President Obama to ramp up immigration fight
President Barack Obama is ramping up his push to overhaul the immigration system, launching a sustained personal campaign that will rely in part on recruiting outsiders to pressure Congress to take up the controversial issue.
“He is committed and will be leaning into this issue in a very serious and very vigorous way,” Melody Barnes, director of the Domestic Policy Council, said Tuesday. “We are upping the intensity on this issue, and hopefully the information and facts about this issue will compel people to act.”
Barnes and Cecilia Munoz, the White House director of intergovernmental affairs, detailed a strategy of pressuring Congress by deploying Cabinet members, senior staff and business, labor and Hispanic groups to make the case. The administration took a similar approach ahead of a surprisingly close Senate vote last year on the DREAM Act, which would have provided a path to citizenship for young illegal immigrants who were brought to the country as children.
The president is also spending more time on the issue. He has hosted three immigration meetings in the past three weeks, including one Tuesday with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and another last week with movie stars, media personalities and activists. On Friday, he renewed his support for the DREAM Act during a speech to graduates of Miami Dade College.
“The past couple of weeks are also prologue,” Barnes said. “You will continue to see him build on this, and he has said to others that he has given his commitment to be both vocal and public on what needs to get done.”
Barnes would not specify what this would entail. She suggested the tactics would not include the White House introducing its own bill, as congressional Republicans wanted.
“Often when the White House just puts something on the table, it can become a point of conflict and not an inflection point to move forward,” Barnes said.
Given the slim Senate Democratic majority and Republican-controlled House, the odds remain long for passage of a bill that includes a legalization program for the country’s estimated 11 million illegal immigrants. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) attempted earlier this year to restart the debate in the Senate, but amid a series of distractions from the budget, Libya and the economy, they haven’t gotten far.
Obama has faced criticism from the Hispanic community because of his failed campaign pledge to introduce an immigration overhaul bill during the first year of his presidency. The public push by the White House suggests, in part, an attempt to build a political case ahead of the 2012 elections that Obama was committed to passing an overhaul bill but got stymied by an uncooperative Congress.
Obama has declined to use his executive authority to slow deportations of college students who are illegal immigrants or of other undocumented workers, saying he was hamstrung by Congress’s inaction. His refusal to use that power also has disappointed the Hispanic community.
Munoz said the issue can be addressed only by the passage of a bipartisan bill.
The recent White House meetings “are all a reflection of an effort to really engage those folks as vigorously as possible and elevate the debate and creating pressure and a sense of urgency we feel to get this job done,” Munoz said.