If we are to believe what the Washington Post has reported this week, U.S. President Barack Obama is doing "little new" when it comes to his immigration policy, and is actually expanding one Bush administration program to check "the immigration status of virtually every person booked into local jails."
There are a great many things wrong with these statements. For one thing, Obama has only been in office for four months, amid a crippling economic recession and other cataclysmic issues. But even with these circumstances, and behind the hyperbole used by the mainstream media to further link Obama's immigration policy to the Bush administration, the White House is moving quietly to get to the real crux of the immigration debate: a path towards comprehensive reform.
Let's be clear. If we are to get anywhere close towards fixing our broken immigration system we need to pass legislation that would recognize the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants who are already in the United States. For example, the latest legislation debate by Congress dealing with comprehensive reform would have given immigrants "Z-visas" that would have allowed them to stay permanently in the United States with a social security number. Eventually, they could even begin naturalization proceedings to become citizens after paying a certain amount of "back taxes."
Similar proposals to provide a path for immigrants to become "legal" will likely be on the table when the Obama administration meets with bipartisan members of Congress on June 8th to discuss making comprehensive immigration reform a priority this year, an objective that the President announced in April, when he said:
"If the American people don't feel like you can secure the borders, then it's hard to strike a deal that would get people out of the shadows and on a pathway to citizenship who are already here," Obama said. "The attitude of the average American is going to be, well, you're just going to have hundreds of thousands of more coming in each year."
In order to accomplish this task, it appears that the White House is using a distinct strategy to undercut pervasive Republican talking points accusing them of somehow being "weak" on border security and the minuscule number of undocumented immigrants who commit serious violent crimes or drug trafficking. By supporting maneuvers to fortify the U.S.-Mexican border with more security forces and other initiatives to pump up Department of Homeland Security resources, the Obama administration is deflating the arguments of those who oppose reform by showing the media and the public just how tough they're being by "making criminal aliens a priority."
And Wednesday, there was the continuation of such a narrative, with New York Sen. Chuck Schumer saying that because we have now begun to "secure" our borders, we can now "pass strong, fair, practical and effective immigration reform this year."
The Obama administration is picking its battles tactfully. Homeland security secretary Janet Napolitano announced that workplace raids conducted by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement would be halted, while John T. Morton was confirmed as the head of the same agency last week.
Yes, it was reported this week that the White House is asking for $200 million to grow a massive biometric database program know as "Secure Communities," which will be used to preform more detailed background checks on every person booked into a local jail. But that doesn't mean, as the Washington Post implies, that it will be a dragnet to capture and deport every undocumented person who happens to land in jail.
First off, there's no way to create a database for people who the government doesn't know about. Even when states pass laws requiring police to contact federal immigration authorities if they suspect someone they've apprehended is undocumented, most of the time detainees are released because the feds don't have the resources to go to local jails and arrest every single person who doesn't have papers.
Secondly, under "Secure Communities," arrestee information is only checked with the Federal Bureau of Investigation's criminal databases and the Department of Homeland Security's biometric records taken from visa applications and other federal government forms. So unless someone was wanted by the FBI for criminal acts or had given their finger prints to the federal government once before, they wouldn't even be flagged by the background check. Immigration officials say that the databases do not include biometric data from local or state detention facilities, as some reports have claimed.
This is not to say that the "get tough" immigration programs supported by the Obama administration should go without criticisms. With regards to "Secure Communities," federal immigration authorities still have to come up standards for how the database is to be implemented and used by local police. Then there's the 287(g) program, which deputizes local and state police authorities to be immigration officers and detain individuals without documentation, spurning racial discrimination and civil rights violations. The White House wants to keep funding levels for that program at the same $5.4 level it's been at for the last few years. That is also a concern.
But if programs like that, which are relatively small potatoes in the governmental sense, are what it takes to gets past ridiculous talking points parroted by the mainstream media and the right wing on a daily basis to block progress on this issue, then we're one step closer to obtaining the necessary votes for true comprehensive immigration reform in the near future. Ultimately, recognizing the millions of immigrants who already work here would not only help to end the injustice, but eventually it would also make the "get tough" programs a moot point anyway.
(Cross-posed at Gabacha.com.)