Obama Reiterates Call for Immigration Reform
President Barack Obama reiterated his call for Congress to pass a comprehensive immigration reform bill in a speech at El Paso, Texas on Tuesday. In addition to including certain enforcement measures, the president said any immigration overhaul package has to require those who want to legalize their status to learn English, pay fines and back taxes, undergo a background check in addition to holding businesses accountable that exploit undocumented workers. But he did not unveil any new legislation or announce changes to federal regulations governing immigration.
“Everybody recognizes the system is broken. The question is, will we finally summon the political will to do something about it,” Obama said. “The most significant step we can now take to secure the borders is to fix the system as a whole so that fewer people have the incentive to enter illegally.”
In his speech, the president noted that Border Patrol now doubled their agents since 2004, tripled the number of intelligence analysts along the border, deployed aerial surveillance, and improved screening of rail shipments to seize guns, drugs and money.
But he also acknowledged that that may not be enough to satisfy some critics. “Maybe they’ll say we need a moat. Or alligators in the moat. They’ll never be satisfied,” he quipped.
The speech came on the heels of several recent meetings at the White House with notable business leaders, immigrant rights activists, lawmakers and even film stars in an effort to build a broad base of support for reform. It also marks the third time in as many weeks where the president has actively campaigned for legislative action. The president has urged Congress to act during an Univision town hall meeting and commencement speech at Miami Dade College last week.
But some remain skeptical if Congress will move with sufficient urgency to pass a reform bill in the near future. “We all understand the importance of the legislative process and that we need a bipartisan bill in the long run, but that will take a long time and given the gridlock in Washington, has an uncertain payoff,” Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) recently told Politico. “Immigrant communities need help now, our system is broken now, and the president can do something about it now.”
Other law makers seem to agree with Congressman Gutierrez. A few weeks ago, 20 Senate Democrats, urged the president to defer deportation for individuals who would be DREAM Act eligible through executive action instead of going through Congress. Under the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act, as many as 2.1 million people who grew up in the U.S. could achieve at least conditional legal status if they avoid trouble with the law, get a high school diploma or a GED, and complete two years of college or military service. Many DREAM activists have risked deportation by staging sit-ins in Congress and around the country to draw attention to the bill. After clearing the House, the measure, which the president still supports, failed in the Senate during the last session of Congress.
Meanwhile groups like National Immigration Forum and the American Civil Liberties Union have argued that the very enforcement policies that the president lauded in his speech have all too often encouraged racial profiling, eroded the due process rights of immigrants, and resulted in unnecessarily deporting undocumented immigrants without criminal records. In the process, families of mixed immigrant status, advocates say, are often torn apart. In 2010 alone, 392,862 immigrants were removed, mostly for noncriminal offenses, compared to 291,060 in 2007.
But it does seem that at least some administrative changes to the system are possible. In the summer of 2010, an undated memo from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services was leaked to the press. Entitled “Administrative Alternatives to Comprehensive Immigration Reform,” the memo contemplated alternatives to deportation including granting permanent status to some unauthorized immigrants and extending the temporary status of others in lieu of Congressional action on reform. At the time, the memo was praised for its fresh thinking, but only very few changes to the system were implemented.
For his part, Obama continues to resist pursuing more robust administrative regulations even as he acknowledged the toll that a broken immigration system imposes on people. “As long as the current laws are on the books, it’s not just hardened felons who are subject to removal, but sometimes families who are just trying to earn a living, or bright, eager students, or decent people with the best of intentions,” said the president.
“And sometimes when I talk to immigration advocates, they wish I could just bypass Congress and change the law myself. But that’s not how a democracy works. What we really need to do is to keep up the fight to pass genuine, comprehensive reform.”
Watch the speech.