The Activist's Handbook. Randy Shaw
April 2009 that he would begin looking for a path for illegal immigrants to become legal in that year. A senior administration Official announced that President Obama “plans to speak publicly about the issue in May, and over the summer will convene working groups, including lawmakers from both parties and a range of immigration groups, to begin discussing possible legislation for as early as this fall.” This timetable, the Official said, was consistent with pledges Obama had made to Hispanic groups in the previous year’s campaign, including the promise that comprehensive reform would be a priority of his first year in office. Immigrant rights leader and Congress member Luis Gutierrez discussed Obama’s approach to comprehensive reform at the 2009 UNITE HERE convention in Chicago in late June. Gutierrez, a Chicago representative who went way back with Obama, described a serious meeting he and others had had with the president in which they had expressed concern about his lack of action on immigration reform. Assuring his audience that Obama remained committed to the issue, the congressman said he expected a comprehensive measure to pass by Christmas. While echoing activists’ disappointment over the slow pace of progress, he and the larger movement still believed the president would come through.23
Gutierrez expressed this measured optimism before Obama turned health care reform over to “moderate” Republicans, and before Tea Party activists disrupted town hall meetings in August as part of a concerted strategy to derail health care. When Congress returned to the Capitol in September 2009, health care was the talk of the town, and immigration reform was completely off the political radar. This undermined faith in the Obama administration’s early assurances that health care would not crowd out other priorities. Activists responded by having Gutierrez introduce a comprehensive immigration reform bill on October 13. The introduction was accompanied by large rallies in Washington, D.C., and twenty other cities, but the effort appeared to be more of a strategy by immigrant rights groups to placate an increasingly anxious base than a serious step toward enacting comprehensive reform.
As early as fall 2009, the once-high hopes for comprehensive immigration reform were on life support. Obama’s election had moved the Republican Party even further to the right, so that one-time immigration reform supporters like Arizona’s John McCain—who had once sponsored a reform bill with Ted Kennedy—would no longer touch the issue. After House moderates cast a tough vote to narrowly pass a climate change bill that never went anywhere in the Senate, Speaker Nancy Pelosi realized that she could not ask her caucus to repeat this pattern and agreed with Senate leader Harry Reid that action on immigration reform had to begin there. In light of the Republicans’ strategy of filibustering everything they opposed, this meant that all sixty Democrats might be needed to pass immigration reform. This was a highly unlikely event, as some conservative Democrats always opposed reform and success had long depended on at least some Republican support. (Even the modest reforms President George W. Bush had supported would have been impossible in the fall 2009 political climate.)
Meanwhile, President Obama was missing in action. And immigrant rights groups allowed him to stay missing. They engaged in no public protest over his failure to follow through on immigrant rights. After losing political momentum by subsuming their political timetable to the president’s, activists had a golden opportunity with the October 13 nationwide rallies to force Obama to at least explain why his administration was increasing enforcement and deportations without doing anything to mitigate the harm such actions did to undocumented immigrants. Instead, the rallies created a misleading impression of progress toward reform, reducing rather than increasing pressure on the president.
In addition to giving Obama a pass on comprehensive reform, leading immigrant rights groups also failed to publicly demand that Obama take administrative actions that did not require congressional approval. For example, he could have used his executive power to protect students who would qualify under the DREAM Act bill. First introduced in 2001, this measure offered a path to citizenship to undocumented young people who graduate from U.S. high schools and then complete two years in the military or two years at a four-year institution of higher learning. Obama could also have declared a moratorium on deportations that break up families or do not involve serious criminal conduct (he did the latter in 2011).
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