President Obama once again has warned Republicans they will be committing political “suicide” if they do not legalize millions of illegal immigrants.
“If they were thinking long-term politically, it is suicide for them not to do this,” Obama said in a town hall Thursday in Santa Monica, Calif.
“Because the demographics of the country are such that you will lose a generation of immigrants which says, ‘That party doesn’t seem to care about me.'”
I leave it to the GOP to determine whether the president truly has its best political interests at heart, but anyone seeking the success of legal Hispanic Americans should look elsewhere for policy prescriptions.
Briefly put, legalizing the 7 million-9 million estimated illegal Hispanic immigrants will do nothing about the schools, the families or the wallets of the 46 million or so Hispanics who are here legally, either as citizens or as green card holders. Reducing this group to the single issue of illegal immigration is lazy and misguided when the media does it, as it constantly does. But it’s downright cynical for the president to do so..
It’s not new for Obama to politicize this issue, of course. He was just being true to form when he suggested Hispanics could perceive the GOP doesn’t care about them.
But the president should tread carefully on the question of caring. He has time and again postponed acting on his promises of amnesty, as recently as just this past summer. He had promised illegal immigration activists to ram it through using executive action by September. But then he apparently realized that this approach would be so divisive that he had to postpone it, perhaps until after the November elections.
But more importantly, genuine caring would involve a different set of policies than those Obama advocates. Caring would be doing something about the persistent education achievement gap between Hispanics and non-Hispanic whites.
According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress produced by the Department of Education (and known as the nation’s report card), Hispanic kids trail whites by an average of 20 points in fourth grade and 26 points in eighth grade in mathematics. In reading, the gap is 25 points in fourth grade and 24 in eighth grade.
This is not a good report card for the president—but it’s also an opportunity for him. For instance, Obama could stop opposing school choice. Instead, he had his attorney general sue Louisiana last year to block that state’s attempt to make sure that poor kids were able to escape bad public schools.
And if the president cared, he would try to do something about the high Hispanic out-of-wedlock rate. We know he recognizes the awful impact this has on the possibility of Hispanic upward mobility, because as a candidate in 2008 he had this to say in a Father’s Day speech at the Apostolic Church of Chicago:
“We know the statistics. Children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools and 20 times more likely to end up in prison. They are more likely to have behavioral problems, or run away from home, or become teenage parents themselves. And the foundations of our community are weaker because of it.”
As president, Barack Obama regrettably has kept too quiet on these matters. Instead he prefers to take the low road, as he did again last week by castigating the Tea Party. Referring to Republicans, he opined: “In the short term, they have a problem with the Tea Party and others who often express virulently anti-immigrant sentiment.”
Conservatives ought to call out the president on this. They also should avoid falling into a familiar trap: speaking to and about Hispanics only through the prism of illegal immigration. There are myriad other issues. Ditto for the legions of one-time Obama supporters now rushing to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the president: This is an issue made for them, too.
