Reply #16: How Immigration Reform Got Caught in the Deportation Dragnet

[EFerrari]

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When President Obama entered the White House, he promised to push a “comprehensive immigration reform” bill in his first year. Doing so, he apparently calculated, would require a compromise. To garner bi-partisan support for opening new paths to citizenship for the 11 million unauthorized immigrants in the U.S., the president, congressional Democrats and key Beltway advocates came together around a troubling political strategy: They would endorse a hawkish buildup of deportation and border security in hopes of creating space for broader reforms. In a major speech on immigration this past July, the president outlined his approach, vowing to “improve our enforcement policy without having to wait for a new law.”

Almost two years into the Obama presidency, however, no bi-partisan support for a broader bill has emerged from this hawkishness—in fact, the few Republicans who once backed immigration reform have fled. Worse, the Democrats’ would-be political trading game conceals a larger, more troubling fact: Even if the strategy eventually works, the “comprehensive” schema Obama supports will undermine itself with its massive and indiscriminate deportation dragnet. This week, Sen. Robert Menendez introduced the latest version of a “comprehensive” bill. Nothing in it would have prevented Hossain, or hundreds of thousands like him, from being needlessly deported.

The enforcement programs that Obama supports purport to target immigrants convicted of serious crimes and to stop guns and drugs from crossing the border; the reality is that they are driving a system that’s come unhinged. In the three years since Hossain was expelled from Texas, a million other people were removed from the U.S. An enforcement structure that looks anything like the one both parties have built can do little better than indiscriminately deport any non-citizen caught in its expanding net, no matter their ties to the U.S. or their immigration status.

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http://colorlines.com/archives/2010/10/how_immigration_reform_got_caught_in_the_deportation_dragnet.html