In a stunning election-year gambit, President Barack Obama put Republican rival Mitt Romney on the defensive Friday by relaxing the nation's deportation policy toward hundreds of thousands of young illegal immigrants.
The decision, announced initially by Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, appeared calculated to motivate Latino voters in Arizona and crucial presidential battleground states such as Colorado, Florida and Nevada to vote for Obama, a president whose administration has frustrated many Hispanics with its aggressive deportation stance and failure to deliver comprehensive immigration reform.
The policy shift is being carried out by executive order and won't require legislative action.
The announcement was immediately decried by Capitol Hill Republicans who charged Obama was circumventing Congress, which despite years of negotiations has been unable to come to terms on similar legislation, known as the Dream Act. Some critics called the new policy "back-door amnesty."
The executive order comes as the U.S. Supreme Court is poised to rule on the constitutionality of Senate Bill 1070, Arizona's controversial immigration-enforcement law. That much-anticipated decision could come as soon as Monday.
It also comes in advance of Obama's expected appearances before two major Hispanic organizations. Obama is scheduled to speak next Friday at the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, or NALEO, conference in Florida. In July, he is expected to address the National Council of La Raza in Las Vegas.
In more practical political terms, the administration's announcement overshadowed the Romney campaign's launch Friday of a five-day bus tour through six swing states.
The new policy would allow certain illegal immigrants under age 30 to apply to stay in the United States without fear of deportation for two years. They also could apply for a work permit. But they still would not have any legal status in the country.
Those wishing to take advantage of the new policy must prove they were younger than 16 when they arrived in the United States and have lived in the the country for at least five years. They also must either still be attending school, have graduated from high school, have obtained a GED diploma or have been honorably discharged from the military or Coast Guard. Undocumented immigrants with felony or significant misdemeanor criminal records, or who otherwise pose a threat to national security or public safety, are not eligible.
"Now, let's be clear: This is not amnesty, this is not immunity," Obama said during remarks in the White House Rose Garden on Friday. "This is not a path to citizenship. It's not a permanent fix. This is a temporary stopgap measure that lets us focus our resources wisely while giving a degree of relief and hope to talented, driven, patriotic young people. It is the right thing to do."
Romney, the GOP's presidential nominee-in-waiting, reacted cautiously to the policy shift during a campaign stop.
"I believe the status of young people who come here through no fault of their own is an important matter to be considered and should be solved on a long-term basis so they know what their future would be in this country," Romney said. "I think the actions that the president took today makes it more difficult to reach that long-term solution."
Romney's measured tone was in contrast to the tough stances he took toward immigration during a grueling GOP primary in which he struggled to win over conservative anti-illegal-immigration activists. Late last year, Romney said he would as president veto the Dream Act.
Polls have Romney taking a beating among Latinos -- a crucial demographic for both parties -- and even prior to Friday, Romney had signaled that he will try to soften his image among Hispanic voters, who the NALEO Education Fund estimates will number more than 12million in this year's presidential election. The Latino vote could decide close contests in several battleground states.
Obama dominated the Latino vote in 2008 and was able to carry Colorado, Florida, New Mexico and Nevada.
Other Republicans, including the 2008 GOP nominee for president, had harsher words for Obama.
"Today's announcement by President Obama is a politically motivated power grab that does nothing to further the debate but instead adds additional confusion and uncertainty to our broken immigration system," Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., a former Dream Act supporter, said Friday in a written statement. "Further, I find it interesting that after promising to enact comprehensive reform in the first year of his presidency, the president chose to make this announcement in the middle of his heated re-election campaign. Rather than unilaterally deciding for the American people what they want and how they believe this problem should be addressed, I encourage the president and his administration to finally reach out to Congress and propose legislation on this important issue."
Speaking Friday on CNN, Napolitano disputed suggestions that the policy change was driven by election-year politics.
"First of all, this was a decision out of my office as the secretary of Homeland Security," said Napolitano, a former Arizona governor. "One of the things we've been doing over the last year is re-examining all 340,000 pending immigration cases and trying to restack them in line with our priorities and trying to administratively close cases that are low priority. As we've done that, we've seen this whole category of young people, and we need to go a step further, and this is the next logical step, and that is to defer action."
The overall political impact of the decision on Obama's re-election prospects remains unclear. The new policy won't drive away any voter who isn't already lost to the Obama campaign, one political expert said, and it could put Romney in an uncomfortable position.
"It will add to the message that the Obama campaign already has been crafting to Latinos, that Obama is the stronger candidate from their perspective," said Louis DeSipio, a political scientist at the University of California-Irvine.
"It's trickier for Governor Romney in that he has to decide whether he wants to be the Romney of the primaries, which was very strident on immigration issues, or whether he wants to return to his more traditional position, which is to not really talk about it very much."
Bruce Merrill, a veteran political scientist and pollster, doubted the move will turn out to be a game-changer for Obama, although he noted that his surveys have indicated strong support for the Dream Act in Arizona.
Politically, it will probably only reinforce Obama's already significant appeal to Hispanic voters, he said.
"It really may be that he's doing things that he thinks are the right things to do -- you kind of hope that's the case," said Merrill, now a senior research fellow at Arizona State University's Morrison Institute for Public Policy. "I just don't think it's going to bring a lot of new Hispanic votes, frankly, to him."
Merrill compared Friday's immigration announcement to Obama's May9 declaration of support for same-sex marriage, which Merrill said was much talked about at the time but probably won't affect the presidential election much one way or the other.
By Dan Nowicki, The Republic|azcentral.com Jun 16, 2012
Dramatic change in migrant policy - USATODAY.com
