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Newsday and New York Times Editorials on Immigration

Posted July 5, 2010 by Patrick Young, Esq.
Categories: Federal Immigration Policy

The New York Times had a major editorial on Friday in response to President Obama’s speech on immigration this past Thursday. Here are some excerpts:

President Obama’s first major speech on immigration had the eloquence and clarity we have come to expect when he engages a wrenching national debate. In declaring the welcome of strangers a core American value, in placing immigrants at the center of the nation’s success and future, Mr. Obama’s exhortation was worthy of the late Senator Edward Kennedy, whose memory he respectfully summoned on Thursday. “Anybody can help us write the next great chapter in our history,” he said, regardless of blood or birth.

Mr. Obama was just as clear on why the immigration system is failing and how to fix it. Our nation “has the right and obligation to control its borders,” he said, but sealing off that vast space with troops and fences alone is a fantasy. And no amount of security at the border does anything about the undocumented 11 million who have already crossed it. Mr. Obama called for enabling these potential Americans to “get right with the law,” and for fixing the system of legal immigration, which is too inefficient for the country’s own good.

The president took particular notice of the extremism of Arizona, where a law, to take effect on July 29, compels its police to check the papers of anyone they suspect to be an illegal immigrant. It makes a crime out of being a foreigner in the state without papers — in most cases a civil violation of federal law. This is an invitation to racial profiling, an impediment to effective policing and a usurpation of federal authority, Mr. Obama said, evoking a future where “different rules for immigration will apply in different parts of the country.”

In promising to end the chaos into which immigration has collapsed (“this administration will not just kick the can down the road,” he said), Mr. Obama has laid out an ambitious goal. He urged Congress to help him pass a bill, particularly Republicans who supported bipartisan reform under President George W. Bush but who now have a united front against reform.

But Mr. Obama’s call to action applies not just to Congress but to himself as well. He neatly defined the obstacles to a comprehensive bill: the Republican senators who have abandoned bipartisanship and taken the extreme position of opposing any immigration reform that is common-sense and practical.

But Mr. Obama has presidential powers, and he should use them. He has given the border more troops. Now he should seek to lift the burden of fear from peaceable immigrant communities. His administration is widely expected to bring a lawsuit soon challenging the deeply unjust Arizona law. Mr. Obama, a constitutional scholar, could have written the complaint himself, but his address did not mention a lawsuit.

Mr. Obama should not suspend all enforcement against illegal immigrants. But he can reset the administration’s enforcement priorities to focus on dangerous and convicted criminals and rein in the operations that his Department of Homeland Security has promoted that enable local law enforcement to engage in the racial profiling he rightly denounces.

Mr. Obama appealed to middle of the debate, to Americans who crave lawfulness but reject the cruelty symbolized by Arizona’s new law. We hope his words spur the beginning of Congressional action. But in the hot summer to come, when police officers in Arizona start pulling people over, and tension grows and other states follow its bad example, let’s hope his administration also is ready to show the determination to protect the resented newcomers whose rights and dignity he so powerfully defended on Thursday.

Today’s Newsday urges action in D.C. to head off local attempts to “fix” immigration:

After 12 years of operation, Huntington closed its day labor site last week. It’s a disappointing end to what started out as a progressive local response to our failed national immigration policy. Shutting down recruitment locations or passing anti-loitering laws, however, won’t make these workers disappear from the streets of Huntington or anyplace else.

The site, run by the Family Service League, connected these workers with employers, social services agencies and local churches where, if needed, they could find food and a place to sleep. But its effectiveness was diminished by quality-of-life complaints by local residents and aggressive efforts by some who lived outside the town to intimidate the contractors and homeowners offering jobs.

The same magical thinking, that these workers can be made to disappear, persists in the Town of Oyster Bay. A federal judge has issued an injunction against the town’s anti-loitering ordinance, saying that it could interfere with the workers’ constitutional rights to commercial speech. Supervisor John Venditto, however, is appealing on the grounds that the town has the right to regulate public safety.

Nationally, more than 1,500 local laws have been passed in the past decade to deal with consequences of illegal immigration. Courts here and in California, where a similar ordinance was upheld, will continue to sort out the rights of day laborers. A solution, however, will come only when Washington enacts immigration reform.

Finally, Dan Janison ‘s column today is pessimistic about the chances for reform passing before the elections. There is a brief quote from me in the article.

Tags : , day laborers, huntington station, immigration reform, obama, oyster bay, patrick young

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