President Obama to Renew Push for Immigration Reform
When President Obama takes to the stage at 3:30 p.m. EDT in El Paso, Texas, and launches the next phase of his public campaign to achieve comprehensive immigration reform, he'll be doing so against the backdrop of the recently released 2010 Census data.
According to the data, Latinos made up more than half of the population growth over the last decade, most rapidly in the South. Today, one of every six Americans -- about 50 million people -- is Hispanic.
However, it's possible the more significant data point is one that's remained unchanged since 2006. Opposition to a comprehensive reform package remains strong enough to deny the president the sufficient votes.
President Obama and his team are eager to tout all they've done on border security in order to inoculate one of the key obstacles to moving the debate back to comprehensive immigration reform: a pathway to citizenship for the roughly 11-12 million immigrants currently residing in the United States illegally.
"The number of border agents today is double what it was in 2004. We have tripled the number of intelligence analysts working the border. We've deployed unmanned aerial vehicles that now patrol the border from Texas to California. We are screening 100 percent of southbound rail shipments to seize guns and money going south, even as we go after drugs coming north. So we're seeing results," White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said at Monday's press briefing.
In addition to a more secure border, senior administration officials indicated the president will make an economic argument for immigration reform, noting that 25 percent of job-creating, high-tech startup companies were founded by immigrants.
The White House acknowledges that the votes currently aren't there in Congress, and the meetings with stakeholders in recent weeks, combined with the president's speech Tuesday, are aimed at sparking more public support for reform in order to push Congress to act.
"It's disappointing that the only time border security and immigration reform get President Obama's attention is when he is campaigning," Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said in a statement issued on the eve of the president's visit. "The bottom line is that nothing President Obama says, or where he says it, can change the fact that he failed to deliver on his promise to make immigration reform a priority during his first year in office."
The politics are hard to ignore.
Latinos made up 9 percent of the national electorate in 2008, and Mr. Obama walloped Sen. John McCain among those voters by more than 2-to-1.
More important to his re-election than those national numbers are the Hispanic voters in key battleground states. In Colorado, they accounted for 13 percent of the electorate; in Florida, 14 percent; in Nevada, 15 percent; in Arizona, 16 percent; and in New Mexico, 41 percent. Combined, those five states account for 60 critical electoral votes.
President Obama's aides are eager to say this push for immigration reform is about policy not politics. However, with the fastest growing portion of the electorate in key battleground states keenly attuned to this issue, it's not hard to imagine that if the administration falls short of its goal to enact legislation, then utilizing the issue for political gain is a runner-up outcome they'll happily accept.