Results 1 to 3 of 3

Thread Information

Users Browsing this Thread

There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)

  1. #1
    Banned
    Join Date
    Jun 2013
    Posts
    8,546

    The Five Political Forces That Will Control Obama's Efforts To Curtail Deportation Of

    From Numbersusa.com newsletter

    Comments are open on "The Five Political Forces That Will Control Obama's Efforts To Curtail Deportation Of Immigrants," by Brian Beutler of The New Republic.
    You may wish to reference this New Republic piece from last year: "Why Liberals Should Oppose the Immigraiton Bill"
    Thank you for being respectful and supporting other comments you agree with.

    jerem


    Obama Deportation of Immigrants Plan Faces Political Pressures | New Republic
    newrepublic.com

    July 31, 2014


    The Five Political Forces That Will Control Obama's Efforts To Curtail Deportation Of Immigrants


    By Brian Beutler @brianbeutler


    A large and growing body of evidence suggests that President Obama both has the legal authority to significantly reduce deportations and intends to use a great deal of that authority before the November election, most likely to allow many more unauthorized immigrants to remain and work in the country.
    For perhaps the first time in the past five years, the reform advocates the administration consults, along with Democrats in Congress who have been pressuring Obama to go big, have some spring in their step. Legal experts have advanced multiple arguments establishing Obama’s ability to offer protection to millions of immigrants. And according to the LA Times the action under consideration would cover “roughly 5 million of the estimated 11 million people who entered the country without legal authorization or overstayed their visas.”
    As far-reaching as that sounds, it arguably wouldn’t actually max out Obama’s legal authority. But that’s just another way of saying that the politics of deferred action for low-priority offenders cut both ways. And by my count, five competing pressures will control the scope of Obama’s actions.

    1) Re-enlisting the 2012 coalition

    This goal underlies just about everything Democrats in Congress and President Obama have done since early in his second term—from advocating for a minimum wage increase, to expanding civil rights for gays and lesbians, and even to passing comprehensive immigration reform in the Senate. What makes immigration different is that it’s a big outstanding issue on which Obama can, but hasn’t yet, taken action on his own. Unless he announces new deportation protections, he can’t claim to have cashed in all his chips with progressives and immigrant voters, and that would in turn cut against the goal of reducing Democrats’ midterm fall off problem.

    2)
    Making Republicans be offensive and extreme

    Item one goes hand in glove with item two. If the prospect of action on deportations doesn’t in and of itself motivate key Democratic constituencies to show up in November, the spectacle of Republicans agitating for maximum deportations and saying nasty things about immigrants might just do the trick. If it keeps various members of Congress and conservative celebrities agitating for impeachment, all the better. If these were the only two political factors weighing on the administration’s decision, it’d stand to reason that Obama would push the envelope—do everything his advisers believe the law empowers him to do without hesitation. But there’s more.

    3) Obama probably wants to avoid an actual impeachment
    As much as Democrats enjoy goading Republicans into threatening impeachment, and as much as I and everyone else outside a conservative fringe believe an actual impeachment fight would be severely damaging to GOP political interests, I also think Obama would like to go as far as possible on immigration without inviting the kind of right-wing backlash that forces GOP leaders to actually introduce articles of impeachment. Obviously I don’t think he’s going to do anything he thinks is unlawful. But it’s what Republicans think that matters, and the clamor for impeachment will grow in proportion to the scale of the action he takes. I could be wrong about this. But impeachment is the kind of hyper-polarizing confrontation Obama has generally submitted to rather than welcomed. It’d also center around a substantive and potentially controversial policy decision (as opposed to perjurious statements about oral sex) and thus carry a patina of seriousness that other GOP acts of procedural extremism have lacked.

    4)
    Protecting Southern Senate Dems

    The most straightforward (but I believe overstated) political downside to acting in September or October (as opposed to in early 2015) is that the election this November won’t turn on national mobilization, but on a handful of closely contested Senate races, in states with small immigrant populations, where opposition to legalization is strong and Obama is deeply unpopular. The big bone of contention is that some Democratic political operatives don’t believe it makes sense to draw another divisive issue into these races, and force vulnerable candidates to choose between aligning with Obama and taking a position at odds with immigrant voters and the rest of the party. But this is more a question of timing than of scope.

    5)
    The child-migrant crisis

    This one cuts both ways. The prospect of deporting thousands of children will create an imperative for Obama to get right with immigrant voters, and (perhaps mostly) with immigration reform advocates, who are already unhappy with the president’s deportation record. But the idea of effectively legalizing millions of unauthorized immigrants against the backdrop of the child-migrant crisis raises the possibility that the broader public will ultimately turn against the action, and that the whole political plan will backfire.


    http://www.newrepublic.com/article/1...2031%2C%202014





    A Liberal Opposes the Immigration Bill
    The New Republic

    It's about low-wage American workers

    June 27, 2013

    Why Liberals Should Oppose the Immigration Bill It's about low-wage American workers

    By T.A. Frank

    The consensus among decent people in favor of the immigration bill making its way through Congress is so firm that expressing dissent feels a bit like taking the floor to suggest we chop down the Redwood National Park. People don’t want to hear it, and they also think you’re a nut. That makes this article one of the hardest I’ve ever had to write. It’s not that I’m afraid people will get angry; it’s that I can’t imagine anyone on my side (liberal) is open to persuasion. And, despite the vastness and complexity of the issue, I have to be brief: the Senate hopes to be done with things this week.

    Sometimes, though, you just have to embrace futility.

    The country I want for myself and future Americans is one that’s prosperous, cohesive, harmonious, wealthy in land and resources per capita, nurturing of its skilled citizens, and, most important, protective of its unskilled citizens, who deserve as much any other Americans to live in dignity. This bill threatens to put all of that out of reach, because it fails to control illegal immigration. The problem is not that it provides 11 million people eventual amnesty (I don’t object to that, in theory); the problem is that it sets in motion the next waves of millions.

    High levels of low-skill immigration are good for wealthy Americans and bad for poor Americans.

    That is not a fashionable concern, of course. Worrying about illegal immigration today is a lot like worrying about communists in government in 1950. It’s not that the problem isn’t legitimate or serious (there actually were, we now know, a lot of Moscow loyalists working for the U.S. government). It’s that expressing your concurrence links you to a lot of demagogues and bad actors.

    Most of America’s college-educated elites are little affected by illegal immigration. In fact, it’s often a benefit to us in terms of childcare, household help, dinners out, and other staples of upper-middle-class life. Many therefore view the problem as akin, in severity, to marijuana use—common but benign, helpful to the immigrants and minimal in its effects on Americans or anyone else. I know, because it used to be my own view.

    There’s no short way to argue why I was misguided or explain how my views evolved. Oddly enough, an early important realization came to me in Hong Kong during the SARS crisis of 2003. I thought about how Hong Kong had created a flawed but remarkable city in which even low-skilled laborers such as these men and women, who were wearing masks and wiping down railings, lived far better than similar laborers on the other side of the border. I also realized that only a wall (and I didn’t much like walls) prevented millions of people on the People’s Republic of China side of the border from coming over to take these lowly jobs for a fraction of the current wage. (Hong Kong had no minimum wage at the time.) I knew I wouldn’t want these unskilled street cleaners to lose their adequate standard of living to such unbridled competition.

    But if that was how I felt about protecting Hong Kong’s working class, why shouldn’t I feel that way about America’s?

    Worldviews evolve slowly, of course. I read a lot research and studies. I familiarized myself with more of the literature: both immigration-skeptical work by people like Harvard’s George J. Borjas and Cornell’s Vernon Briggs and immigration-boosterish work by people like U.C. Berkeley’s David Card and U.C. Davis’s Giovanni Peri, to name a few. I read lots blogs and news stories. I started reporting on California and wrote articles that concerned immigration. I came to believe that the boosters had many more vulnerabilities and flaws in their arguments than the skeptics. I found the theories of people like UCLA’s Ruth Milkman—who posits, for example, that illegal immigration had little to do with the decline of wages and working conditions in Los Angeles’s trucking, garment, and janitorial industries because “de-unionization…provokes native-born workers to abandon no-longer-desirable jobs, at which point immigrants then fill the vacancies”—to be unpersuasive.

    I also noticed that a lot of immigration-boosterish studies—most of them, I’d say—contain telling caveats that undermine their case. For instance, buried on page 20 in Appendix Two” of this pro-legalization report touted by the Center For American Progress—trumpeted in a press release with the headline “How Immigration Reform Would Help the Economy”—is an estimate that if half of the current unauthorized labor force were deported the wage of a low-skill U.S. worker would rise by $399 a year. By contrast, legalization would raise that worker’s wage by less than half that much—and that’s assuming no further illegal immigration.

    All in all, I became convinced that high levels of low-skill immigration are good for wealthy Americans and bad for poor Americans. Far more important, high levels of illegal immigration—when you start to get into the millions, as we have—undermines unions and labor standards, lowers wages, heightens social tensions, strains state budgets, widens income inequality, subverts the rule of law, and exacerbates class divides. The effects go far beyond wages, because few undocumented workers earn enough to cover anything close to the cost of government services (such as education for their children) they require, and those services are most important to low-income Americans. In short, it’s an immense blow to America’s working class and poor.

    Most labor unions support the current legislation, of course, but few of them seem to acknowledge the possibility of a mass influx of a future illegal workforce. In part, that’s because the SEIU and many other unions have thousands of undocumented members, and raising a fuss about enforcement or opposing the current bill would alienate their own members. It’s probably also that they believe, unrealistically, that the bill would be effective at controlling the border in the future.

    And a lot of Democrats have also convinced themselves that even if there’s a wage loss to low-skilled workers, the massive new voting bloc of mostly left-leaning immigrants will ultimately help the little guy. But if millions of new Democratic voters oppose strict immigration control, then there will no Democratic support for meaningful immigration control. And generous social benefits cannot coexist with an open border. (Nor can a more egalitarian society.)

    I know that unauthorized immigrants are for the most part good, decent people. Deploring illegal immigration is not a condemnation of the immigrants themselves, anymore than deploring traffic is a condemnation of drivers. The rhetoric about hard workers trying to support their families is true, and in a perfect world we could invite everyone in without any tradeoffs. But the United States cannot take in millions upon millions of impoverished workers and hope to provide its own low-income citizens with lives of dignity or economic security.

    Most of the enthusiastic endorsements I’ve read of the current Senate bill seem to assume that the problem of illegal immigration will be solved once the legislation is passed. (Chuck Schumer recently promised on the Senate floor, “illegal immigration will be a thing of the past,” a remarkable performance even by Schumer standards.) But the Congressional Budget Office projects no such thing. It sees only a 25 percent reduction in current levels.

    That’s because, for all the ambitious measures listed on paper, the current bill grants near-immediate legalization in exchange for future enforcement. That deal is okay, except that failure to enforce the law in the future would not lead to loss of legal status. In fact, the only penalty I can detect in the bill is that failure to secure the border in five years would lead to the creation of a “Border Commission” with the power to—make recommendations. (If you care to see Marco Rubio’s defense of it, you can read it here and see if you’re convinced.) It is a large-scale replay of what we tried in 1986, when legalization was followed by lax enforcement and a much larger wave of unlawful migration. Enforcement capacity must be demonstrated before legalization is made permanent.

    Enforcement of immigration law is not all that hard. Illegal immigration can never be reduced to zero, of course, but it can be brought down to levels that we had in the 1950s and 1960s, and with very little outright force. There are plenty of means: enhanced fencing and patrolling at the southern border, E-Verify for all hiring, strict penalties for employers who hire illegally, a biometric entry/exit system, and punishment (and deportation) for entering the country illegally. Ron Unz of The American Conservative has proposed that a $12-an-hour minimum wage plus strict sanctions would greatly reduce the magnet of sweatshop employment. None of these methods could work singly, but used in concert they would bring illegal immigration down to negligible levels. An analogy might be made to crime in Manhattan: it will never go to zero, but the rate has become so low as to cease to be alarming.

    The trouble has always been political will. Every interest group has an argument against one enforcement mechanism or the other. Farmers and small businesses and the SEIU oppose E-Verify as a “job killer;” the ACLU contends it has “enormous privacy and security risks.” Environmentalists oppose a border fence because of migrating wildlife, and the 2006 Secure Fence Act never led to completion on the ground. Employer sanctions are unpopular with employers, who often are political donors and “job creators,” and plans in 1986 to start levying them never came to proper fruition. The biometric entry/exit system is “too expensive.” So we’ve historically compromised and done none of the above. That’s why all the “tough” measures being put into the current bill are simultaneously overblown and unserious. The Senate just voted to spend almost $40 billion on securing the southern border, when almost half of unauthorized immigrants are visa over-stayers. So why not spend a mere $5 billion to help roll out E-Verify? Or $25 billion to implement a biometric entry/exit system?

    Now politicians also seem to have become frightened of potential new voters. Calls to enforce the law, they fear, have come to be seen as anti-immigrant or xenophobic. If that’s the state of affairs now, what is it likely to be when 11 million new beneficiaries of lax border enforcement and their families and descendants become voters? This is why the New York Times editorial page, back in 2000, when it was more cold-eyed on the subject, warned, “Illegal immigration of unskilled workers induced by another amnesty would make matters worse.”

    If we intend to offer amnesty, however, we should at the very least place the burden of proof on those proposing to fix the problem. The way to do it is not by granting “provisional legal status” that can’t be revoked but, rather, by granting to all of today’s unauthorized immigrants what Obama has granted to those who were brought here as children: deferred action. Create a window of time—five or ten years—during which to implement all the current proposed border enforcement measures without any existing (non-criminal) residents having to fear penalties or deportation. It would be a time-limited period of legalization equivalent to a temporary visa. If future illegal immigration is reduced to set agreed-upon levels (50,000 a year should be the high end), then Congress could vote to upgrade “deferred” immigrants to permanent legalization and allow them to commence a path to citizenship. If not, then they would revert to their present unauthorized status. There must be measurable benchmarks of results rather than absurd outlays, and genuine consequences must be attached to them.

    Certainly, many people would resist this plan, but if so that is precisely because they know—or at least strongly suspect—that the enforcement measures in the current legislation are meaningless. So let’s make them meaningful instead.

    If I have a plea to my fellow liberals more broadly, it’s that they focus more of their empathy on fellow Americans being left behind. Because we increasingly live in bubbles, many of us are at best only abstractly aware of how cruelly circumstances of unskilled Americans have deteriorated over the past few decades. Even as these Americans have lost their well-paid manufacturing jobs, Washington has looked the other way while millions of low-skilled unauthorized immigrants have competed with them for low-skilled service jobs. The insouciance of privileged Americans toward the effects of this on life among less-privileged Americans is, in my view, a betrayal of citizenship.

    If we are to have any hope of regaining any control over our own immigration policy—which is to say, our destiny as a nation—then we must ensure that everyone has an incentive to follow the laws on who gets to be here and who does not. Otherwise, we will shred the few remaining safety nets we have, and the dream of dignity for all American citizens will slip farther and farther, perhaps permanently, out of reach. No matter how magnificently Chuck Schumer claims the contrary.
    T.A. Frank, a frequent contributor to The New Republic, is a writer and editor in Los Angeles.

    http://www.newrepublic.com/article/1...gration-reform
    Last edited by kathyet2; 07-31-2014 at 12:55 PM.

  2. #2
    Senior Member MinutemanCDC_SC's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jan 2006
    Location
    tracking the usurper-in-chief and on his trail
    Posts
    3,207
    Quote Originally Posted by Brian Beutler
    Obviously I don’t think he’s going to do anything he thinks is unlawful.
    Didn't Mr. Obama say - 18 times at least - that he didn't have the Constitutional or legal authority to declare an amnesty by executive decree? Before he did it anyway, I mean.

    Obviously, I can hardly believe that I wasted my time reading such tripe.

    <10 fingers down for Brian Beutler>
    One man's terrorist is another man's undocumented worker.

    Unless we enforce laws against illegal aliens today,
    tomorrow WE may wake up as illegals.

    The last word: illegal aliens are ILLEGAL!

  3. #3
    Senior Member vistalad's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jan 2009
    Location
    NorCal
    Posts
    3,036
    Quote Originally Posted by kathyet2 View Post


    Why Liberals Should Oppose the Immigration Bill. It's about [protecting] low-wage American workers [, and the quality of American life, and the principle of American sovereignty. End of story.]
    ***********************************
    Americans first in this magnificent country

    American jobs for American workers

    Fair trade, not free trade

Similar Threads

  1. Public Revolts Against Obama, Political Establishment's Amnesty Efforts
    By Jean in forum illegal immigration News Stories & Reports
    Replies: 2
    Last Post: 11-11-2013, 01:51 AM
  2. Gun control recall efforts worry liberals
    By AirborneSapper7 in forum Other Topics News and Issues
    Replies: 2
    Last Post: 07-13-2013, 07:54 PM
  3. NY Times Denies 2012 Political Forces
    By Ratbstard in forum General Discussion
    Replies: 2
    Last Post: 10-26-2011, 11:27 AM
  4. More school: Obama would curtail summer vacation
    By Dixie in forum Other Topics News and Issues
    Replies: 6
    Last Post: 09-28-2009, 02:37 PM
  5. Feds step up deportation efforts
    By FedUpinFarmersBranch in forum illegal immigration News Stories & Reports
    Replies: 1
    Last Post: 07-06-2008, 01:27 PM

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •