Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Obama Pushes off Immigration Reform, Napolitano Continues Bush Enforcement First Policies

With President Obama breaking his campaign promise to address comprehensive immigration reform in his first year office Janet Napolitano is left with no other option but to continue the Bush administration policies of enforcement first. The New York Times has reported that Napolitano intends to take a "tough stance on enforcing current [broken] immigration laws". What she failed to mention is that the enforcement that she intends to oversee involves targeting United States citizens employers who ironically are not in violation of the United States immigration law that she is enforcing.

Napolitano was transparently attempted to separate herself from the previous administration's immigration stance stating that the Obama administration's approach is "more strategic, more cooperative, more multilateral and, in the long run, more effective.”

The reality is that Obama's immigration policy is to target United States employers, which is no immigration policy at all. Moreover, what sense does it make to be vigorously enforcing, or not enforcing as the case may be, laws that in the President's own words are "broken". How is it even possible to effectively enforce laws that by your own admission don't work.

As an immigration practitioner I can not begin to tell you how disappointing President Obama is on the issue of immigration reform. Obama has pulled the classic bait and switch that is inherent to Washington 's politics as usual, which is even more disappointing coming from a man who promised change we can believe in. I'm not believing it Mr. President, and neither are the tens of thousands of Hispanics who voted you into office.

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