WASHINGTON: After US President Barack Obama’s much-publicized international trip and his weeks-long focus on the financial system, the president told Americans yesterday that his administration has at least three more key items on its domestic policy plate — housing, immigration and climate change.
But many Americans wonder that with housing and other economic issues bubbling on the front burners, will Obama also plan to start addressing the thorny issue of immigration reform this year?
Yes, White House official Cecilia Muñoz told the New York Times on Wednesday.
“He intends to start the debate this year.” She said immigration will “not take precedence” over health care and energy in the hierarchy of issues important to the White House.
This means President Obama is gearing up for yet another legislative battle, this time over the extremely contentious issue of immigration, which will include the search for a path to legalize the status of millions of illegal immigrants.
Americans are sharply divided over how to deal with 12 million illegal immigrants living in the United States. Many of them say illegal immigrants are a drain on the country’s resources and want them deported.
The White House is calculating that public support for fixing the immigration system, which is widely acknowledged to be broken, will outweigh opposition from voters who argue that immigrants take jobs from Americans.
Administration officials said that Obama’s plan would not add new workers to the American workforce, but that it would recognize millions of illegal immigrants who have already been working here.
Despite the deep recession, independent studies of census data show there is no evidence of any wholesale exodus of illegal immigrant workers.
A groundswell among voters opposed to legal status for illegal immigrants led to the defeat in 2007 of a bipartisan immigration bill that was strongly supported by President Bush.
Obama, then a Democratic senator, backed immigration reform proposed by Bush that sought tougher border controls and a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants.
The Secure Borders, Economic Opportunity and Immigration Reform Act, as it was called, received criticism from both sides of the immigration debate, despite being portrayed as a compromise between legalization of illegal immigrants and increased border enforcement.
Bush’s fellow Republicans in the US Congress killed the proposal.
During Obama’s presidential campaign, he pledged to “bring people out of the shadows” through a system that would allow the 12 million undocumented immigrants to pay a fine, learn English and go to the back of the line in the citizenship process.
Obama will speak publicly about the matter in May and bring together working groups including Democratic and Republican lawmakers over the summer to begin discussing possible legislation for as early as the fall.
The president will frame the new effort — likely to rouse passions on all sides of the highly divisive issue — as “policy reform that controls immigration and makes it an orderly system,” said Muñoz, deputy assistant to the president and director of intergovernmental affairs in the White House.
The timetable is consistent with pledges Obama made to Hispanic groups in last year’s campaign.
But with the economy seriously ailing, advocates on different sides of the debate said that immigration could become a polarizing issue for Obama in a year when he has many other major battles to fight.
Opponents, mainly Republicans, say they will seek to mobilize popular outrage against any effort to legalize unauthorized immigrant workers while so many Americans are out of jobs.
Democratic legislative aides said that opening a full-fledged debate this year on immigration, particularly with health care as a looming priority, could weigh down the president’s domestic agenda.
Just last month, Obama openly recognized that immigration is a potential minefield.
“I know this is an emotional issue; I know it’s a controversial issue,” he told an audience during a town meeting in California. “I know that the people get real riled up politically about this.”
Opponents of legalization legislation were incredulous at the idea that Obama would take on immigration when economic pain for Americans is so widespread.
