KIMBERLEY STRASSEL: OBAMA’S GAME OF IMMIGRATION POKER
Obama’s Game of Immigration Poker
Does the president want to change the system, or just blame Republicans for failure in next year’s midterm elections?
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The Senate’s Gang of Eight this week unveiled its hard-negotiated immigration bill. A bipartisan group in the House praised the product and declared its own bill not far behind. And the White House? Let the guessing continue.
The overriding question throughout this year’s push to reform immigration has been what game the White House is playing. The media keep writing that President Obama sees immigration as his second-term legacy. That’s what the White House keeps telling them, anyway, and who are they to doubt it?
But congressional negotiators remain highly suspicious that the White House is more interested in using a failed immigration bill as a weapon against the GOP in 2014. They look past the administration’s occasional tepid statements of support to its actions. So far what they’ve seen is a string of events that have been decidedly unhelpful in the cause of reform.thema to the GOP.
There was a lot of blowback against the speech, and two weeks later in his State of the Union address Mr. Obama restrained himself to broad talking points. Yet within a week, the White House leaked a draft of its own immigration bill, a partisan document that seemed designed to force Senate negotiations to the left or derail the talks altogether.
There’s also been the White House’s rear-guard action against a “trigger”—which makes a path to citizenship contingent on progress in border enforcement. There is wide bipartisan understanding that an evaluation of current border security is central to any bill, and this requires the Department of Homeland Security to produce data. Yet in March, a senior DHS official told a House committee that it had not created a broad measure of security (despite promising to do so in 2010), and wasn’t likely to anytime soon.
Obama officials told the New York Times last month that they had “resisted” a measurement “because the president did not want any hurdles placed on the pathway to eventual citizenship for immigrants in the country illegally.” Yet even congressional Democrats understand that the DHS’s failure could be a deal-killer—Texas Rep. (and Obama fan) Sheila Jackson Lee warned the agency it had better “get in the game.” The administration’s response was to roll out Homeland Secretary Janet Napolitano, who on March 26 insisted there is “no one number” that can capture border security, and that in any event a trigger “is not the way to go.”
Meanwhile, the White House has refused to say if it will accept policies that are central for Republican support. Senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer recently dodged a question about whether his boss would sign a bill with a trigger. White House officials have been equally evasive on whether the president supports a guest-worker program.
Mr. Obama’s own response to this week’s Gang of Eight bill was notable for its lack of enthusiasm. “This bill is clearly a compromise, and no one will get everything they wanted, including me,” he said in a statement released Tuesday.
Then again, compared with, say, taxes, immigration has never been an animating issue for Mr. Obama. He was among a group who helped kill the 2007 reform by voting for a poison-pill amendment to weaken a guest-worker program—at the behest of unions. He continually slotted immigration behind other first-term priorities, preferring to leverage it against Mitt Romney.
There are signs, too, that the White House staff are divided between those who want substantive change and those obsessed with political positioning.
It seems that the White House strategy has come down to: win if we do, win if we don’t. The focus on the GOP’s Hispanic problem has diverted attention away from the enormous pressure on Democrats by Hispanic activists to get reform. The White House has every incentive to be outwardly supportive. It will let Congress do the dangerous work, wait to see if that body can rally support, and retain the right to take credit for a final product.
At the same time, the administration is positioning itself to capitalize on defeat—keeping its distance from key GOP demands (like a guest-worker program), the better to blame Republicans should those issues prove stumbling blocks. It’s letting it be known (see: speeches and leaks) that the Gang’s compromise is not its idea of reform, the better to keep activists on its side should the deal fall apart.
The reality is that immigration reform is proceeding despite President Obama—not because of him. That’s the lens through which to view the debates in the weeks to come.
Write to kim@wsj.com
A version of this article appeared April 19, 2013, on page A13 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Obama’s Game of Immigration Poker.
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