Jorge Mújica Murias
México del Norte
Immigrants without papers arrested and in process of deportation but without a criminal record would be able to stay in the country. Those two lines are the whole meaning of a change in direction of Barack Obama’s immigration policy announced this week, ordering the review, on case-by-case bases, of some 300 thousand people without immigration documents currently in the hands of government.
“From the perspective of public safety and law enforcement”, wrote homeland Security’s Janet Napolitano in a letter sent to a Group of Senator who support immigration reform, “homeland Security’s resources should focus on our highest priorities… or we will fail in our mission, will crowd immigration courts and waste resources we should be using on those individuals who are a real problem for public safety”.
Awkward wording, simply meaning ‘we should not be deporting honest workers even if they had a drink too many, and we should really go after drug dealers and rapists’.
Shame there is another document made public not so long ago announcing that Homeland Security’s goal for the year was to deport half-a-million immigrants. We would sure have liked the new letter to clearly say ‘that goal is no longer valid’. Otherwise, the contradiction will be too gross. If the goal is still valid, then detentions will keep happening at their current maddening pace, and then they will take the time to check each case to see if it was worth to detain so many people or not.
In other words, if that is the case, we are tempted to recommend all undocumented immigrants to do their best to get arrested (unless they have ‘real’ criminal records, because the new policy means they could end up getting a work permit, Social Security number and possibly their Green Cards.
To put it simp l e , Obama finally gave us what we have demanded for so long, a sort of amnesty, even if the path takes us first to jail.
But, as all immigration activists told me when I asked them their opinion when the announcement was made, we are like Saint Thomas, who wisely said: “Seeing is Believing”. I strongly agree. Only one organization publicly declared that “Obama Listened To Us”, when the announcement came, but what I think Obama heard was the very wide and transparent threat that “Without Legalization There Will Not Be Reelection”.
Because Obama is a politician in the middle of a campaign, and politicians in campaign measure the effects their actions will have in the next election, and Barack knows that no immigrant will give him a vote in 2012 if he keeps deporting housekeepers, nannies, aunts, uncles and cousins and workers who have been here for 20 years working from sunup to sundown, paying taxes they can claim back.
The bad part of anycampaigning politician is that they promise everything just for the sake of getting votes, and then they don’t deliver. I guess no one has forgotten Obama promised “immigration reform in my first 90 days in office”, and he’s been there for about a thousand days and we did not see it. What we saw were one million people deported.
If the guy in the White House is really serious, then he would have to complement his “new immigration policy” with some actions: he has to get rid of E-Verify; he has to cancel Secure Communities; he should eliminate the 287-G Polimigra agreements, and he should stop repeating “the law is the law and we have to enforce it”.
If the takes some action, then we may do as Saint Thomas and start believing… if not, if there is nothing but a letter from Janet Napolitano to some Senators and see the Polimigra still acting, Secure Communities and other anti-immigrant programs still in place, then we will not believe and he will still lose his beautiful house in Washington in November of next year…
