Obama's Anti-Immigrant Stance
Under the guise of immigration enforcement, the White House pushes a pro-union agenda.

Shikha Dalmia | July 12, 2011

When it comes to immigration policy, President Obama has found his inner Machiavelli. He has devised an enforcement approach that at once disarms conservatives, delights labor unions, and minimizes bad feelings within the Hispanic community. All this might help him keep his job, but only by killing others’.

Last month, the administration announced a renewed crackdown against employers who hire undocumented aliens, notifying 1,000 of them to prepare for an audit raid. Under these raids, Immigration and Customs Enforcement inspectors descend upon companies and comb through their books, looking for irregularities.

Employees who don’t have authorization to work or valid Social Security numbers are fired and sometimes arrested. And employers whose books show signs of under-the-table payments face fines, forfeiture, and jail.

The beauty of these raids, especially from the standpoint of PR within the Hispanic community, is that they seem more humane than the Bush administration’s flashy workplace raids in which inspectors, TV cameras in tow, would crash a taqueria or a construction site, round up the workers, demand their papers, and arrest those who couldn’t produce valid ones for future deportation. By contrast, a bunch of inspectors sitting around, quietly going through books doesn’t seem that awful. But the impact of such silent raids on businesses and workers—both immigrant and American—is far more deadly.

For starters, because they don’t require probable cause and are cheaper than the Bush raids, the Obama administration can conduct more of them. The Los Angeles Times reported even before the new crackdown that the number of employer raids had increased fourfold since 2008, and the fines collected from businesses grew sevenfold. Meanwhile, deportations were at a record high. This helps defuse accusations by enforcement-first conservatives that President Obama is soft on illegal immigrants. But the real purpose of the raids is, in the words of an Obama official, driving “unfair competition out of the market.â€