By Silvia Ayuso, DPA,
Washington: With health care reform practically under his belt, another crucial reform, immigration, is emerging as a major challenge for US President Barack Obama in 2010. A large portion of the immigrant community has laid its hopes on Obama to solve a problem that spans several administrations.
Wade Henderson, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR), defines migration reform as “one of the pre-eminent civil and human rights issues of our time”.
The US immigration system is “broken”, he said recently.
At issue is the status of an estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants who are already living in the US, most of them Latinos.
Obama called the issue a “priority” during his presidential campaign, and in recent months has renewed both personally and through key aides his commitment to reform.
At the same time, however, he made it clear that he could not focus on the issue until well into 2010, due to the delays that the difficult debate on health care reform has caused on his agenda.
Beyond that, there is a dark precedent of previous failures, such as the last two attempts under Obama’s Republican predecessor George W. Bush.
Times remain hard in the US despite emergence from the worst recession in decades, and most people are focusing on their own financial problems and the high unemployment rate, which is hovering around 10 percent.
Migration reform proponents insist that it is precisely those reasons that make “now” the best time to press for reform.
“Although there is a very good argument about this being a good time to fix things, in the real world it is difficult to see that under so much stress,” said Doris Meissner, a former commissioner of the US Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and current director of the US Immigration Policy Program at the Washington-based Migration Policy Institute (MPI).
“This obviously makes the context more difficult for us,” agreed Frank Sharry, the executive director of the pro-immigrant group America’s Voice.
“But the reform we are looking for refers above all to the 12 million people who are living in the United States with no legal status. We are not looking to get hundreds of thousands of visas for those who may come over in the future,” Sharry argued.
Recent legislative moves have renewed hopes that 2010 will bring the solution.
In mid-December, Democratic Representative Luis Gutierrez put forward a bill for migration reform in the lower house of the US Congress. Early in 2010, a bipartisan initiative from Democrat Charles Schumer and Republican Lindsey Graham was expected to reach the Senate.
Intense civic and political pro-reform campaigning has escalated, featuring celebrities like actress Eva Longoria. Four young Latino immigrants who are protesting deportations of illegals are walking from Miami to Washington to make their point, hoping to arrive in the nation’s capital May 1.
“We hope for a debate that starts in the Senate probably in March. Obviously the debate on health reform has to finish and has to be successful so that there is room and political capital to press the issue of immigration, but we expect results,” Sharry said.
For him, the “window of opportunity” on the issue is set to remain open until June or July.
And yet activists stress that time is running out, particularly since midterm elections loom in November for all of the lower House and one-third of the Senate.
Many fear immigration reform faces steep challenges at a time when many legislators have already risked much of their political capital on health care reform and the soaring public deficit.
Most pro-immigrant organisations, however, see this as an extra reason to press on. After all, the Latino community, which is already the largest minority in the US, has major weight when it comes to votes.
The number of minority voters rose dramatically from 2004 to 2008, to 9.8 million Latino voters and 3.4 million Asian voters in 2008, the US Census Bureau says.
The Centre for Migration Policy sees these numbers as a call to action for politicians on the longed-for migration reform.
The Latino vote, once a bulwark of the Republicans, was regarded as a key to Democrat Obama’s election win – a fact repeatedly stressed by pro-reform activists.
“Promises to repair the broken immigration system played an important role in the 2008 elections, and voters sent a clear signal that they want the government to solve problems,” said Angela Kelley, vice president of the Centre for American Progress (CAP).
The 2008 elections made both the Democrats and the Republicans “take notice of a community for which migration reform is an important issue and which is watching to see whether Obama keeps his promise”, Sharry agreed.
Clarissa Martinez, director of La Raza, the main Latino civil rights organisation in the US, says simply that migration reform is “morally imperative, urgently needed and politically wise”.