Pilar Marrero is covering the immigration and deportation policies of the Trump Administration-in-the-making. In Ideólogo de la “auto deportación” hace parte del equipo de TrumpLa Opinión, she reports on the large role Kris Kobach, one of the xenophobes' heroes, plays in the Trump transition team.
Currently Secretary of State in Kansas, he has distinguished himself by his p[romotion of segregationist voter-suppression methods. Trump also made a point of identifying himself closely with anti-Latino xenophobes like Alabama Republican Sen. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III and the infamous Sheriff Joe Arpaio, thankfully defeated this week for re-election.
Kobach affirmed publicly this week that Trump intends to proceed with his famous wall, the only question being how fast and who will pay for it.
Not only will US-Mexico relations be very different under a Trump Administration. There will be some direct spillover affect from Trump's Mexico and deportation policies to how governments and electorates in the rest of Latin America view the United States. Trump ran on a campaign of blatant hostility to Latinos, Latino immigrants and to Mexico and Mexico in particular.
And when it comes to that all-important issue of immigration policy, Trump announced on Thursday that he had named Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state and hard-core anti-immigration activist, to his transition team. Koback wrote State Bill 1070, the infamous Arizona “show me your papers” law, which was later overturned by the courts. He has been informally advising the campaign about immigration and was supposedly the one who convinced Trump how the government could find some way to make Mexico pay for the mythical border wall.
The Republicans are about to nominate a nasty demagogue, Donald Trump, as their Presidential candidate. He's running an overt White Power campaign. This gives the Democratic Party an historic chance to shift Latino votes in particular to Democrats on a long-term basis; to win voters under 30 to identify not just with the Presidential candidate but with the Democratic Party; to overtly challenge and discredit the White Power ideology that the Republicans have been exploiting for decades in a more sublimated way; to take control of the Senate and, in a long shot, the House as well; and to build a mandate for Democratic goals that even Hillary Clinton nominally claims to support like increasing Social Security, boosting the minimum wage and overturning the reactionary Citizen's United Supreme Court decision.
So what is the incumbent Democratic President doing to make this happen?
The article discusses the implications of a new round of Latino deportations President Obama announced last month. (Kate Linthicum and Brian Bennett, Obama administration plans new raids that would deport Central American childrenLos Angeles Times 05/12/2016) Even Hillary Clinton criticized that plan when the Administration announced it:
Democratic presidential rivals Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, who are both vying for Latino votes, criticized the deportation plan Thursday.
“I oppose the painful and inhumane business of locking up and deporting families who have fled horrendous violence in Central America and other countries," Sanders said. "Sending these people back into harm’s way is wrong."
Sanders urged Obama to use his executive authority to extend a protection known as Temporary Protective Status to those fleeing Central America.
Clinton said she is "against large-scale raids that tear families apart and sow fear in communities." She called for a plan "to stop the root causes of the violence in Central America and expand orderly resettlement programs."
"I am concerned about recent news reports, and believe we should not be taking kids and families from their homes in the middle of the night," she said.
Of course, this is Hillary Clinton, the establishment candidate of the Democratic Party, so this is an issue on which she has recently, uh, evolved: "She has softened her position on the issue since 2014, when she told a reporter that she believed immigrant children from Central America 'should be sent back as soon as it can be determined who responsible adults in their families are.'"
David Dayen does a great job of spelling out the political problem with this, and rightly emphasizes that its an immoral, destructive policy:
One of the most popular themes of 2016 general-election prognosticators is that Donald Trump simply cannot find enough white males to carry him to victory—and that’s the only way he can win. His alienation of Latinos in particular, beginning when he denounced Mexican immigrants as rapists in his campaign announcement speech, has triggered a backlash, with surges of non-white voter registration in states like California. All Democrats need to do in November, the thinking goes, is sit back and collect the votes of people of color against a boor like Trump.
Amid polls showing Trump neck-and-neck with likely Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, this is a reassuring notion for Democrats and #NeverTrump types alike. But it also makes the Obama administration’s latest round of aggressive deportation raids, which will target Central American mothers and children fleeing violence and possible death, all the more puzzling.
The crackdown threatens to squander a historic political advantage in 2016. It could even disrupt a generational political realignment between Democrats and Hispanics. But putting politics aside (for a moment), the White House’s position is wholly indefensible. The political danger is real — but it’s ultimately a sidelight to a senseless human tragedy. [my emphasis]
President Obama says Democrats are only too happy to run against Donald Trump, but he is personally "worried" about the fate of the Republican Party.
"This country works when you have two parties that are serious and trying to solve problems," Obama told Tonight Show host Jimmy Fallon. "And they've got philosophical differences and they have fierce debates and they argue and they contest elections."
Indicating that Trump is not a serious candidate, Obama said that what has happened in the Republican Party "is not actually good for the country as a whole. It's not something Democrats should wish for."
Saying the nation needs a "healthy two-party system," Obama said that he hopes that "there's some corrective action" after this year's election.
Yes, after all these decades of the Republican Party having high-minded philosophical debates, this rude Donald Trump comes along and threatens to change the constructive approach the Republican Party has been taking for so long.
The reality is that Hillary Clinton and her campaign will have to win enough votes to be elected President. If she wants active support from Sanders and wants his voters to turn out in large numbers in November, she's going to have to make that appeal. I'm seriously unsure whether the Clinton campaign will even care about turning those voters out. Her campaign seem to have a remarkable complacency about those voters having no place else to go. And so far, including in her refreshingly aggressive foreign policy speech against Trump recently, she's emphasizing more the theme At Least She's Not Donald Trump than trying to build a Democratic mandate.
And for that kind of campaign, making particular appeals to Sanders voters would step on the Pangloss message that the Obama Administration is the best of all possible worlds and Hillary will preserve that ideal world against Trump the Barbarian. I had thought until May 17 that it would be fairly easy for a Clinton campaign to strongly appeal to Sanders voters in the general election. But that was the day DNC Chair, Hillary supporter and BFF of the payday lending industry Debbie Wasserman Shultz issued her anathema against Sanders and his supporters based on the Clinton campaign's phony charges about Sanders supporters throwing chairs and punching Clinton supporters at the Nevada state convention, which I discuss in the immediately preceding post. I really don't know if the Clinton campaign cares if the Sanders voters back her or not. Especially since she's emphasizing the vote-against-Trump approach.
The Clinton campaign's response to things like this is now pretty standard: Trump scary, Bernie evil, Hillary wonderful. And this is the face that Hillary's campaign has so often shown to the Sanders voters, Clinton lashes out: ‘I am so sick of the Sanders campaign lying’tin hay 03/31/2016:
And maybe At Least She's Not Donald Trump will be good enough for the fall campaign. Supporters of democracy certainly have to hope so.
Golly, if the President hadn't done that, there could have been bipartisan harmony with Republicans for the next two years! Reuters: "All year long I have warned the president that by ... threatening action repeatedly on immigration, he was making it impossible to build the trust necessary to work together," [House Majority Leader John] Boehner told reporters. "With this action, the president has chosen to deliberately sabotage any chance of ... bipartisan reform that he claims to seek."
Bill Schneider, a resident scholar at the corporatist-Democratic, Centrism Fetishist, Third Way group, sees Obama's immigration reform as a move to shore up Democratic support among Latinos, as part of a legacy-building drive and evidently as an intention to finally push back against Republicans instead of stumbling again and again in failed attempts at Bipartisanship over contentious issues (Immigration effort shows a president who is fighting backReuters 11/20/2014):
Obama is not sulking. In fact, the midterm defeat seems to have given him new resolve. Obama went to China and came back with an agreement on climate change. China has, for the first time, committed itself to a program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Critics of climate change can no longer use China’s unwillingness to act as an excuse for U.S. inaction.
Now Obama looks about to issue an executive order halting the deportation of as many as five million illegal immigrants who would be forced to abandon their families. Obama may not get comprehensive immigration reform through Congress, but he has done what he believes he can do. He wants immigration and climate change to be the signature legacies of his second term.
Oh, and he also surprised everyone by coming out in favor of net neutrality. Where did that come from? The president wants Internet providers to be regulated like public utilities. Republicans are crying foul. They hate government regulation. Net neutrality is popular among tech savvy young people, however, who deserted the Democrats in droves in this month’s midterm. The demographics of the issue are good.
And the politics? Instead of sulking in defeat, Obama is embracing climate change, immigration reform and net neutrality. Republicans are grumbling. The president's response: "In your face!"
At least the immigration reform is mostly a good thing.
Still, I can't help but notice that Obama's speech made one gesture after another to the conservative framing of the immigration issue. For just one example:
When I took office, I committed to fixing this broken immigration system. And I began by doing what I could to secure our borders. Today, we have more agents and technology deployed to secure our southern border than at any time in our history. And over the past six years, illegal border crossings have been cut by more than half. Although this summer, there was a brief spike in unaccompanied children being apprehended at our border, the number of such children is now actually lower than it’s been in nearly two years. Overall, the number of people trying to cross our border illegally is at its lowest level since the 1970s. Those are the facts. ...
Now, I continue to believe that the best way to solve this problem is by working together to pass that kind of common sense law. But until that happens, there are actions I have the legal authority to take as President –- the same kinds of actions taken by Democratic and Republican presidents before me -– that will help make our immigration system more fair and more just.
Tonight, I am announcing those actions.
First, we’ll build on our progress at the border with additional resources for our law enforcement personnel so that they can stem the flow of illegal crossings, and speed the return of those who do cross over. [my emphasis]
Obama's six-year record as President has included a pattern again and again of making moves - or at least speeches - that please his base, then follow up by promoting some bad policy (the Grand Bargain to cut benefits on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid being the classic so far) in hopes of achieving domestic Bipartisanship with the toxic Republican Party.
We can hope this time will be different.
But he framed even this action which the Republicans consider anathema in the Republicans' own terms. He.Just.Can't'.Help.Himself.
Demetrios G. Papademetriou provides some historical background on immigration issues in this 2013 piece, The Fundamentals of Immigration ReformThe American Prospect 03/12/2013
These are guides to the provisions of Obama's immigration reform actions:
And while the reprieve will be welcome news for millions, it contains a paradox: young people who were part of the 2012 reprieve, the DACA-mented, will see their parents excluded from the pending relief measures, because the new reforms exclude the undocumented parents of DACA recipients. In other words, the youth who have been on the frontlines campaigning for an expansion of their program now face the devastation of their parents being among the millions who the new measures leave behind.
I know that's kind of a groaner of a headline. What it means is that the hoopla from the Radical Right/Republicans over health care reform is likely to seem like a lower-case tea parties compared to the s**tstorm they are likely to kick up over immigration reform.
Pro-immigrant activists from Reform Immigration for America are sponsoring house parties for comprehensive immigration reform.
