Thread: Obama to make immigration case at Mexico border

Obama to make immigration case at Mexico border


* Hispanics major voting bloc in 2012 presidential vote

Obama keeping National Guard at border, adding agents

By Patricia Zengerle

WASHINGTON, May 10 (Reuters) - President Barack Obama will make his case for immigration reform on Tuesday on a visit to the U.S. border with Mexico, reaching out to Hispanic voters whose support he is counting on to win re-election next year.

Top aides said Obama would contend in a speech in El Paso, Texas, that tightening border controls while providing a path to citizenship for some illegal immigrants will improve U.S. security as well as the economy.

"Comprehensive immigration reform would be a plus, not a drag, on the federal budget," a senior administration official told reporters, requesting anonymity as he spoke before the president's speech.

The official said the cost of such overhaul would be $54 billion, but the revenue increase would be $66 billion, adding: "Bringing people to a path where they can be taxpayers is obviously going to be more of a plus than allowing the status quo to continue."

The White House will also seek to extend the stay of 1,200 National Guard troops posted at the border who are due to leave in June, another official said, though the administration is still determining how to pay for them.

There are an estimated 11 million illegal immigrants living in the United States, many of them Latin Americans who crossed the porous 2,000 mile (3,220 km) frontier with Mexico.

Obama has pledged repeatedly to fix the U.S. immigration system to address citizenship concerns and make it easier for businesses to plan, but the issue has taken a back seat to other matters such as economic recovery and healthcare reform.

In December the "Dream Act," which would have given a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants brought to the United States as children, failed to pass -- a disappointment for many Hispanic Americans.

Immigration is a politically explosive issue in the United States and Obama is not expected to be able to push through a broad overhaul before the November 2012 presidential vote.

In Texas, Obama is expected to stress the point that leading Republicans -- including former President George W. Bush -- have backed immigration reform in the past, and call for bipartisan action.

He will need to convince Hispanics something will happen on the issue if he wins a second term, said Audrey Singer, an immigration expert at the Brookings Institution.

"If this group who has been promised over Obama's presidency, but also Bush's, that things were going to change, if they keep getting disappointed, it's hard to say what that is going to mean," Singer said.

RALLYING CRY

Tightening immigration laws -- and opposing the idea of giving "amnesty" to those who broke the law sneaking into the country -- has become a rallying cry for many Republicans who want a clampdown to keep drug crime from crossing the border.

"The president can pander all he wants to, make as many speeches as he wants to," said Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican who chairs the main committee in the U.S. House of Representatives that would consider immigration legislation.

"I do not see amnesty (for illegal immigrants) coming up before the ... committee that I chair."

In August Obama signed a $600 million bill to tighten security along the Mexican border, including the hiring of 1,500 border patrol agents, customs inspectors and law enforcement officials.

The National Guard troops were sent to fill the gap while those new agents were trained.

Obama's failure to get broader legislation on immigration through Congress has upset many Hispanic voters, especially because the United States deported nearly 400,000 illegal immigrants last year.

The 50.5 million Hispanics in the United States represent 16 percent of the population and are the fastest-growing U.S. minority group. They voted for Obama by a margin of more than two-to-one in 2008, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.

Immigration is a concern for local politicians in southern U.S. states and many business owners who struggle with the cost of immigration and uncertainty about how laws may change.

"There's a lot of pressure percolating up from all different camps," Singer said.

Obama and other Washington officials have consulted with business executives, Hispanic celebrities, local politicians and labor and religious leaders on immigration system reform.

The administration will also announce on Tuesday plans for dozens of "community conversations" on the issue around the country. (Additional reporting by Jim Forsyth and Tim Gaynor; Editing by Laura MacInnis)



http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/ ... 9420110510

quote(The official said the cost of such overhaul would be $54 billion, but the revenue increase would be $66 billion, adding: "Bringing people to a path where they can be taxpayers is obviously going to be more of a plus than allowing the status quo to continue.")quote

Certainly coming to correct city,( Mexico City North ) the idea an amnesty would bring in money is so incorrect its laughable what it will do is increase America's debt and welfare rolls while increasing the Democrat voting rolls. Sad the politicans view Americans as stupid.

Obama: Stop campaigning and pandering to illegals and start taking care of American citizens - remember them? - the ones you were elected to represent.

Politics
Fresh Off Taking Down Bin Laden, Obama Tackles Immigration

Published May 10, 2011

President Obama, here fundraising in New York in April 2011, is beginning to reform the nation's immigration laws with a speech in El Paso, Texas, on May 10, 2011. (Photo AP-Kathie Willens)

President Obama, here fundraising in New York in April 2011, is beginning to reform the nation's immigration laws with a speech in El Paso, Texas, on May 10, 2011. (Photo AP-Kathie Willens)

President Barack Obama, fresh off a week in which he ordered the successful commando operation against the world's most wanted man, Osama bin Laden, is moving on to an issue that is, at least politically, perhaps just as challenging – immigration reform.

The president begins his push in earnest to remake the nation's immigrations with a speech in El Paso on Tuesday. The speech is scheduled for 1:30 p.m. MDT at the Chamizal National Memorial.

The president's speech along the U.S.-Mexico border is the latest high-profile immigration event by Obama, who has also hosted meetings at the White House recently with Latino lawmakers, movie stars and others.

It all comes despite an unfavorable climate on Capitol Hill, where Republicans who control the House have shown no interest in legislation that offers a pathway to citizenship for the nation's 11 million undocumented immigrants.

Still, the president has said over the past few weeks that he firmly believes in the urgent need to fix the "broken" immigration system in line with "our nation's 21st century economic and security needs."

Obama's efforts have been criticized as little more than politics in pursuit of the ever-growing Hispanic electorate ahead of the 2012 election.

White House officials dispute that. They acknowledge the difficulties in getting a bill but say it's likelier to happen if the president creates public support for immigration legislation, leading to pressure on Republican lawmakers.

"We already know from the first two years, the last Congress, that there was political opposition to comprehensive immigration reform, including from some places where there used to be political support," said presidential spokesman Jay Carney. "We are endeavoring to change that dynamic by rallying public support, by raising public awareness about the need for comprehensive immigration reform."

At the same time, the strategy allows Obama to highlight that Republicans are standing in the way of an immigration bill — shifting responsibility away from himself at a time when many Latino activists say he never made good on his campaign promise of prioritizing immigration legislation early on.

Obama's spotty immigration record in the eyes of Latino voters makes it all the more politically imperative for him to shore up their support with his re-election campaign approaching. One of the stick points is the number of deportations during the president's term. It is calculated that authorities will deport some 400,000 people this year, a record number to be added to similar amounts in the last two years.

"What's different from 2008 is that there are more Hispanics and more millennials in the electorate overall. Latinos are even a bigger share than they were in 2008," said Simon Rosenberg, a former Clinton White House strategist who follows immigration policy as head of the left-of-center NDN think tank.

"Millennials" is a term for people born after 1980.

More Latinos than ever voted in the 2010 midterm elections, according to the Pew Hispanic Center, accounting for almost 7 percent of those voting. Still, turnout among Hispanic voters is far lower than among other groups, giving Obama a reason to want to try to motivate them.

Some analysts believe the president can highlight the successes of border security on the American side. In El Paso, for instance, according to FBI data, had only five murders in 2010 despite its proximity to Cuidad Juárez, a main battleground in the war between Mexican drug cartels.

Administration officials, too, boast of increasing the number of agents on the border, seizing more contraband and nearing completion of a border fence, and say they plan to extend the deployment of National Guard troops Obama sent to the border.

"It's a great chance for Obama to stress the success of border security and the importance to the U.S. economy of a steady, regulated flow of goods and persons across the border," Andrew Selee, director of the Woodrow Wilson Center's Mexico Institute, told Efe. "The topic is undoubtedly controversial, but that flow cannot be stopped without harming the U.S. economy, and the best option is to seek reforms that allow it to be regulated more intelligently."

Obama has picked hostile political territory to make his pitch, visiting a state he lost by more than 10 percentage points in 2008. But the trip does have one overtly political upside: Obama plans a side trip to the relatively liberal bastion of Austin to raise money for the Democratic National Committee at two fundraisers Tuesday night.

At the same time, Obama is pitching his immigration argument to the larger public, and he's refining it in a way that goes to Americans' pocketbook concerns. White House officials say Obama will emphasize the economic value of reforming immigration laws, noting that immigrants account for a substantial share of business start-ups and patent applications, among other things — activities that create jobs for everyone.

It's a different approach than talking about immigration as a security issue or a moral one, and also provides a counter to the Republican argument that undocumented immigrants drain U.S. resources.

Republicans, however, aren't buying it.

"It seems President Obama has once again put on his campaigner-in-chief hat. The president's push to legalize millions of illegal immigrants is purely political," said Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. "And even though administration officials like to pretend the border is secure, the reality is that it isn't."

Brendan Buck, spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said that House Republicans had no plans to take up immigration legislation and argued that if Obama were serious about immigration reform he would have reached out to Boehner on the issue, which Buck said he hasn't.

The White House says Obama will push Tuesday for legislation and release a blueprint on his approach to reform, but without setting out any timeline. Indeed, getting immigration reform done any time soon is not realistic. Obama wasn't even able to get legislation through Congress last year that would have provided a route to legal status for college students and others who were brought to the country as children.

The so-called DREAM Act passed the House, then controlled by Democrats, but was blocked by Senate Republicans.

The Senate is now even more heavily Republican, and Republicans control the House. That means immigration reform can't happen unless they cooperate.

But for Obama, if the public's aware of that, it's a political win — even if Republicans don't budge.

Based on reporting by The Associated Press and EFE. AP Writers Suzanne Gamboa and Jim Kuhnhenn contributed to this story.

Read more: http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/politi ... z1LxY5tSdy

Residents would show President Obama bakery, 'tortilla wall'


by Victor R. Martinez \ El Paso Times
Posted: 05/10/2011 06:17:08 AM MDT


Both Bowie High School Principal Jesus Chavez and sophomore Melissa Garcia would take President Barack Obama to the South Side's Bowie Bakery if they could.

If Melissa Garcia had 20 minutes to spend with President Barack Obama, the Bowie High School sophomore would take him for pan dulce at Bowie Bakery, a quick tour of the powerful murals that dot Segundo Barrio, and finally kneel and pray at Sacred Heart Catholic Church.

It's what she knows, it's what she lives every day.

"This is where the history of our city began," said Garcia, one of five Bowie High School students who will be in the audience for Obama's speech today at the Chamizal National Memorial.

"People not from here always look at the Bowie area as a bad neighborhood," Garcia said. "It's not like that at all. The people and the community around Bowie High School are really proud people who have it together. We are truly one big family, and I want President Obama to know that."

Garcia is a true product of El Paso's South Side. The youngest of 12 siblings, she is a first generation Mexican-American who has lived in the neighborhood all her life. She attended Hart Elementary and Guillen Middle schools and has ambitions of graduating as the valedictorian from Bowie and studying international business at the University of Texas at Austin.

"After I graduate, I want to come back home and help my community because, like I said before, we are one big family, that's why we always have Bowie alumni coming back and helping us," she said. "I want the president to know we are hard-working people who care about our community."

Segundo Barrio is one of the poorest and least-educated neighborhoods in the nation. According to the 2000 U.S. Census, 62 percent of residents in the Segundo Barrio live below the federal poverty line, and nearly 80 percent don't have a high-school diploma.

"If the president is here to talk about border issues and border violence, then that really affects us because we live it here with our kids every day," said Bowie High Principal Jesus Chavez. "Our kids have close connections to Juárez. We've had one student already killed. At least once a month we have kids who lose an uncle or a cousin. Some kids have even lost heir fathers to the violence."

With Obama speaking across the street from Bowie and possibly addressing border issues, Chavez said it is a good sign that Washington is paying attention.

_____"It validates our kids' struggles who cross those bridges on a daily basis to visit family or attend funerals of their uncles and cousins," he said. "It means a lot to a place like Bowie, a place like El Segundo, where we have that connection to Juárez. It's showing faith that something is going to get done and somebody out there wants to do something about these issues."________________

Chavez, like Garcia, would take the president to Bowie Bakery, but would throw in a trip to the school's handball courts behind the Bowie gymnasium where the school's art department painted a red-white-and-blue mural of Obama after the 2008 election.

"I would also take him down to the projects where these kids come from to see how they live everyday," Chavez said. "We are one of the poorest ZIP codes in this nation, but despite that, we have done very well in the classroom in the past two or three years. I want him to see what we're working with every day with these kids, the reality of life in their neighborhood."

El Paso historian Fred Morales said that if he could give the president a walking tour, he would start at Chihuahuita, El Paso's smallest and oldest neighborhood that has played an important part in the city's development for more than 400 years.

"I would show him the tortilla curtain and the new wall that's gone up," Morales said. "I would tell him how the Mexican Revolution and the Chamizal dispute affected the history of Segundo Barrio and Chihuahuita."

_______In 1978, a border fence, which was referred to as a "tortilla curtain," was proposed and later made to separate El Paso and Juárez. It was largely ineffective.

Frances Rios, who was having lunch with her boyfriend, Jorge Moreno, at the original Rock 'n' Roll Cafe on 2138 Cypress (across the street from the Chamizal National Memorial), said having Obama speak in her neighborhood is a big deal.

"This neighborhood doesn't really get the spotlight a lot of times," said Rios, a 19-year-old sophomore math major at UTEP. "It's going to be really important not only for the neighborhood but for the entire El Paso community."

Rios, who is a 2009 Bowie graduate, attended Beall Elementary and Guillen Middle schools.

"There is a certain feeling and a sense of history in our neighborhood," she said. "You walk around here and people know who you are. It's like a huge extended family. Plus, a lot of successful immigrants started here and many of them stayed here. It's our history and it's really important for him to see it."

Victor R. Martinez may be reached vmartinez@elpasotimes.com; 546-6128.

Ramón RenterÃ*a contributed to this story. He may be reached at rrenteria@elpasotimes.com; 546-6146.

http://www.elpasotimes.com/news/ci_18028304