Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Sunday, March 21, 2010
In Shadow of Health Care Vote, Immigrant Advocates Keep Pushing for Change
By JULIA PRESTON
WASHINGTON — Immigrant advocates, frustrated with President Obama’s lack of progress on legislation to overhaul the immigration system, called one month ago for a march in Washington that they said would display the strength of their numbers and would give the president the push he needed to get the debate rolling in Congress.
That was then.
In the space of a few weeks, with the acrimonious health care debate eclipsing other issues in Washington, the results advocates can expect from the scheduled rally of tens of thousands of their supporters on the Mall here on Sunday appear to have diminished. Now the question for advocates, who planned their go-for-broke mobilization as a catalyst to jump-start a bill in Congress, is whether it will at least help to keep a conversation about immigration going in Washington between now and the November elections.
As luck would have it, the immigration rally will not even be the main event here on Sunday, when most of the nation’s attention will be on the crucial health care vote in the House of Representatives.
But advocates say the mobilization has already achieved results. In large part because of their prodding, President Obama held meetings last week with groups engaged in the immigration issue. On Thursday, Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, and Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, unveiled a blueprint for a bill that would offer a path to legal status for an estimated 11 million illegal immigrants, and also included new provisions for expanded workplace and border enforcement.
Mr. Obama immediately embraced the blueprint. But after repeated promises last year that he would move an immigration bill in early 2010, the president scaled back last week, saying only that he would work to “forge a bipartisan consensus” this year. And while advocates are insisting that Mr. Obama must lead the way, he is throwing it back to them, calling on immigration groups to help round up at least one other Republican sponsor for the legislation put forth by Mr. Schumer and Mr. Graham.
On top of the difficulties any bill to overhaul immigration would confront with unemployment near 10 percent, the near-term obstacles became clear on Friday when Mr. Graham pointedly reiterated a warning that an immigration bill would be “the first casualty” if Democrats adopt health care legislation by an expedited process that circumvents Republican votes.
“If the health care bill goes through this weekend, that will, in my view, pretty much kill any chance of immigration reform passing the Senate this year,” Mr. Graham said.
Still, the rally allows advocates a chance to show a coalition that has broadened since popular opposition roundly defeated a Bush administration immigration proposal in 2007. Evangelical Christian churches have joined the effort, led by the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, the largest group of Latino evangelicals, and by the National Association of Evangelicals, which represents 450,000 churches nationwide.
African-American organizations, which in 2007 were skeptical, fearing that immigrants could pose competition to black workers, are more fully on board, and Benjamin T. Jealous, president of the N.A.A.C.P., is a scheduled speaker. While the A.F.L.-C.I.O. did not support the 2007 overhaul proposal, this year organized labor has united. Gay and lesbian groups, which had not been active on the issue, are now involved.
But business groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which strongly backed the 2007 legislation, are less enthusiastic this year and will stay away Sunday. Mr. Schumer and Mr. Graham have said that the rift between business and labor over their proposal will be one of the hardest to bridge. As soon as their blueprint was released, the A.F.L.-C.I.O. blasted provisions for a temporary guest worker program to handle future immigration of blue-collar laborers.
Immigrant groups are also coming to protest deportations and immigration enforcement at workplaces that they say continue to affect immigrant communities. Federal agents executing an arrest warrant at two restaurants in Maryland detained more than 20 immigrants on March 11, the day the immigration groups were meeting with Mr. Obama.
Some advocates met Friday with Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano to criticize the enforcement. In an interview later Friday, Ms. Napolitano said the administration’s strategy would continue unchanged, with the emphasis on capturing and deporting immigrants who have committed crimes.
Organizers of the march said on Saturday that their goal was to persuade Mr. Obama to take up immigration legislation once the smoke has cleared from the health care debate.
“We are trying to send a strong message that when health care is past us, this is the issue that needs to be up at bat,” said Angela Maria Kelley of the Center for American Progress. “We’ve been in the bullpen for a long time, and now we want to show the strength of the team and the power of the issue.”
But even if the rally is a success, its organizers may face hard decisions about how to manage the expectations of their followers in a political season when the prospects in Congress for immigration have dimmed.