Certainly the President will pursue immigration reform during the election campaign. Did we expect him to do something else to get as many votes as possible?
It’s almost a rhetorical question to ask if Obama will discuss immigration reform while on the campaign trail. What else would he do to attempt to garner more votes? The economy is bad, the DREAM Act tanked, the health system is a mess and immigration reform is – well, it isn’t in great shape either, and honestly never has been when people started trying to fix what likely wasn’t broken in the first place.
The problem here is that people have heard Obama say he is going to do immigration reform for so long, they are sick and tired of hearing about it, and furthermore, don’t believe him. It’s a little like Peter and the Wolf. He has been heard to say he would promise he would try to accomplish immigration reform in the first year of his second term – if he gets re-elected, and, some would say, if pigs fly.
Just take a look at the record, and you can see that he started wooing the Latino voters in 2009, saying he would push for immigration reform. Both houses were filled to the rafters with Democrats then, so no excuse for not getting the show on the road. Then in 2010, Janet Napolitano said it would a priority. Anyone want to try and find out what happened between 2009 and 2010? Nothing, but words. Now two and a half years later do we have immigration reform on any level that may be considered to be meaningful? The answer is, “No.”
So what’s going on? If you pay close enough attention, you will hear stories like this one from all over the country; stories of immigration raids where it hurts the local economy in a major way. One story is about a dairy farm in Michigan that had three immigration raids, with the last raid featuring a tank and helicopter. What is going on? The farmer ended up on probation and was fined $2.7 million for hiring illegal aliens. He had to find white, American workers, a fruitless task as they did not want to do the work.
The simple truth is that very, very few American born workers are willing to do the hard work of dairy farming or even pick produce seasonally each year. The bottom line is that if the farmer in this story did not have illegal aliens doing the work, he’d be stuck between a rock and a hard place. Milk and dairy products are a billion dollar industry, and here is the federal government raiding the workers who keep the farm in business and the economy flowing. What is wrong with that picture?
Is someone going to do something about this huge gap between what the government says and then turns around and does? Let’s see what happens next.
Sally Odell – Rifkin & Fox-Isicoff, PA is an immigration lawyer in Miami with immigration law offices in Orlando and Miami Florida. To learn more, visit http://www.rifkinandfoxisicoff.com.
