Obama trying to keep the issue alive for '11

President Barack Obama spent parts of the past two days meeting with various people about immigration reform – activists on Monday and the Latinos in Congress on Tuesday.

As a result of those meetings, we got to hear plans some sort of presidential address about the issue to be forthcoming, along with plans to ensure that the American people know that it is the Republican caucus that is strongly behind the effort to keep any sort of reform from even being considered.

ALL THAT MAY be nice, but I couldn’t help but think that one religious leader summed up the real significance of this week’s meetings. Rev. Sam Rodriguez of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference told the Politico newspaper and website, “the president is clearly on our side. He is our senior ally.”

I don’t think that Obama believes a speech on national television would change one person’s mind about this issue. If anything, it might offend some people that their favorite program was pre-empted for “political b.s.”

What this is really about is making sure that Latino leaders go back to their home communities and constituencies and tell them that Obama “is clearly on our side.”

Obama and his political alllies want our votes. They’re counting on our electoral influence to stave off the strength of the conservative ideologues who eagerly have been waiting ever since Nov. 5, 2008 for the chance to cast a vote against the Obama administration.

BUT MANY OF our ranks have wondered why Obama was not willing to put the same amount of influence into addressing immigration reform as he did into healthcare reform (which the far right hated almost as much as they hate real immigration reform).

Obama is using these meetings to plan tactics that are meant to ensure that we don’t have significant numbers of Latino voters deciding there’s no difference between the political geeks of differing parties. He doesn’t want us to stay home.

If it sounds like I think the Monday and Tuesday sessions were little more than a chance for Obama to drop to his knees and beg for our support, then so be it.

If anything, perhaps we should thank those dimwits in the Arizona Legislature who voted for the measure that takes effect in one more month that gives the local police greater incentive to try to enforce federal immigration laws.

BECAUSE THAT SEEMS to be what has motivated Obama and many of his aides to realize that there is a serious problem here, and that some people are going to be more than willing to be led like sheep by those with a nativist ideological bent toward policies that are ignorant, harmful, and in many ways, un-American.

That is what I think of the latest poll by Quinnipiac University Polling Institute of people in Ohio, to whom a plurality would like to see their state adopt an Arizona-like measure, and to whom a large majority (72 percent) think that immigration “reform” ought to be enforcement-oriented, and should not worry about greater assimilation. That number gets particularly high when one considers what “white, born-again Evangelicals” think.

Only 10 percent of those people want policies oriented to integrating newcomers into our society.

It almost makes me think of the political fight in the 1960s over civil rights, when many of the activists thought then-President John F. Kennedy wasn’t willing to take the hard-and-firm action needed to achieve true respect of rights for all people.

IT WOUND UP taking a political pragmatist like Lyndon Johnson (a former Senate Majority leader) to actually push the Civil Rights Bill through Congress and sign it into law, which is the act that usually gets him the distinction as being the president who did the most for black people in our society.

Could it be that Obama is starting to realize he needs to shift out of the JFK mode and into LBJ-type action? If anything, we saw that his people are capable of it in the way they pushed healthcare reform into law – despite the overwhelming desire of Republican members of Congress to kill it.

That is what is frustrating to many Latinos, who earlier in the year were starting to talk about Election Day boycotts and sitting on our collective culos when it comes to casting ballots.

We understand the forces out there that are determined to see that nothing in the way of real immigration reform is ever achieved (some people benefit from the bureaucratic mess that currently exists).

BUT WE ALSO know that the nation as a whole will suffer until this mess is cleared up.

It’s nice to see that Obama is “on our side” for now. But his long-term legacy when it comes to Latinos is going to be determined by the end result – not just the fact that he gave some lip service to Luis Gutierrez and his Congressional colleagues when they met for an hour Tuesday in la Casa Blanca.

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