prepared to follow through on—he’s right to punt on immigration reform
now and take it up after the election.
There
are three reasons why delay is wise for liberal supporters of
immigration reform. First, as Senate Democrats quietly (and then
not-so-quietly) pointed out, granting
legal status to millions of undocumented immigrants would enrage many
conservatives—and possibly independents and Democrats, too—and threaten
the reelection of vulnerable Democrats in Arkansas, Louisiana, North
Carolina, and Alaska. This could cost Democrats
the Senate.
Second,
if Obama were to act now and Democrats lost the Senate in November,
it’s likely that politicians and members of the media—who often struggle
with cause and effect—would
blame immigration reform, rather than Obama’s unpopularity and the
disproportionate number of seats Democrats must defend this year (21,
vs. 15 Republican seats). This would probably set back the cause Obama
and Democrats purport to agree on, even if they
disagree on timing.
Finally,
the politics of immigration reform will shift after the election in a
way that will make presidential action much easier for Democrats to
swallow. The big event
on the horizon will be the 2016 election, which, because it’s a
presidential year, will draw a younger and more diverse electorate more
favorably inclined toward immigration reform. The Senate dynamic will
flip, too. In 2016, Republicans will be defending
24 seats, vs. only 10 for Democrats—the lag effect of the Tea Party
wave of 2010. In that context, Obama’s action to end deportations would
hurt Republicans, not Democrats. GOP presidential candidates won’t
relish having to answer questions about whether they’ll
support Obama’s “amnesty” or overturn it and deport millions of
immigrants. The political pressure would fall on Republicans, whose
failure to pass reform would imperil their chances to control the Senate
and the White House.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
No comments:
Post a Comment