Obama Goes All In on Immigration

President Obama made a compelling speech to announce the executive actions he will take on immigration. The argument here is that it would be preferable were his speech delivered sometime around next March. Given this Congress, it's just a matter of deciding when is the best time.

That Congress, with its current approval ratings as low as 7%, has utterly failed to deal with the nation's
decades-long immigration problem is beyond argument. That the executive actions President Obama's is taking are morally the right thing to do is also beyond dispute. The problem of illegal immigrants has grown huge — some 11 million estimated to be in the U.S. — largely because of the failure of Congress, Democrats and Republicans alike, to face the issue for decades. The last immigration bill dates to the Reagan administration, 28 years ago, when some three million gained legal status after passage of a law with conditions much like the present proposal. Which makes the point that what Republicans did then they refuse to do now.

The result of this irresponsible neglect has allowed families to come here, find jobs, have children and generally settle into communities all over the national map with no resolution. For those here a long time, a legal problem has metamorphosed into a moral transgression by those who indicate a preference to deport.

But by acting during the so-called lame duck session, the President is making a strategic mistake that invites certain retaliation. "I think the President will come to regret the chapter history writes if he does move forward", said soon-to-be Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. "He needs to understand something … Congress will act", and he is not referring to its passing a needed law.

The strategic error is that the public is not fully caught up on how we got here and thinks the President is acting imperiously. They think the President is deliberately picking a fight when he should try to work with Congress. That fits with the unending critiques of Obama being aloof, standoffish, a loner. Thus does a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll released the same day as Obama's talk say that while 6 in 10 Americans agree there should be a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, 48% are against Obama taking this peremptory action. Only 38% are for his going forward now.

Safe to say that the public is only dimly aware that the Senate passed a bipartisan immigration bill with 68 votes at the end of June in 2013. They are hearing probably for the first time that "500 days" have passed (a big placard next to current Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid when commenting on Obama's action read "511"). Few in the public learned much about what Obama intends to do from his speech because, despite its importance and their obligation to serve the public interest, NBC was the only broadcast network that carried it. We the people surely don't remember that when the Senate delivered its bill, House Speaker John Boehner huffily said that the House wouldn’t even consider it. The House would write its own.

It never did. In January of this year, after weeks of debate, House Republicans had come up with a one-page term sheet that spelled out legislation that the Speaker viewed as “a fair, principled way for us to solve this issue...This problem's been around for at least the last 15 years so I think it's time to deal with it". But he was cowed by an onslaught from the rightmost elements of the Party — groups such as the Tea Party Patriots, FreedomWorks, the Heritage Foundation — that viewed the proposed terms of reform as “amnesty” and found them too damaging for those viewpoints to be out in the open in an election year. So Boehner immediately reversed field and announced in early February that nothing would be done on immigration for the rest of the year. Another entire year gone.

So it's understandable that Obama believes he has waited long enough, but does the public know that? We are not a nation of policy wonks who track these twists and turns.

It's highly probable that in that White House luncheon on the Friday after the election, Boehner informed the President that there is still too much Tea Party in the House to pass the Senate bill — or modify it, tear it up and rewrite it, or do anything on immigration for an indeterminate future. Obama may be acting on that, but the public doesn't know what he heard from the Republican leadership, nor do we, and not knowing what he may have been told leaves him seeming overly hasty and bellicose.

But if he instead were to say that he will wait until January when new members come aboard in the expectation that the House will take up immigration as its first order of business, that if they do so he would not resort to executive action until the end of March if nothing has been accomplished, a time frame that many have suggested, he would be viewed as much more reasonable. He would be making this offer with the secret and near certain knowledge that nothing would come of it, but when nothing comes of it, he will have made a strong case that Republicans just can't get the job done. He could have used the interim to sell his plan to Americans, which he has hardly bothered to do, putting more pressure on the Republican-run legislature to act. And finally, he would go before the television cameras and make the same speech he just did, but this time would gain broad acceptance by the public for resorting to unilateral action to do the work of an inept Congress. That would hand Democrats a potent theme as the 2016 election looms. That seems the better strategy. Instead he has handed Republicans a justification for a war of obstruction.