New York Times
By Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Ashley Parker
September 7, 2014
WASHINGTON
— By the time Senator Angus King called the White House to warn
President Obama against taking executive action to overhaul the
immigration system, officials
were well aware they had a problem on their hands.
What
had once looked like a clear political imperative for both parties —
action to grant legal status to millions of undocumented immigrants —
had morphed instead into
what appeared to be a risky move that could cost Democrats their
majority in the November midterm congressional elections.
But
Mr. King, a Maine independent who is a member of the Democratic caucus,
warned Denis McDonough, the White House chief of staff, of yet another
nightmare scenario:
Unilateral action by the president might undermine the prospects for
bipartisan agreement on a broad immigration overhaul for years to come.
It
was that concern, shared by members of Mr. Obama’s inner circle as well
as other members of Congress, White House officials said, that
ultimately prompted the president
to break the promise he made on June 30 in the Rose Garden to act on
his own before summer’s end to fix the immigration system.
After
a summer in which a surge of Central American migrants into the United
States at the southern border had reawakened public worries and anger
about immigration, and
with Republicans running attack ads against Democratic senators on the
topic, the issue had simply become too toxic and combustible for Mr.
Obama.
“If
we were to act in this political hothouse environment, that would
undermine the long-term ability to finish the job on immigration
reform,” one official said, speaking
on condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions.
It
was a stark turnabout that demonstrates a stunningly quick shift in the
politics of overhauling United States immigration laws, which looked
like an imperative after
the 2012 presidential election, when Republicans received a paltry 27
percent of the Hispanic vote and said publicly they needed to
re-evaluate their hard-line immigration stance.
“All
the progress we’ve made over two years was destroyed in six weeks,”
said Tamar Jacoby, who has advised Republicans on immigration strategy
and heads ImmigrationWorks
USA, an employer group that backs an overhaul. “It’s always harder to
do something than not to do it, and especially on an emotional topic
like this, it’s very fragile.”
Now the president says he must go back and repair the broken consensus that had emerged around the immigration issue.
“The
truth of the matter is that the politics did shift midsummer because of
that problem,” Mr. Obama said in an interview aired Sunday on NBC’s
“Meet the Press,” referring
to the surge of Central Americans, including thousands of unaccompanied
children, across the border.
“I
want to spend some time, even as we’re getting all our ducks in a row
for the executive action, I also want to make sure that the public
understands why we’re doing
this, why it’s the right thing for the American people, why it’s the
right thing for the American economy,” he said.
In
the meantime, Mr. Obama has earned bitter outrage from Latinos, who
make up one of his party’s strongest political constituencies. Already
angered by the president’s
move during his first term to accelerate deportations, activists have
called the delay of promised executive action a betrayal.
“Given
the string of broken promises from this president to the Latino
community on immigration, there is a real question as to whether he will
follow through,” said Frank
Sharry, the executive director of America’s Voice, an immigrant-rights
group. “There are important segments of the Latino community,
particularly Latino immigrant voters, where there’s a sense that the
Republicans hate us, and the Democrats like us, but they
don’t fully respect us yet — and I think that will have to be overcome
going forward.”
Angela
M. Kelley, vice president for immigration policy at the Center for
American Progress, said Latinos — like an aggrieved girlfriend who has
waited in vain for a marriage
proposal — are going to expect Mr. Obama to take even more expansive
executive action later this year, given the delay.
“A
guy says he’s going to propose, and then he decides he’s going to delay
and not propose for a couple of months, so you go, ‘O.K., I want a
two-carat ring now instead
of a one-carat ring,’ ” Ms. Kelley said. “The cost is high for what
he’s done in terms of a delay. He’s asking the community to pay now, and
to some extent, he’ll have to pay later.”
It
took about one month for Mr. Obama’s promise to begin crumbling. By
early August, the start of Congress’ summer break, Representative Tom
Cotton, Republican of Arkansas,
had released an attack ad charging that Senator Mark Pryor, Democrat of
Arkansas — one of his party’s most at-risk candidates in November’s
midterm congressional elections — was ignoring an immigration crisis on
the United States-Mexico border, where thousands
of Central American migrants were streaming into the United States.
Other
vulnerable Democrats were facing similar ads, and one by one, they
began calling top White House officials, including Mr. McDonough, to
vent their concerns that
if Mr. Obama took executive action, it could cost them their seats —
and their party control of the Senate.
The
White House requested polling data in key Senate races and received
numbers from Arkansas and Iowa, where voters overwhelmingly sided with
those opposed to the possibility
of Mr. Obama taking executive action on immigration.
Public
polls showed that backing for a broad immigration overhaul, including a
path to citizenship for undocumented people, was still strong, but
slipping among Republicans.
Of more concern to vulnerable Senate Democrats was broad public
disapproval of Mr. Obama’s handling of the migrant surge. According to a
July survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, 56
percent thought the president was mishandling the
issue, twice as many as those who approved — the lowest rating of any
issue since he became president.
The
decline stemmed at least in part from a perception, elevated by the
growing number of migrants, that the southern border was porous and
immigration law was not being
enforced there.
“After
the election, there was a strong coalition for immigration reform, but
even with a strong coalition, it needed to be a balanced bill — you can
only get citizenship
if you get tougher enforcement,” said Neera Tanden, a former Obama aide
who heads the Center for American Progress. “What really happened that
moved this whole thing, tragically, was the border crisis, which created
this argument of there being a magnet for
undocumented immigrants.”
White
House officials said it became clear in recent weeks that the crisis
had created a mistaken impression that the border was not secure, thus
sapping support for further
action to grant legal status to undocumented immigrants. Republicans
seized on that perception, arguing that Mr. Obama’s 2012 directive shielding certain undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children from deportation had prompted the surge.
In the end, though, it was a cautionary tale from 20 years ago that swayed Mr. Obama and his team.
An
important “object lesson,” said one official, was the 1994 crime bill,
which then-President Bill Clinton pushed through before that year’s
midterm elections, in which
his party lost control of the House for the first time in four decades.
Many Democrats, including some who work at the White House, believe the
passage of that legislation — which included the federal assault
weapons ban — doomed a dozen of their candidates
and has made the gun issue a toxic one for members of their party to
this day.
“It
affects the psychology of the folks on the Hill and emboldens the
opponents,” the official said. “What would be the worst of all worlds
would be to act and lose the
election, and have people say it was because of immigration reform.”
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