Obama takes on immigration reform

The announcement this week that the Obama administration is going to tackle immigration reform was met with skepticism and scorn by quite a few. Some think that the Obama team will be too lenient on illegal immigrants, while others believe Obama is trying to do too much in his first year in office. Both are wrong.

(Note: I'm not going to provide a link to Fox News, which is trying desperately with Rush Limbaugh and the Wall Street Journal, to make this and other issues a wedge dividing the country. Fox is calling President Obama the Divider-in-Chief and the WSJ allows space to Karl Rove to make the same claim. Talk about hypocrisy; the Bush administration divided this country like no other, and Rove was the key architect.)

Immigration is a difficult issue with many different sides to it. But one thing is clear: we can't just round up 12 million+ people and send 'em back like many on the right are advocating. We don't have the manpower or the money to do that. Besides it is cruel on its face. Who do you send back and to where? The father born in Honduras and the mother born in Mexico -- do you split them up? What about their two children born in Alabama? Do they "get" to stay while their parents are shipped back like cattle? Who will take care of them? How much are we willing to spend to round up these families? What kind of Gestapo police force will that take? And isn't the United States of America supposed to be the haven for such immigrants anyway? More than likely, we all have illegal immigrants in our family histories; unless we are Native Americans, we can't be 100 percent certain. Any immigration reform that doesn't allow for a clear path to citizenship and amnesty is doomed to failure.


The entire issue is overtly racist at is base level. When I taught advanced editing at Baylor, one of the semester-long assignments was to create a web publication. Back then -- 1995 -- the white supremacists were some of the most active on the web. For each, their No. 1 issue was immigration "reform" to bring back the "purity" of the United States (as if that ever existed in the first place). Now, more than 10 years later, so many have bought into their exact arguments. It amazes me how the sick viewpoint of these radical white groups is the key philosophy of putting up a fence and rounding up the illegals to send them back. Shame on you, Lou Dobbs!

As to those who "object" because Obama is doing too much -- he has no choice. This country is entangled in an incredible web of a mess. If you think Obama has to pull back and solve one or two problems at a time, you are brazenly idealistic. From the housing crisis to the financial crisis to the joblessness crisis to the health-care crisis to the environmental crisis to the immigration issue to stem-cell research to repairing our reputation globally, it is all interconnected. You can't just isolate one problem at a time and think these issues are not dependent upon the others.


This "too much" criticism also doesn't take into account that the president has a team to tackle each of the problems; it is not like Obama is sitting down at his desk trying to solve each by himself. Obama and his cabinet serve as the upper management to make sure the solutions the team members come up with jibe with what others are doing as they tackle their individual problems. It has been done this way before, leading to our most prosperous times as a nation: FDR didn't attack one problem at a time to get us out of the depression.

Does this mean he'll be totally successful? I can't answer that. But I know it will be utter failure if he doesn't try.