Immigration – Page 6

“Amnesty” In Jeopardy?

Even though Press Secretary Josh Earnest swears the plan is still on, Yglesias expects the GOP wave to scuttle Obama’s promise to take executive action on immigration reform by the end of the year:

To see why, just think about the speech that the president would have given had he announced this initiative back in June. He would have said that immigration reform was a pressing problem. He would have praised the Senate for passing a bipartisan reform bill with an overwhelming majority behind it. He would have noted that the House of Representatives had refused to bring any kind of immigration legislation to the floor. He would have argued that the public was behind him, and made the humanitarian case for action, and flagged the business community’s desire for reform. He would have bemoaned Republican obstructionism. And he would have plowed ahead with a controversial expansion of executive authority.

His argument, in other words, would have been that House Republicans were obstructing something the public, the business community, and even a bipartisan majority of the Senate wanted. But can you really cry obstruction right after losing an election? Republicans are now able to claim not just that Obama was stretching his authority in a novel way, but doing so specifically to overturn an adverse result in the midterms.

With nothing left to lose, though, Allahpundit fears he’ll go all-in:

Obama has nothing to fear from voters anymore. Even in a worst-case scenario, where he issues the order and there’s a public backlash, Hillary and the rest of the 2016 crop are free to condemn him for it. “I support the president’s noble goal of bringing the undocumented out of the shadows,” she’ll say, in perfect left-speak, “but we need to let the people’s representatives work this out in Congress.” That’s a win/win answer, pandering to the Latino voters she needs in 2016 while distancing herself from O for the benefit of independents. And of course, amnesty fans who are grateful to Obama will end up expressing it by voting for her, notwithstanding her (tepid, phony) opposition to it.

Meanwhile, issuing the order would have some nice political benefits for Obama. It’d be his way of showing his deeply demoralized base that he’s not giving up on progressivism entirely, even if he ends up making a deal or two with the evil GOP. And it’d be a clever way to throw the new Republican Congress off-balance, putting Boehner and McConnell in the agonizing position of deciding whether to pander to their base by fiercely opposing the order or to pander to Latinos they’re wooing for 2016 by going easy on Obama over it.

Obama had delayed his promised executive action out of fear of making even more trouble for Democrats in the midterms, but Esther Yu-Hsi Lee observes that the delay might actually have hurt some candidates:

Sen. Mark Udall (D-CO) vacated his Senate seat for Rep. Cory Gardner (R-CO) on Tuesday night, setting off speculation that low Latino turnout was the cause. Advocacy groups like Presente and the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON) have actively called on Latinos, who were a decisive force in the 2012 election, to resist voting for Democrats out of anger that the President hadn’t acted on promised action. Despite Udall’s loss, a Latino Decisions poll found that Latino voters in Colorado still strongly favored him over Gardner by a 71 percent to 23 percent margin. On the campaign trial, Democratic House members like Rep. Joe Garcia (D-FL) were confronted by Latino voters who demanded to know why the party — including Obama — had done nothing on immigration reform. Garcia lost his race on Tuesday to Republican challenger Carlos Curbelo.

Adrian Carrasquillo takes a closer look at Colorado, where new polling data “supports advocates’ contention that Udall’s defeat may have had something to do with immigration”:

According to a Latino Decisions election poll that connected with 400 Latino voters in Colorado in English and Spanish, on cell phones and on landlines, voters were not well-informed on the distinctions on immigration stances between the two candidates. A Colorado advocate with knowledge of the poll set to be released Wednesday said only 46% of Latino voters said they knew Udall’s stance on immigration and beliefs on Gardner’s stance were all over the place, with 21% saying he supported a path to citizenship, 38% saying he opposed “comprehensive immigration reform,” and 20% saying they didn’t know his stance.

And while Latino voters did turn out for Udall — in slightly higher aggregate numbers, according to early figures, than they voted four years ago — their share of the vote didn’t rise as fast as some expected. (Latinos make up more than 20% of the population of Colorado, according to federal figures.) So while Udall won 71% of the Latino vote, according to Latino Decisions, he fell short of Obama’s 87% showing in 2012 and Michael Bennet’s 81% in 2010, with the lack of clear distinctions on immigration as part of the reason why.

Drowned In Search Of Freedom

Barbie Latza Nadeau tells the ugly story of how as many as 500 Middle Eastern migrants seeking refuge in Europe were deliberately shipwrecked off the coast of Malta by their traffickers last week:

Unlike most of the traffickers who eventually either abandon the ships or meld in with the migrants, these traffickers had devised a bucket brigade plan to pass their human cargo between a series of increasingly smaller vessels mid-journey, always taking the bigger boats back for more refugees, according to survivors. … The only problem with the plan to pass the passengers was that eventually the migrants refused. According to two Palestinian survivors who spent a day and a half in the water before being rescued, the boat they had been on for just a day was met by yet another smaller vessel “for the umpteenth time” about 300 miles off the coast of Malta and the migrants, who were by then extremely tired, hungry and sea wary, were ordered to once again jump onto the smaller ship to continue the journey.

According to reports from refugee aid groups in Sicily who spoke to the survivors, when the migrants refused to transfer yet again, the trafficker from the mother ship allegedly hopped onto the waiting ship, which then rammed the vessel full of migrants until it sank. The smugglers then sped off, leaving as many as a hundred people floating in the water. Only a dozen survived, including two children who were saved when a merchant ship called the Pegasus spotted them floating in the sea. They said that the rest eventually sank beneath the surface—some after bobbing in the water clinging to debris for several hours.

Zooming out, Dara Lind explains how dangerous that voyage is:

Crossing the Mediterranean is much deadlier than crossing from Mexico into the US. The National Foundation for American Policy found that the deadliest year on record for the US/Mexico crossing was 2012, when 477 migrants were killed. That’s about 1 of every 1000 migrants apprehended crossing the border illegally. In 2011, which was the deadliest year for the Mediterranean crossing before this year, 1,500 migrants were killed: 1 in every 50 migrants who crossed. And the IOM’s initial estimates for this year indicate that 2014 will be twice as lethal as 2011: they estimate that 3000 migrants have been killed so far making the voyage.

(Map from Pew.)

Asylum Roulette

To qualify for asylum in the US, immigrants have to prove not only that they have a credible fear of persecution in their home countries but also that they belong to a particular social group and are being persecuted because they belong to that group. Not all victims of violence qualify. That burden of proof, as Emily Bazelon points out, leaves many asylum seekers in the lurch, including victims of domestic abuse and gang violence:

In 1996, the Board of Immigration Appeals, which functions as the country’s central immigration court (with review by the federal appeals courts) “broke new ground” on gender-related claims by “granting asylum to a Togolese woman who fled her country to escape female genital cutting,” as Blaine Bookey, a staff attorney for the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies, explains in this 2012 article. The idea was that the risk of cutting both depended on gender and was widespread in some African countries.

Domestic violence, however, didn’t easily get the same kind of recognition as a basis for persecution worthy of asylum. In 1999, the Board of Immigration Appeals rejected the asylum claim of Rody Alvarado Peña, a Guatemalan woman whose husband, she testified, treated her “as something that belonged to him and he could do anything he wanted.” Alvarado said she spent 10 years suffering frequent abuse, including the dislocation of her jawbone and a kick in the spine when she was pregnant. She was dragged by the hair, pistol-whipped, and raped. When she tried to run away, the Guatemalan police and the courts did not protect her. The BIA accepted that Alvarado had been abused but ruled that she was not part of a recognized social group—“Guatemalan women subjugated by their husbands” didn’t make the list—and that she had not shown she was abused because she was a Guatemalan woman living under male domination.

Is The Border Crisis Over?

The influx of migrant children into the US has plunged in the past two months, “from more than 10,600 apprehended in June to just over 3,000 in August”:

One major culprit is the hot summer weather, which could discourage migrants from making the journey from Central America to the United States. But at the same time, the Obama administration has engaged in an aggressive public-relations offensive in Latin America to warn parents against sending their children here. And immigration courts nationwide have expedited processing cases of the migrants recently caught at the border, putting those hearings ahead of others in line. “The system is, by and large, working,” said Kevin Appleby, the director of migration policy for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. “If anything, they need to ensure that the children are receiving the appropriate due process and we’re not violating our own law or international law.”

But Danny Vinik isn’t celebrating:

The ultimate answer is that we just don’t know why so many unaccompanied minors came across the border this year or why it is falling now. One reason may be that the administration ran multiple ad campaigns to deter parents from sending their kids north, explaining that the journey is dangerous and the kids wouldn’t be allowed to stay. The Mexican government also stepped up enforcement on its side of the border. And the weather may be having an effect as well. It’s still tough to tell the exact reasons. Given that, it would be foolish to make sweeping policy changes, like House Republicans voted to do before the August recess.

That’s not to say this situation does not require action. The thousands of kids who came across the border still need housing and food. The immigration courts are still backlogged. This crisis isn’t over. But it’s a different one than policymakers originally imagined. It’s not about border security or stopping the flow of unaccompanied minors. It’s about fairly handling the ones who are already here. That’s a very different problem.

(Chart via Vinik)

The Immigration Can Gets Kicked Down The Road, Ctd

Heaping scorn on Obama for delaying action on immigration, Beutler fears that the decision will come back to bite the president and his party should Democrats lose the Senate:

Obama will have placed himself in an incredibly awkward position. He will still be bound by his modified pledge to announce deportation relief before the end of the year, but will have to act in the aftermath of an election Republicans just won opposing what they tendentiously describe as “executive amnesty.” They’ll rewrite the story of their victory around their position on deportation.

The delay might also motivate some Democrats to stay home in November, Suderman suggests:

The potential flip side … is the move could depress turnout amongst pro-immigration Democrats. And it’s clear that immigration activists are not happy. The administration says the move is still coming, but there’s skepticism that it could be put off permanently.

“All the progress we’ve made over two years was destroyed in six weeks,” ImmigrationWorks USA head Tamar Jacoby told The New York Times. “Given the string of broken promises from this president to the Latino community on immigration, there is a real question as to whether he will follow through,” America’s Voice director said to the paper. But the administration seems to have decided it’s worth the risk. Basically, the White House is betting that the GOP’s negative response to a pre-election announcement would be more significant than whatever effect this has on Democratic turnout.

Sargent, on the other hand, sees Democrats playing a long game:

Democrats have an interest in seeing this happen just before the GOP presidential primary, because it makes it more likely the GOP candidates will out-demagogue one another in calling for Obama’s protections from deportation for millions to be rolled back, pulling the GOP field to the right of Mitt Romney’s “self deportation” stance in 2012.

Byron York shakes his head at the way Obama has punted on this issue for years:

During the days when his power was at its peak, Obama pursued higher-priority issues even as he led immigration activists to believe they were up next. Which leads to the conclusion that perhaps immigration reform — the substance of it, not the politics — has never been all that important to the president. Now, there’s still something more important: protecting vulnerable Democrats from voter disapproval of unilateral presidential action on immigration. Obama says he will finally act, after the election, after voters can no longer hold him or his party accountable. But who knows? Maybe something more important will come up yet again.

Douthat holds out hope for a less imperial solution:

[T]here is another possibility, which is that Caesarism delayed will eventually become Caesarism eschewed altogether … or else that Obama will eventually do something unilaterally on immigration, but it will be much more modest (a down payment on reform, the White House can tell activists) than what’s been floated and promised these last few months. Maybe the politics will keep looking somewhat ugly, maybe Democrats up for election in purple states in 2016 will pressure Obama to keep punting — or maybe the president will actually heed some of the criticism of his plan and revert to a more modest conception of how presidential power should be exercised on this issue. I’m not such a cynic that I don’t believe the last scenario is impossible, and it’s a good reason for the White House’s critics to be pleased with this delay: Sure, it could be setting us up for an even balder power grab in four months, but where there’s procrastination there’s hope, and a journey away from executive overreach could begin with exactly this kind of step.

The Immigration Can Gets Kicked Down The Road

Obama is delaying his executive order on immigration deportations until after the elections. Jonathan Cohn spells out the political logic of the move:

Vulnerable Democrats seeking reelection let the White House know, publicly and privately, that they feared an executive order would deal serious, maybe fatal, blows to their candidacies: While the ensuing debate would energize immigration reform supporters, particularly Latinos, it would also energize the conservative base. Given the political geography of the 2014 midterm elections, in which control of the Senate will depend on the ability of Democrats to hold seats in red states like Arkansas and North Carolina, the political downside seemed bigger than the political upside.

But Ezra Klein has a hard time squaring this political calculation with the White House’s former rhetoric:

This is the problem with the White House’s decision — and, to some degree, the way they’ve managed this whole issue. If these deportations are a crisis that merits deeply controversial, extra-congressional action, then it’s hard to countenance a politically motivated delay. If they’re not such a crisis that immediate action is needed, then why go around Congress in the first place?

Cillizza sees signs of political malpractice:

[W]hat Obama and his senior aides failed to account for — or underestimated — was the blowback from within his own party to a major executive action by an unpopular president on an extremely hot-button issue. (Worth nothing: Obama’s approval numbers eroded steadily over the summer and into the early fall; his political standing today is weaker than it was when he pledged action on June 30.) The move, it became clear, would have been seen as bigger than just immigration as well; it would have been cast (and was already being cast) by Republican candidates and strategists as simply the latest example — Obamacare being the big one — of federal government overreach.

This disconnect between the long-term legacy building prized by Obama and the near-term political concerns of many within his party is not new but, quite clearly, became a major point of tension.

Beutler is puzzled:

The political reasoning sounds incredibly straightforward. Most of the Senate Democrats running in tightly contested elections represent conservative states with low immigrant populations and deep hostility to “amnesty.” So why introduce more uncertainty into those campaigns, and potentially ignite a fire under the GOP base, when you could just as easily wait six weeks?

But it also seems suspiciously simple to me. That’s in part because I don’t entirely understand how much cover you buy for vulnerable Democrats if you put off the official announcement, but tell the press that the dreaded amnesty is coming just a few weeks later.

PM Carpenter is befuddled by the White House “political operation’s second-term bumbling”:

Now, everybody is pissed off. Immigration activists are screaming “betrayal” and “broken promise;” a major labor union is “deeply disheartened”; the nation’s most influential Spanish-language news anchor has denounced the delay as “the triumph of partisan politics”; Republicans are gleefully outraged; and Democrats are stuck with defending an executive action that never was, but still will be–“I’m going to act because it’s the right thing for the country,” said the president [Sunday] on “Meet the Press”–thus it might as well have been.

Gabriel Arana takes the president to task:

Given how long immigrants have had to wait for any sort of relief from the fear of deportation, another few weeks may seem like no big deal — that is, of course, if you’re not one of the tens of thousands of people who’ll be kicked out of the country while the president waits out the midterms.

But for many immigrant-rights supporters, the delay shows the president doesn’t understand the moral crisis at the heart of the immigration debate, in which those looking to escape poverty get branded as parasites, their children as “anchor babies.” Our dysfunctional immigration system has created a powerless class of millions of people; without the ability to vote or to advocate on behalf of themselves in public, they have no choice but to wait for our politicians to take sympathy. Lawmakers all “play politics,” but extending the suffering of this vulnerable population because it might save you a few votes at the ballot box is yet another sign you don’t fully consider them Americans.

How Tomasky sees this playing out:

Despite whatever acidic rhetoric Latino leaders are dishing out toward Obama today, I would expect that will change this fall. He’ll announce his unilateral moves on immigration after the election. The Republicans will boil with rage. In all likelihood, they’ll move to impeach. So then we’ll have the spectacle of one party—the party that has blocked the passage of an immigration bill in the first place—seeking to throw a president of the other party out of office for trying to do something on immigration that he wouldn’t have had to do if the first party hadn’t spent two years refusing to pass a bill. It’s pretty clear which side of that fence the vast majority of Latinos are going to come down on.

(Photo: A Honduran immigration detainee, his feet shackled and shoes laceless as a security precaution, boards a deportation flight in Mesa, Arizona to San Pedro Sula, Honduras on February 28, 2013. By John Moore/Getty Images)

Are We Abetting Central American Gangs? Ctd

Tomasky thinks we need to take a hard look at our own role in Central America’s descent into violence:

So in the three crisis countries, or at least in two of them (Guatemala and El Salvador), there’s a pattern. U.S.-sponsored civil wars tore the country apart in the 1980s. What happened next? As Ryan Grim and Roque Planas put it in a terrific Huffington Post piece tracing this history in greater depth, “With wars come refugees.” Terrified citizens of these nations started running to the United States by the tens of thousands.

When they got here, there was nothing for them. Depending on how old they were, they or their kids formed gangs in Los Angeles and elsewhere in the 1990s. We responded to that by “getting tough” on crime, throwing thousands of them in jail. Then when they got out of jail, we deported them back. We escalated the drug war—we had some success in Colombia, which merely pushed much of the cocaine trade into Central America. The ex-gang members we deported created extremely violent societies, societies where 10-year-old kids are recruited into new gangs and threatened with death if they don’t join, and it’s from those societies that today’s children are fleeing.

But Robert Brenneman stresses that the situation there is not as hopeless in as the prevailing narrative would have you believe:

While it is true that many of the children who reach the US border have grown up in difficult and even dangerous situations and ought to be granted a hearing to determine whether or not they should be granted asylum, I have Central American friends (including some from Honduras) who might bristle at the suggestion that every child migrating northward is escaping life in hell itself. The idea that all Central American minors ought to be pronounced refugees upon arrival at the border rests on the mistaken assumption that these nations are hopelessly mired in violence and chaos, and it encourages the US government to throw in the towel with regard to advocating for economic and political improvements in the region.

True, a great deal of violence and hopelessness persists in the marginal urban neighborhoods of San Salvador and Tegucigalpa, but these communities did not evolve by accident. They are the result of years of under-investment in social priorities such as public education and public security compounded by the entrance in the late 1990s of a furious scramble among the cartels to establish and maintain drug movement and distribution networks across the isthmus in order to meet unflagging US demand. At the same time as we work to ensure that all migrant minors are treated humanely and with due process, we ought to use this moment to take a hard look at US foreign policy both past and present in order to build a robust aid package aimed at strengthening institutions and promoting more progressive tax policy so that these nations can promote human development, not just economic growth. It is time we take the long view with regard to our neighbors to the south.

Previous Dish on our role in the Central American crisis here and here.