Political Shift Stalls Efforts to Overhaul Immigration

New York Times

By Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Ashley Parker

September 7, 2014

Political Shift Stalls Efforts to Overhaul Immigration 

WASHINGTON — By the time Senator Angus King called the White House to warn President Obama against taking executive action to overhaul the immigration system, officials were well aware they had a problem on their hands.

What had once looked like a clear political imperative for both parties — action to grant legal status to millions of undocumented immigrants — had morphed instead into what appeared to be a risky move that could cost Democrats their majority in the November midterm congressional elections.

But Mr. King, a Maine independent who is a member of the Democratic caucus, warned Denis McDonough, the White House chief of staff, of yet another nightmare scenario: Unilateral action by the president might undermine the prospects for bipartisan agreement on a broad immigration overhaul for years to come.

It was that concern, shared by members of Mr. Obama’s inner circle as well as other members of Congress, White House officials said, that ultimately prompted the president to break the promise he made on June 30 in the Rose Garden to act on his own before summer’s end to fix the immigration system.

After a summer in which a surge of Central American migrants into the United States at the southern border had reawakened public worries and anger about immigration, and with Republicans running attack ads against Democratic senators on the topic, the issue had simply become too toxic and combustible for Mr. Obama.

“If we were to act in this political hothouse environment, that would undermine the long-term ability to finish the job on immigration reform,” one official said, speaking on condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions.

It was a stark turnabout that demonstrates a stunningly quick shift in the politics of overhauling United States immigration laws, which looked like an imperative after the 2012 presidential election, when Republicans received a paltry 27 percent of the Hispanic vote and said publicly they needed to re-evaluate their hard-line immigration stance.

“All the progress we’ve made over two years was destroyed in six weeks,” said Tamar Jacoby, who has advised Republicans on immigration strategy and heads ImmigrationWorks USA, an employer group that backs an overhaul. “It’s always harder to do something than not to do it, and especially on an emotional topic like this, it’s very fragile.”

Now the president says he must go back and repair the broken consensus that had emerged around the immigration issue.

“The truth of the matter is that the politics did shift midsummer because of that problem,” Mr. Obama said in an interview aired Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” referring to the surge of Central Americans, including thousands of unaccompanied children, across the border.

“I want to spend some time, even as we’re getting all our ducks in a row for the executive action, I also want to make sure that the public understands why we’re doing this, why it’s the right thing for the American people, why it’s the right thing for the American economy,” he said.

In the meantime, Mr. Obama has earned bitter outrage from Latinos, who make up one of his party’s strongest political constituencies. Already angered by the president’s move during his first term to accelerate deportations, activists have called the delay of promised executive action a betrayal.

“Given the string of broken promises from this president to the Latino community on immigration, there is a real question as to whether he will follow through,” said Frank Sharry, the executive director of America’s Voice, an immigrant-rights group. “There are important segments of the Latino community, particularly Latino immigrant voters, where there’s a sense that the Republicans hate us, and the Democrats like us, but they don’t fully respect us yet — and I think that will have to be overcome going forward.”

Angela M. Kelley, vice president for immigration policy at the Center for American Progress, said Latinos — like an aggrieved girlfriend who has waited in vain for a marriage proposal — are going to expect Mr. Obama to take even more expansive executive action later this year, given the delay.

“A guy says he’s going to propose, and then he decides he’s going to delay and not propose for a couple of months, so you go, ‘O.K., I want a two-carat ring now instead of a one-carat ring,’ ” Ms. Kelley said. “The cost is high for what he’s done in terms of a delay. He’s asking the community to pay now, and to some extent, he’ll have to pay later.”

It took about one month for Mr. Obama’s promise to begin crumbling. By early August, the start of Congress’ summer break, Representative Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, had released an attack ad charging that Senator Mark Pryor, Democrat of Arkansas — one of his party’s most at-risk candidates in November’s midterm congressional elections — was ignoring an immigration crisis on the United States-Mexico border, where thousands of Central American migrants were streaming into the United States.

Other vulnerable Democrats were facing similar ads, and one by one, they began calling top White House officials, including Mr. McDonough, to vent their concerns that if Mr. Obama took executive action, it could cost them their seats — and their party control of the Senate.

The White House requested polling data in key Senate races and received numbers from Arkansas and Iowa, where voters overwhelmingly sided with those opposed to the possibility of Mr. Obama taking executive action on immigration.

Public polls showed that backing for a broad immigration overhaul, including a path to citizenship for undocumented people, was still strong, but slipping among Republicans. Of more concern to vulnerable Senate Democrats was broad public disapproval of Mr. Obama’s handling of the migrant surge. According to a July survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, 56 percent thought the president was mishandling the issue, twice as many as those who approved — the lowest rating of any issue since he became president.

The decline stemmed at least in part from a perception, elevated by the growing number of migrants, that the southern border was porous and immigration law was not being enforced there.

“After the election, there was a strong coalition for immigration reform, but even with a strong coalition, it needed to be a balanced bill — you can only get citizenship if you get tougher enforcement,” said Neera Tanden, a former Obama aide who heads the Center for American Progress. “What really happened that moved this whole thing, tragically, was the border crisis, which created this argument of there being a magnet for undocumented immigrants.”

White House officials said it became clear in recent weeks that the crisis had created a mistaken impression that the border was not secure, thus sapping support for further action to grant legal status to undocumented immigrants. Republicans seized on that perception, arguing that Mr. Obama’s 2012 directive shielding certain undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children from deportation had prompted the surge.

In the end, though, it was a cautionary tale from 20 years ago that swayed Mr. Obama and his team.

An important “object lesson,” said one official, was the 1994 crime bill, which then-President Bill Clinton pushed through before that year’s midterm elections, in which his party lost control of the House for the first time in four decades. Many Democrats, including some who work at the White House, believe the passage of that legislation — which included the federal assault weapons ban — doomed a dozen of their candidates and has made the gun issue a toxic one for members of their party to this day.

“It affects the psychology of the folks on the Hill and emboldens the opponents,” the official said. “What would be the worst of all worlds would be to act and lose the election, and have people say it was because of immigration reform.”

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