‘LOVE YE therefore the stranger: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.” President Obama was quoting from Deuteronomy at a Hispanic prayer breakfast this week. It reminds us, he said, “to look at that migrant farmer and see our own grandfather disembarking at Ellis Island, or Angel Island in San Francisco Bay; and to look at that young mother, newly arrived in this country, and see our own grandmothers leaving Italy or Ireland or Eastern Europe in search of something better.”
On Tuesday in El Paso in a major speech he also insisted that the overwhelming majority of these folks are just trying to earn a living and provide for their families and contribute positively to the US economy. It is a sympathetic although controversial line, one that will, however, certainly endear him to a large Hispanic voting bloc which was critical to his election in 2008 and will be again in 2012. And, no doubt, to the young Irish campaigning for reform.
But in relaunching at six events over two weeks his welcome campaign for immigration reform – a “moral imperative” – a bid to regularise the position of 11 million undocumented without legal status Obama has returned to a cause that has frustrated him repeatedly since his election. And prospects for rekindling it are no better now that the House has come under control of the Republicans, implacably opposed as they are to any measure that might lead to eventual citizenship – “reward for illegality” – for illegal immigrants.
The speeches also come against a background of increasingly determined anti-immigrant action by up to a dozen states debating measures to tighten their own laws. Obama has been forced to match his calls for a path to citizenship with a simultaneous insistence he is as tough as anyone on enforcement of border controls. Nearly 400,000 immigrants were deported last year, there is tighter security along the Mexican border, and workplace inspections for illegal employees are up.
Democrats have pushed modest changes such as the DREAM Act, supported by Obama, which would allow people who immigrated illegally as children or teenagers to achieve permanent-resident status if they complete post-secondary education or military service. The Bill, a new version of which was introduced on Wednesday, is unlikely to succeed and Obama, unwilling to be seen bypassing Congress, has refused to use discretionary powers to overrule such deportations.
In truth, the undocumented will be waiting until 2012.