Immigration: Obama’s challenge to the GOP

last updated 8 January 2015

At long last, President Obama is taking on the hot-button issue of immigration, said the San Francisco Chronicle in an editorial. In a speech in El Paso, Texas, last week, Obama challenged Republicans to help him open a path to citizenship for the nation’s 11 million illegal immigrants. The president said he has done his part by expanding staffing and barriers on the Mexican border, so that fewer people are trying to cross. Republicans, he said provocatively, probably won’t be happy until he builds a moat. “Maybe,” he added, “they’ll want alligators in the moat.” Strong words, but the president was reminding Latinos that “Republican pigheadedness” is what’s blocking comprehensive immigration reform, said Lee Hockstader in The Washington Post. So while the GOP candidates brawl over who’s “the meanest Deporter in Chief,” Obama can “buy ads on Univision reprising his speech” and reap “a bumper crop of Hispanic votes.”

Don’t be so sure, said Laura Martinez in Newsday. Many Latinos feel betrayed by Obama, and regard this latest speech as another bit of empty pandering. “Why the bitterness?” Two out of three Hispanics voted for Obama in 2008 because he pledged to overhaul the broken immigration system, and those votes helped make Obama president. Since then, his administration has proposed no immigration reforms, while deporting more people than the Bush administration did. By demonizing Republicans, said Charles Krauthammer in The Washington Post, Obama has left “zero chance” for any compromises on this issue. But all he cares about is getting the Hispanic vote—not results. As for his insistence that the border fence “is now complete,” the Mexican border is 1,954 miles long—and only 350 miles are now securely fenced to keep out pedestrians. “Americans are a generous people,” and will agree to legalizing the 11 million immigrants who already live here. But first, we need more than Obama’s “flimflam” insistence that the border is secure.

That day may not come, said Robert Robb in The Arizona Republic. Obama is half right: Border enforcement is better. But immigrants are still crossing the border in large numbers, and employers continue to hire them at cheap wages. In Republican circles, the idea is now taking hold that “legalization under any conditions is a morally wrong reward for breaking the law.” Such thinking leaves Obama without any Republican partners, and the country without “a way out of the stalemate.”