President Barack Obama gave what was billed as an important speech on immigration last week in El Paso, Texas. Unfortunately, nearly everything Obama said was either factually incorrect or deliberately misleading.
Why, 28 months into the Obama presidency, is there now a sudden push to pass ?comprehensive? immigration reform? After all, from 2009 to early 2011, Obama had large Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate. Why hasn?t Obama already rammed through his own immigration bill, as he did with health care? The answer, of course, is that about 70 percent of the American people consistently poll against the president?s initiatives on illegal immigration.
But now he has lost the House. A close re-election bid looms. The president is enjoying a sudden bounce in popularity after the capture of Osama bin Laden. He needs to firm up his base of Latino supporters. Time to blame Republicans for his unwillingness to get a bill through his Democratic Congress.
Obama?s demagoguery seemed to work on the crowd in El Paso. In blaming Republicans, Obama charged that their fears about open borders were groundless since ?The fence is now basically complete.? And to emphasize that claim, he mocked his opponents by saying, ?Maybe they?ll need a moat. Maybe they?ll need alligators in the moat.? It is again quite untrue. The fence is most assuredly not ?basically? complete. Currently, fewer than 700 miles of the more than 1,900-mile border have any sort of barrier. And less than 5 percent of the border has a secure double-fenced impediment. A recent Government Accountability Office study found that 40 percent of the border is essentially open and unguarded. There are still well over a half-million illegal border crossings per year.
In a fit of projection, the president also accused his opponents of politicking the issue for partisan advantage: ?We?ve seen a lot of blame and a lot of politics and a lot of ugly rhetoric around immigration.? That too was a distortion for at least two reasons. One, during the 2010 midterm election, the president himself urged Latinos to ?punish? their political ?enemies.? That advice sure seemed like ?ugly rhetoric.?
The president also deliberately confused legal and illegal immigration in lamenting the inability of highly skilled immigrants to get work visas and citizenship. But polls show wide support for legal immigration based on skills.
What he didn?t dare reveal was that to let in professionals and business people from around the world, based on skills and earning potential, might also mean to curtail those without education and capital ? including millions of illegal immigrants from Mexico who don?t speak English or have high school educations, and who often have little means of support.
Even when the president offered some sensible proposals about illegal aliens paying fines, applying formally for citizenship and learning English, he was still disingenuous. Obama floated these proposals without any details of enforcement, since to do so would likely turn off the cheering crowd.
The vast majority of the American public is not racist or ?playing politics? in worrying about out-of-control illegal immigration. The enforcement of existing federal immigration law has become a joke. Drug violence in Mexico is destabilizing that country and spilling over the border. Jobs are scarce, with unemployment here still at 9 percent. Many billions of dollars in remittances to Mexico leave the United States, often from illegal aliens who rely on our social services to make up the difference.
These are serious issues that deserve more from a president than re-election pandering at the border and bad jokes about alligators and moats.
E-mail the author at: author@victorhanson.com
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Written by Victor Davis Hanson and published on the Sacremento Bee, May 20, 2011.
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Source: http://www.federalobserver.com/2011/05/22/hanson-president-plays-politics-on-border/
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