By BEHROUZ SABA, New
America Media
A timid President Obama faced a group
of palpably hostile White House correspondents as he announced “deferred
action” for young, undocumented immigrants who have waited for years to be
offered a path to citizenship through the DREAM Act. In compliance with his
order, the Department of Homeland Security will merely halt deportations for
the next two years of non-criminal, undocumented immigrants between the ages of
16 and 30 who were brought to the country as children. Beneficiaries will also
receive H-1 visas to live and work legally on a temporary basis.
This election-year ploy to win Latino
votes is a patently miserable substitute for the generous, comprehensive
measures required to address the plight of the nearly 12 million undocumented.
Putting 800,000 young, promising women and men in legal limbo adds just another
layer of dysfunction to a fundamentally inoperative immigration system.
President Obama, trying to lay the
groundwork for comprehensive immigration reform early in his presidency,
appeared tough, appeasing the opposition as he commenced to deport the
undocumented with criminal backgrounds by hundreds of thousands. Yet during his
first term he failed to provide the moral leadership and pragmatic imperative
for comprehensive reform, allowing his vociferous opponents to hijack the issue
in the name of “national security” and “jobs for Americans.”
The president, in an announcement
barely lasting 10 minutes, called America “a nation of laws and a nation of
immigrants.” Yet he and most other advocates of including the undocumented into
the American mainstream have lacked the political courage as well as persuasive
powers to spell out the vital importance of immigrants to America.
While 4 million newborns are added to
the American population annually, the country accepts a million immigrants as
new residents. Hundreds of thousands more arrive on student, work and tourist
visas, never to be repatriated. The overwhelming majority of immigrants who
decide to live in this country permanently do so to work and make a better life
for themselves and their families.
Those without higher education fill
grueling, low-paying service, agricultural and manufacturing jobs by hundreds
of thousands, generating wealth for the native-born and providing the country
with abundant food. Scores of foreign students and H-1 visa holders who decide
to stay, at the expense of brain drain to their own countries, join America’s
hubs of research and productivity from Silicon Valley to the research and
academic centers on the Eastern seaboard. Yet many others become independent
entrepreneurs and innovators, heirs to a legacy of immigration that has kept
America in its position of global leadership.
America is not a nation of immigrants
because the first European colonizers arrived here in 1492. In the 21st
century, America continues to thrive principally due to the influx of
immigrants.
The Obama administration has done a
miserable job of communicating these facts to the majority of Americans. Their
failure has left the field wide open for political opportunists and predators
who perpetuate the can’t of immigrants stealing jobs from the native born.
President Obama has a realistic shot at
a second term. But upon reelection, he must make immigration the centerpiece of
his administration in a bold departure from his most recent and timorous
performance.
America is indeed a nation of
immigrants. Its leader should proudly uphold this banner instead of cowering,
explaining, apologizing and offering “deferred action.”
With the DREAM Act once again
compromised, the words of Langston Hughes ring as true as ever: “A dream
deferred is a dream denied.”
