by José de la Isla
HOUSTON, Texas — Emerging from a June 25 White House meeting on immigration and 19 other congressional leaders and President Obama, Congressman Silvestre Reyes said he believed the U.S. House had the votes to pass comprehensive reform legislation.
Yet, just hours before the policy conversation, Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel told reporters that while passage was “not impossible,… you wouldn’t need to have the meeting” if the Presidfent had the votes.
This is not the first time Obama’s man has been impolitic about the thorny immigration issue. This time around, however, Emanuel, who formerly represented in a Chicago district in Congress that was 25 percent Hispanic in population, pitted this important issue with another. “It’s also better that we continue to focus on improving the economy,” he said, as if to dismiss the importance of immigration as a policy matter.
This sic-‘em approach taunts other pit-bull issues in the waiting — health care, deficits, education, energy or the environment — with immigration. It’s characteristic tactic to urge delaying a showdown. “I think the more important thing is to get it started this year,” said Emanuel, as if getting it completed wasn’t more important.
But the fact is all this was started and went unfinished in 2007. Emanuel, in fact, is remembered for saying that immigration was the “third rail” of Democratic politics and warned Democrats to stay away from challenging Republicans on it (along with avoiding criticism of the war in Iraq). Most of those who bought in didn’t do as well in the mid-term election as those who ignored him. He seems to have gained some succor from Rep. Luis Gutiérrez (D-Ill.), a strong immigration reform advocate, who told The Wall Street Journal, “Hell, if we had the votes, we wouldn’t be calling you.”
On the other hand, Jim Manley, an aide to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), took issue about the votes. He noted that the Senate passed a bipartisan reform bill in 2006 and could do so again, saying, “The White House should leave the vote counting to us.”
At the meeting with Obama, Rep. Nydia Velázquez (D-N.Y.), chair of the Small Business Committee and the Hispanic Caucus, showed President Obama a list of 210 House members out of a total of 435 ready to vote for comprehensive reform. “I don’t know where Rahm Emanuel is getting that information,” she said.
Reyes and Velázquez were among the 20 Congress members attending the White House bipartisan meeting.
Obama told the legislators that the American people wanted tightened borders, cracking down on employers using illegal workers who drive down wages, and an effective way to recognize and legalize undocumented workers.
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano will head a group of House and Senate leaders to start working through these issues.
Obama announced the FBI had cleared much of the backlog of background checks holding up the legal immigration process.
Homeland Security has been cracking down on unscrupulous employers exploiting the immigration situation.
At the meeting, Obama referred to “the overheated rhetoric and the occasional demagoguery on all sides of the issues.”
Yet, unless he and his man Emanuel are doing a good-cop-bad-cop act, there’s something unfunny about the mixed messages they are giving.
Emanuel’s White House message is different from the President’s. One has to wonder whether Emanuel has opened a new third rail on the immigration issue, one feeding demagoguery to the middle, making reform seem more unfeasible than it is, a diversion from other big-ticket matters.
When you are ahead on a 440-yard dash, as on immigration reform, it’s not smart to add another hundred yards. Hispanic Link.
[José de la Isla’s latest book, Day Night Life Death Hope, is distributed by The Ford Foundation. He writes a weekly commentary for Hispanic Link News Service and is author of The Rise of Hispanic Political Power (2003). E-mail him at joseisla3@yahoo.com]. © 2009
