Some Pro-Immigration Groups Still Giving President Obama a Free Pass

President Obama has had an awful track record on
immigration policy. During his administration, there have been, for
example,
a record amount of deportations. Most recently, the
administration has been criticized for
dumping more than a thousand illegal immigrant children in
Arizona. As immigration advocates decry the inhumane situation, the
president insists he has little flexibility on immigration policy
and must wait for Congress, even as on a slew of other issues—from
No Child Left Behind to his own Obamacare—he’s used questionable
executive power to unilaterally change the law. Here no such
legally questionable action would be needed. Immigration policy is
within the purview of the executive branch, and it could choose to
enforce the law in a different, and still completely legal,
way.

Nevertheless, because most of them are liberal, some
pro-immigration groups are, six years into Obama’s awful
immigration policy, still offering a free pass the man who as
senator helped torpedo President
Bush’s immigration efforts nearly a decade ago.

Here is a statement, for example, released by the executive
director of the group Presente.org, Arturo Carmona:

Eric Cantor’s defeat at the hand’s [sic] of a tea party
extremist prove what many of us have been saying for quite some
time: immigration reform is dead in this Republican Congress. In
the face of growing xenophobic and racially charged extremism, the
only thing that can stop the tearing apart of families and inhumane
treatment of immigrants is executive action. We urge President
Obama to face the facts, stand up to the xenophobic and hateful
forces in America, and take action to stop deportations
immediately. Anything less is unacceptable to Latinos across the
country.

Got it? Some Republicans are xenophobic, therefore they are to
blame for the president’s “inhumane” actions. Rather than applying
pressure on the Obama Administration by lobbing some well-deserved
criticism at it, Presente.org chooses to demonize someone who
has not yet even entered Congress. Not the man in charge of
the government that’s “tearing apart” families, but one man about
to join a body of 535, whose party is in control of just one of the
chambers.

David Brat may be awful on liberal immigration policy, but he’s
hardly a one-issue candidate who ran a one-issue campaign.
Anti-immigration advocates may point to Cantor’s loss as evidence
that immigration reform is an electoral loser, but that
pro-immigration advocates buy into this narrative so fully only
makes sense if they’re not interested in holding President Obama
accountable for six years of awful immigration policy.

Though it would be too much to expect of a liberal special
interest group, anyone truly concerned about xenophobia would have
seen it in the actions and rhetoric of President Obama—and not just
his immigration policy. Obama spent most of the 2012 campaign
railing against outsourcing, a xenophobic policy position that
considers foreign workers and their drive to work dangerous simply
because they’re not Americans.