Deportations may divide Obama’s black and brown base

Taking a brief time out from a bruising partisan battle over raising the nation’s statutory debt limit this week, President Obama recently renewed his support for passing comprehensive immigration reform.

In a speech to the National Council of La Raza, the nation’s premier Latino advocacy group, Obama exhorted the group to create an external network that could circumvent Washington’s thick political climate.

Easier said than done. As the president himself is no doubt aware, granting legal recognition to an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants is a feat no president has been able to accomplish since Ronald Reagan occupied the Oval Office. It’s also something that Obama — with solid majorities in both houses of Congress during his first two years in Washington — has been unable to accomplish despite his most fervent wishes.

This unfulfilled promise has led to pointed criticism from Hispanic organizations that the president is insensitive to their agenda. Obama’s stalled immigration policy even led one prominent Congressman to get himself arrested in protest outside the White House.

To be fair, President Obama and Democrats want to legalize the millions of immigrants, mostly of Mexican extraction, huddled in the shadows of the economy, if for no reason other than the obvious electoral advantage such a move would confer. There are also convincing economic arguments in favor of legalizing millions whose economic activity supports family both here in the U.S. and their native country.

And images of undocumented immigrants being rounded up and deported make for distasteful prime-time news. But the political and empirical realities simply do not favor sweeping reform. There are legitimate reasons why Obama and Democratic leaders have dragged their feet, and few of them have anything to do with recalcitrant Republicans. The top reasons include the following:

Pages: 1 2