Also on Obama's plate: an immigration bill

[Shawn Swanson]

Hi,

Meet your illegal 'neighbor', now your 'voting block neighbor'....

Welcome to the 'New Era.'

Citizenship is going to be free for the taking.

swanson

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Also on Obama's plate: an immigration bill

http://www.mercurynews.com/politics/ci_12102370?source=rss

By Julia Preston
New York Times
Posted: 04/08/2009 09:15:00 PM PDT

While acknowledging that the recession makes the political battle more difficult, President Barack Obama plans to begin addressing America's immigration system this year, including looking for a path for illegal immigrants to become legal, a senior administration official said Wednesday.

Obama 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 the official, Cecilia Munoz, deputy assistant to the president and director of intergovernmental affairs in the White House.

Obama plans to speak publicly about the issue in May, administration officials said, and over the summer he will convene working groups, including lawmakers from both parties and a range of immigration organizations, to begin discussing possible legislation for as early as this fall.

Some White House officials said immigration would not take precedence over the health care and energy proposals that Obama has identified as priorities. But the timetable is consistent with pledges that Obama made to Latino groups in last year's campaign.

He said then that comprehensive immigration legislation, including a plan to make legal status possible for an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants, would be a priority in his first year in office. Latino voters turned out strongly for Obama in the election.

"He intends to start the debate

this year," Munoz said.

Polarizing issue

But with the economy seriously ailing, advocates on different sides of the debate said 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 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.

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. 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 George W. Bush.

Administration officials said Obama's plan would not add new workers to the American work force, but that it would recognize millions of illegal immigrants who have already been working in the United States.

Opponents of legalization legislation were incredulous at the idea that Obama would take on immigration when economic pain for Americans is so widespread.

"It just doesn't seem rational that any political leader would say, let's give millions of foreign workers permanent access to U.S. jobs when we have millions of Americans looking for jobs," said Roy Beck, executive director of NumbersUSA, a group that favors reduced immigration. Beck predicted that Obama would face "an explosion" if he proceeded this year.

In broad outlines, officials said, the Obama administration favors legislation that would bring illegal immigrants into the legal system by recognizing that they violated the law, and imposing fines and other penalties to fit the offense. The legislation would seek to prevent future illegal immigration by strengthening border enforcement and cracking down on employers who hire illegal immigrants, while creating a national system for verifying the legal immigration status of new workers.

Many details remained to be debated.

Building support

Opponents of a legalization effort said that if the Obama administration maintained the enforcement pressure initiated by Bush, the recession would force many illegal immigrants to return home. Dan Stein, the president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, said it would be "politically disastrous" for Obama to begin an immigration initiative now.

Anticipating opposition, Obama has sought to shift some of the political burden to advocates for immigrants, by encouraging them to build support among voters for when his proposal goes to Congress.

That is why Rep. Luis Gutierrez, a Democrat from Chicago, has been on the road most weekends since December, traveling far outside his district to meetings in Latino churches in San Francisco and elsewhere, hoping to generate something like a civil rights movement in favor of broad immigration legislation.