Speaking of Obama and Immigration Reform

From the Immigration Policy Center
August 21, 2009

For Immediate Release

President Obama Reaffirms Commitment to Immigration Reform

August 20, 2009

Washington, D.C. - Today, President Obama once more reaffirmed his commitment to comprehensive immigration reform, pledging that "we can get this done." The President and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Napolitano met with immigrant advocates, faith leaders, labor, business, and law enforcement officials to listen to concerns and discuss the next steps forward. Mary Giovagnoli, Director the Immigration Policy Center, attended the White House meeting and issued this statement:

"Today's White House meeting demonstrated a genuine commitment to engage in a dialogue that will lead to a smart and workable legislative package. Secretary Napolitano strongly supported the need to bring all undocumented immigrants out of the shadows, streamline naturalization procedures, improve immigration processes that allow immigrants to live and work legally in the U.S., and create smart immigration enforcement mechanisms. Both the President and Secretary Napolitano acknowledged the importance of immigration to our country as well as the need to create a sustainable legal immigration system for the 21st century. We must all remain committed to following through on the dialogue that began today."

Obama Finally Makes a Public Statement on Immigration Reform

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Obama to Push Immigration Reform Bill Despite Risks
By JULIA PRESTON
Published: April 8, 2009 - New York Times

While acknowledging that the recession makes the political battle more difficult, President Obama plans to begin addressing the country’s immigration system this year, including looking for a path for illegal immigrants to become legal, a senior administration official said on Wednesday.

The latest on President Obama, the new administration and other news from Washington and around the nation.

Mr. Obama will frame the new effort — likely to rouse passions on all sides of the highly divisive issue — as “policy reform that controls immigration and makes it an orderly system,” said the official, Cecilia Muñoz, deputy assistant to the president and director of intergovernmental affairs in the White House.

Mr. Obama plans to speak publicly about the issue in May, administration officials said, and over the summer he 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. link to complete article

"Obama to Attack Immigration Reform this Year: Report," Washington Post/Reuters, April 9, 2009

Taking the Safe Road on Immigration

The New York Times reports that Thomas Saenz, a lawyer with a well noted record on immigration advocacy was passed over for a job, for being too immigrant friendly.
There is so much fighting going on over the economy, it may be that the Obama Administration is wanting to save its energy...for the next big drama

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Editorial
Obama Flinches on Immigration
New York Times
Published: March 23, 2009

In a little-noticed act of political faintheartedness, the Obama administration has pulled back from nominating Thomas Saenz, a highly regarded civil-rights lawyer and counsel to the mayor of Los Angeles, to run the Justice Department’s civil rights division...more

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Obama's civil rights nomination upsets some Latinos
Thomas Perez's selection for a Justice Department post concerns some civil rights advocates, who believe Villaraigosa aide Thomas Saenz was passed over to avoid sparking an immigration battle.
By Paul West and Richard Simon

Los Angeles Times
March 19, 2009
Reporting from Washington -- Thomas Perez is Maryland's highest-ranking Latino, but his selection as the nation's leading civil rights enforcer has provoked sharp criticism from some Latino civil rights advocates.

The criticism isn't directed at Perez, the state's secretary of labor and a first-generation Dominican American, or his qualifications.

Instead, it revolves around a belief that the administration passed over another Latino attorney for the position as head of the Justice Department's civil rights division, possibly out of a desire to avoid a fight over immigration.

A statement by the National Council of La Raza, which calls itself the nation's largest Latino civil rights organization, expressed "profound disappointment" that Thomas Saenz, an advisor to Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, wasn't chosen for job.

"This action may lead some to question whether the White House is ready to fulfill its promise on immigration reform," said Janet Murguia, the group's president. Through a spokeswoman, she refused a request for further comment.

Saenz was reported last month to be the leading contender for the position. A close associate, Los Angeles County Supervisor Gloria Molina, was quoted late last week as saying that he had been offered the appointment and accepted it...more

Rep. Gutierrez: Obama 'Eerily Silent' on Immigration

By Ben Pershing
Washington Post

March 18, 2009

A key member of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus delivered a mixed review of the group's meeting with President Obama today, saying the session "went well" but did not result in any firm commitment by the administration to address immigration reform soon.

Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D), who worked with Obama in the Illinois congressional delegation, said this afternoon that he and his fellow CHC members "firmly advocated for [Obama] to keep his promise to bring about comprehensive immigration reform." He added that, per the group's preference, immigration was the only subject discussed during the hour-long meeting, and that some members expressed their concerns about the administration's policies on immigration raids and deportations.

The White House has not been particularly vocal on the subject of immigration since Obama took office. After the collapse of the Bush administration's efforts to push through comprehensive reform, the issue remains politically sensitive and has not often appeared on lists of Obama's priorities for his first year in office.

"The president has been silent on this issue, eerily silent to many of us," Gutierrez said, adding that he believes "the administration is still struggling with what to do about comprehensive immigration reform."

Obama did announce during the meeting that he planned to visit Mexico next month, which did not seem to impress Gutierrez much. The Illinois lawmaker was more encouraged, he said, by the president's pledge to "do something public in the coming weeks to reiterate his commitment" to immigration reform...

By Ben Pershing | March 18, 2009; 4:48 PM ET Agenda , House
link to complete article

A vegetable garden on the White House lawn

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Wow, this is big.  The Obamas have started a garden on the White House lawn.  I can already see the Bushies snearing.  It may not look proper to some.  But the reality is that gardens like these are what our country really needs.  Homegrown food with no pesticides and no genetically engineered seeds.

The garden will be tended by the First Family and local public school students.  The food will be used in the White House kitchen.

What a great example for the country.

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Shovel-Ready Project: A White House Garden

By Jane Black
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 20, 2009; Page C01
For more than a decade, food activists have rallied, cajoled, even pleaded for a vegetable garden on the White House lawn. Now they're finally going to get it.

Today, first lady Michelle Obama will host a groundbreaking for a White House kitchen garden on the South Lawn. She will be joined by students from Bancroft Elementary in Northwest Washington, , whose participation in the project will continue past today, as they help with planting in the coming weeks and harvesting later this year.

The 1,100-square-foot garden will include 55 kinds of vegetables, including peppers, spinach and, yes, arugula. (The selection is a wish list put together by White House chefs.) There will also be berries, herbs and two hives for honey that will be tended by a White House carpenter who is also a beekeeper. The chefs will use the produce to feed the first family, as well as for state dinners and other official events. more

President Obama - please do something on immigration

Dear President Obama -

We know you are busy with a catastrophic economic downturn.  We realize you have to be constantly calling the Republicans because they have decided to act so silly now that they should be serious regarding the economy.

Immigration is urgently needing your attention.  You promised the DREAM Act would pass in the first 100 days.  You said things would be different with U.S. immigration policy.  Could you have a quick meeting with DHS Director, Janet Napolitano and tell her to go ahead and start changing immigration policy?  Something has to be done with Arpaio in Arizona.  ICE raids need to stop.  The DREAM Act needs to pass (the U.S. economy needs the DREAMers).

Please have one of your staff watch (or attend) today's hearing on local immigration enforcement of the House Committee on Homeland Security - and have them send for Napolitano...

see "Report Questions Immigration Program That Uses Local Police," New York Times, March 4, 2009

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Editorial
Who’s Running Immigration?
New York Times
Published: March 3, 2009


...The country is not a safer or better place because one more business and two dozen more families are torn apart outside Seattle or because Sheriff Arpaio has much of Maricopa County terrified. The system under which illegal immigrants labor, without hope of assimilation, is not any less broken. A new report from the Government Accountability Office shows that federal oversight of the 287(g) program has been sorely lacking.

So, a question: Are Mr. Obama and Ms. Napolitano in charge or not? Let them show it by ending the raids and Sheriff Arpaio’s abuses. Something has to be done about immigration, but it has to be smarter than this....

Will Obama Change the Rules Bush Left Behind?

The Bush Administration made a mockery of humanitarianism.  The U.S. is now seen as a country that tortures and expels people.  Obama has made his statement about torture.  Will he make an effort to control the ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement)?  In the past few years, ICE has turned into something like the wild bunch gang...  entering houses without warrants, deporting nursing mothers, not letting detainees contact family after they are arrested. 

see dreamacttexas post "Sacrifice and Immigration," September 9, 2007

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Haitians Look for Shift in Immigration Policy
By GINGER THOMPSON
Published: February 27, 2009

MIAMI — Vialine Jean Paul has noticed a change when she drops her 7-year-old daughter off at school each morning in recent weeks. Her daughter, Angela, is not sure that her mother will be back to pick her up.

“She tells me, ‘Mommy, good luck,’ ” Mrs. Jean Paul said, choking back tears. “She asks me, ‘Mommy, if you go to Haiti, what will happen to me?’ ”

Though Angela does not know it, the hopes of tens of thousands of Haitian immigrants and their relatives have become fixed on her mother’s fate. Mrs. Jean Paul is one of more than 30,000 Haitian citizens who have been ordered deported from the United States. Her case could be an early test of whether the Obama administration will break with the strict immigration enforcement policies of the Bush administration.

After an estimated 1,000 people were killed in mudslides in Haiti last year, the government asked the United States to grant temporary protected status to Haitian immigrants — relief that was extended when Honduras and El Salvador were hit by similar disasters. The designation is intended for countries in such dire trouble that receiving deportees would undermine their stability.

Deportations of Haitians were temporarily suspended last September, while the Bush administration considered the request. In December, the request was denied and the deportations resumed.

Lawyers say hundreds of people were detained, pushing detention centers across Florida beyond capacity. Hundreds of other immigrants were forced to wear electronic monitoring devices.  more

Bushies have no room to talk, especially Gonzalez

The Bush team has been disparaging Obama's new administration.  This however is no surprise.  The Bush administration was not known for being nice (although they surprised us with how "polite" they were during the transition).  The transition is over now and its time to take out their claws.  With all the problems the Bushies caused, and how incompetent many of them looked (especially Alberto Gonzalez) they really should stay quiet.

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Bush White House Cast Assails Obama
But Ex-President Has Held His Tongue

By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, February 7, 2009; Page A04

Richard B. Cheney says President Obama's policies will make it easier for terrorists to kill Americans. Alberto R. Gonzales says the new attorney general could be undermining the morale of U.S. intelligence officials.

And Andrew H. Card Jr., George W. Bush's first chief of staff, took Obama to task for allowing shirtsleeves and loose collars in the Oval Office -- arguing that they are a clear departure from Bush's sterner sartorial rules...more

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The Virgin of Guadalupe Says there Will Be a DREAM Act in 2009

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The Economist is saying that comprehensive immigration reform may not happen, but the DREAM Act will.  The NYT is saying that Obama's recent picks for the cabinet are making it look like even more could happen.

Is somebody praying out there?

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Editorial
Getting Immigration Right
New York Times
Published: December 25, 2008

It’s way too early to tell whether the United States under President-elect Barack Obama will restore realism, sanity and lawfulness to its immigration system. But it’s never too early to hope, and the stars seem to be lining up, at least among his cabinet nominees.

If Mr. Obama’s team is confirmed, the country will have a homeland security secretary, Janet Napolitano of Arizona, and a commerce secretary, Bill Richardson of New Mexico, who understand the border region and share a well-informed disdain for foolish, inadequate enforcement schemes like the Bush administration’s border fence. And it will have a labor secretary, Hilda Solis of California, who, as a state senator and congresswoman, has built a reputation as a staunch defender of immigrants and workers.

The confluence of immigrants and labor is exactly what this country — particularly, and disastrously, the Bush administration — has not been able to figure out.

In simplest terms, what Ms. Solis and Mr. Obama seem to know in their gut is this: If you uphold workers’ rights, even for those here illegally, you uphold them for all working Americans. If you ignore and undercut the rights of illegal immigrants, you encourage the exploitation that erodes working conditions and job security everywhere. In a time of economic darkness, the stability and dignity of the work force are especially vital.

This is why it is so important to reverse the Bush administration’s immigration tactics, which for years have attacked the problem upside down and backward. To appease Republican nativists, it lavished scarce resources solely on hunting down and punishing illegal immigrants. Its campaign of raids, detentions and border fencing was a moral failure. Among other things, it terrorized and broke apart families and led to some gruesome deaths in shoddy prisons. It mocked the American tradition of welcoming and assimilating immigrant workers.

But it also was a strategic failure because it did little or nothing to stem the illegal tide while creating the very conditions under which the off-the-books economy can thrive. Illegal immigrant workers are deterred from forming unions. And without a path to legalization and under the threat of a relentless enforcement-only regime, they cannot assert their rights.

It’s a system that the grubbiest and shabbiest industries and business owners — think of the hellish slaughterhouse in Postville, Iowa, running with immigrant child labor — could not have designed better. Through it all, the Bush administration’s response to criticism has been ever more enforcement.

Ms. Solis, whose father immigrated from Mexico and was a Teamsters shop steward and whose mother, from Nicaragua, worked on an assembly line, promises a clean break from that past. She lives in El Monte, a Los Angeles suburb where two compelling stories of immigrants and labor have emerged in recent years.

The first was tragic: a notorious 1995 raid at a sweatshop where Thai workers were kept in slave conditions behind barbed wire. The second is less well-known but far more encouraging: a present-day hiring site for day laborers at the edge of a Home Depot parking lot. The Latino men who gather in that safe, well-run space uphold an informal minimum wage and protect one another from abusive contractors and wage thieves. It’s good for the store, its customers and the workers.

Ms. Solis is a defender of such sites and has opposed efforts in other cities to enact ordinances to disperse day laborers and force them underground. She understands that if day laborers end up in our suburbs, it is better to give them safe places to gather rather than allow an uncontrolled job bazaar to drive wages and working conditions down.

That’s a bit of local wisdom that deserves to take root in the federal government.

Harry Reid on Obama's First 100 Days

Reid says Democrats to tackle big issues

BY DEBORAH BARFIELD BERRY
GANNETT NEWS SERVICE

WASHINGTON -- Buoyed by more Democrats in the House and Senate and a Democratic president-elect, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said he expects lawmakers next year to take on hot-button issues from immigration to health care.

The Nevada Democrat also said Congress will try early on to undo some of President George W. Bush's recent executive orders, including ones on environment policies.

Last week, Reid discussed his priorities for the next Congress.

QUESTION: What are your priorities for the first 100 days of the session?

ANSWER: We're going to have to take care of a lot of nominations. ... We have to finish our appropriations process. We have a number of issues to repeal -- presidential orders (Bush) put in in the last few weeks. ... On the environment, for example, we're looking at clean-air regulations.

Q: Will it be an easier pitch with more Democrats in Congress?

A: Yes, next year it will be much easier to do. ... I'll have a larger majority here; so will ( House Speaker Nancy) Pelosi. We'll have a new president. And I think the Republicans come from the same states we come from. They have a lot of issues they need help with.

Q: What failed efforts disappoint you?

A: I wish we would have passed the speculation bill dealing with oil. I wish we could have gotten more money for infrastructure. We got quite a bit. But ... we should have a major infrastructure development program in our country.

Q: With more Democrats in the Senate and the House and a Democrat in the White House, how do you see congressional efforts playing out on such issues as health care and immigration?

A: On immigration, there's been an agreement between (President-elect Barack) Obama and (Arizona Republican Sen. John) McCain to move forward on that. ... We'll do that. We have to get this economy stuff figured out first, so I think we'll have a shot at doing something on health care in the next Congress for sure.

Q: Will there be as much of a fight on immigration as last time?

A: We've got McCain and we've got a few others. I don't expect much of a fight at all. Now health care is going to be difficult. That's a very complicated issue. We debated at great length immigration. People understand the issues very well. We have not debated health care, so that's going to take a lot more time to do