Obama faces pressure on immigration reform
Amid urgent priorities, Latinos push overhaul
By Maria Sacchetti, Globe Staff
November 17, 2008
Before a huge crowd in San Diego last summer, Barack Obama vowed to make fixing illegal immigration a top priority as president, and Latinos nationwide responded with massive support for him on Election Day. Now, they are pressing him to keep his promise.
"We voted in large numbers for Obama," said Juan Salgado, board president of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, a nonprofit based in Chicago, Obama's training ground for immigration issues when he was a senator. "If we're sitting here two and a half years from now and absolutely nothing's been done, people are going to start asking questions."
From Cape Cod to California, activists on both sides of the volatile issue are girding for battle. Supporters of the nation's 12 million illegal immigrants - most of whom are Latino - want Obama to press for a path to legal residency for them. Opponents say reform is impossible at a time when unemployment is soaring, and instead want tougher border security and less immigration to preserve Americans' jobs.
Many analysts are skeptical that Oba ma can navigate the political minefield of illegal immigration in his first year, while confronting the plunging economy and two wars. Still, groups on both sides are commissioning polls to gauge Americans' appetite for the immigration issue and assembling teams to file legislation for their cause next year.
"We're going to be fighting like crazy to keep it off the floor" in Congress, said Roy Beck, president of NumbersUSA, the nation's largest group favoring immigration controls. "Now is not the time to be talking about this."
To start, many expect Obama to halt big immigration raids, such as last year's operation in New Bedford, and, perhaps later, push to allow illegal-immigrant students to pay resident tuition at colleges and universities.
Obama also must decide whether to ask Congress in March to reauthorize the e-verify program, a controversial worker database that is used to check employees' legal status. And he will possibly confront the deportation of his 56-year-old aunt, Zeituni Onyango, who is in the country illegally and who recently fled media attention in Boston for Cleveland.
Immigration advocates say Obama owes a debt to Latino voters, who voted 67 percent in his favor overall, according to a poll for America's Voice, a national communications campaign that favors legal residency for illegal immigrants. Latino support helped him capture such formerly Republican states as Florida, New Mexico, Colorado, and Nevada. Immigrant voters gave Obama the highest support - 78 percent of Latino immigrants voted for him, compared with 61 percent of US born-Latinos.
http://www.boston.com/news/politics/2008/articles/2008/11/17/obama_faces_pressure_on_immigration_reform/
