#ri4a

Hard choices: Hillary Clinton admits role in Honduran coup aftermath

and yet Clinton STILL supports shipping off children of undocumented migrants back to dangerous countries their mothers were fleeing.

#ri4a #CIR #Immigration #ImmigrantChildren  #ComprehensiveImmigrationReform  #Latino  #Hondrusa

by Tyler Reny

            Immigration reform may have been swallowed up over the last week by coverage of the sequester and D.C. dysfunction, but it has hardly disappeared.  In fact, the immigration reform bill is marching steadily forward.  Two weeks ago, the AFL-CIO and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce came to an agreement on managing the entry of low-skilled workers into the U.S., clearing an important roadblock for reform.  Equally as important, Scott Walker, the firebrand conservative Governor of Wisconsin, came out in favor of comprehensive immigration reform.  Walker joined the growing ranks of conservative voices and Tea Party heroes calling for, or amenable towards, a path to citizenship: Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, and Sean Hannity.  This growing chorus of consensus from conservative elites offers the best hope yet for eventual passage of a comprehensive reform bill.

            Political science research shows that the way that elected officials talk about immigrants and immigration matters, elite cues, help set the tone of the debate, are the most common source of news for the mass media, and have the potential to alter public opinion. In other words, the tacit support from “thought leaders” and political elites in the Republican Party has the potential to temper its nativist wing and open some space for wary congress members to vote for a comprehensive bill. 

            Danny Hayes, a political scientist at George Washington University, examined elite cues during the last immigration debate (2005-2007), and found that the chief voices of restrictive legislation were primarily Republican Congress members (amplified many times by certain influential media actors) and the chief sources of “welcoming frames” were immigrants themselves. 

            The 2013 debate has been different.  The Tea Party and conservative thought leaders mentioned above are joined by bi-partisan “gangs” in the Senate and the House, a strong DREAMer movement, and a new coalition of church leaders, law enforcement, and business interests, “Bibles, Badges, and Business,” all loudly trumpeting the positive immigrant and immigration frames.  Indeed, Micah Cohen, writing for FiveThirtyEight, has already found some evidence that opinion towards immigrants from GOP rank and file might be improving.

            This isn’t to say that the anti-immigrant frame has disappeared.  It hasn’t.  Border security and the rule of law are still dominant concerns of most GOP House members and constituents, many who consider a path to citizenship to be just as extreme as mass-deportation.

            And immense political hurdles still remain.  Although Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has promised to prioritize an immigration bill once the “octogang” has completed its work, a comprehensive bill faces major headwind in the GOP controlled House, where a majority of conservative members are from primarily white districts, the chair of the crucial Judiciary Committee, Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), has received an A+ rating from a national leading anti-immigrant group, NumbersUSA, and leadership would be unlikely to bring a bill to the floor without a majority of support from the Republican caucus (though House Speaker Boehner has already violated the “Hastert Rule” several times this session).

            The hurdles for comprehensive immigration reform are numerous but support from some members of the conservative wing of the Republican Party is a promising sign of progress.  As long as Congress can pass a bill before August recess, where immigration reform could become death panels—as Congress members are already starting to see in angry town halls—the chance of reform is real. 

by Tyler Reny

            Immigration reform may have been swallowed up over the last week by coverage of the sequester and D.C. dysfunction, but it has hardly disappeared.  In fact, the immigration reform bill is marching steadily forward.  Two weeks ago, the AFL-CIO and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce came to an agreement on managing the entry of low-skilled workers into the U.S., clearing an important roadblock for reform.  Equally as important, Scott Walker, the firebrand conservative Governor of Wisconsin, came out in favor of comprehensive immigration reform.  Walker joined the growing ranks of conservative voices and Tea Party heroes calling for, or amenable towards, a path to citizenship: Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, and Sean Hannity.  This growing chorus of consensus from conservative elites offers the best hope yet for eventual passage of a comprehensive reform bill.

            Political science research shows that the way that elected officials talk about immigrants and immigration matters, elite cues, help set the tone of the debate, are the most common source of news for the mass media, and have the potential to alter public opinion. In other words, the tacit support from “thought leaders” and political elites in the Republican Party has the potential to temper its nativist wing and open some space for wary congress members to vote for a comprehensive bill. 

            Danny Hayes, a political scientist at George Washington University, examined elite cues during the last immigration debate (2005-2007), and found that the chief voices of restrictive legislation were primarily Republican Congress members (amplified many times by certain influential media actors) and the chief sources of “welcoming frames” were immigrants themselves. 

            The 2013 debate has been different.  The Tea Party and conservative thought leaders mentioned above are joined by bi-partisan “gangs” in the Senate and the House, a strong DREAMer movement, and a new coalition of church leaders, law enforcement, and business interests, “Bibles, Badges, and Business,” all loudly trumpeting the positive immigrant and immigration frames.  Indeed, Micah Cohen, writing for FiveThirtyEight, has already found some evidence that opinion towards immigrants from GOP rank and file might be improving.

            This isn’t to say that the anti-immigrant frame has disappeared.  It hasn’t.  Border security and the rule of law are still dominant concerns of most GOP House members and constituents, many who consider a path to citizenship to be just as extreme as mass-deportation.

            And immense political hurdles still remain.  Although Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has promised to prioritize an immigration bill once the “octogang” has completed its work, a comprehensive bill faces major headwind in the GOP controlled House, where a majority of conservative members are from primarily white districts, the chair of the crucial Judiciary Committee, Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), has received an A+ rating from a national leading anti-immigrant group, NumbersUSA, and leadership would be unlikely to bring a bill to the floor without a majority of support from the Republican caucus (though House Speaker Boehner has already violated the “Hastert Rule” several times this session).

            The hurdles for comprehensive immigration reform are numerous but support from some members of the conservative wing of the Republican Party is a promising sign of progress.  As long as Congress can pass a bill before August recess, where immigration reform could become death panels—as Congress members are already starting to see in angry town halls—the chance of reform is real. 

by Tyler Reny

After spending all last week writing about how Obama’s best strategy surrounding the immigration reform debate is to stay out of it all together, I was quite surprised this weekend when news came out that the administration’s reform plan was “leaked,” and published by USA Today.  The President has made reference, several times, to this plan, most notably in the comically naïve sentence from his Las Vegas immigration speech on January 29th:

“And if Congress is unable to move forward in a timely fashion, I will send up a bill based on my proposal and insist that they vote on it right away.”

If only it were that easy.

But back to the plan.  To nobody’s surprise, many Republican leaders immediately balked at the proposal from the White House.  Rubio called the bill “half-baked and seriously flawed” and, if it were to make it to Congress, it would be “dead on arrival.” Sen. Rand Paul says that the Obama plan shows that he is not “serious” about passing immigration reform.  Rep. Paul Ryan posited that Obama is “looking for a partisan advantage and not a bipartisan solution.”

With all this backlash expected, why would the President’s advisors risk it?  Eugene Robinson, writing in today’s Washington Post, has a very compelling theory: Obama’s immigration plan is a decoy to draw fire from Republicans to provide them cover to support a less “liberal” bi-partisan proposal.  Even one with a path to citizenship in it!

"The problem is that Republicans have spent years demonizing undocumented immigrants as a way of appealing to xenophobic, jingoistic sentiment. So how can members of Congress switch from “these people are a plague” to “these people are welcome to stay” without facing the ire of the party’s activist base?

Enter the president’s draft proposal, which administration officials described as a “backup” plan that Obama may put forward if Congress is not able to reach agreement.

It’s really not much different from what Rubio’s group is talking about. But Republicans can slam Obama’s plan as some sort of Kenyan-socialist-inspired abdication of sovereignty. They can blast the provisions on border security as laughable. They can describe the absence of a real plan for reforming the legal immigration process as slapdash, or unserious, or whatever they want to call it.

Republicans in the Senate can line up instead behind a bill that Rubio’s Group of Eight eventually produces; even Paul, a tea party favorite, has indicated he could vote for reform as long as he had more than “a promise from President Obama” on border security. And if enough contrast can be drawn between a Senate proposal and Obama’s plan, perhaps even a significant number of House Republicans can be brought along — if not a majority, then enough to convince Speaker John Boehner to allow an up-or-down vote."

Originally published in The Next America

by Tyler Reny

Given that immigration reform is shaping up to be one of the key legislative legacies of President Obama’s second term, many were surprised when the president devoted just five short paragraphs, 210 words (out of more than 6,400, or 3 percent), to the bill in his State of the Union address this week. Many immigration advocates took to Twitter to complain that he didn’t do more to “convince” the public and Congress to support a bill.

The problem with this complaint is twofold. First, the president has almost absolutely no ability to move public opinion. Second, the success of an immigration bill actually depends on the president’s ability to remove himself from the debate and disassociate his name from the bill.

First, let's discuss the bully pulpit. Richard Neustadt, perhaps the preeminent scholar on the presidency, wrote in his 1960 book Presidential Power that “the power of the presidency is the power to persuade.”

Over the last 50 years, Neustadt's words have become conventional wisdom among Americans, reporters, and especially among presidents themselves. Ronald Reagan, the Great Communicator, tried hard to rally the country behind his policy agenda from his bully pulpit. Bill Clinton made hundreds of appearances during his presidency to move public opinion, particularly on health care. George W. Bush embarked on a 60-day tour, “Conversations on Social Security,” to sell his Social Security privatization plan.

Obama, too, believes in the persuasive power of the presidency. When asked by Charlie Rose what he thought his biggest mistake was of his first term, he said he didn't try hard enough to tell the right story to the American people.

Unfortunately, the conventional wisdom is wrong. In 1993, when George Edwards III, the distinguished political science professor at Texas A&M, began looking into the persuasive powers of the presidency, he found surprising evidence (or lack thereof). Contrary to common wisdom, he found a sitting president can help set an agenda but has very little ability to move public opinion.

Edwards first looked at Reagan (again, remember that Reagan has been compared to Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt as one of America’s greatest orators) and concluded that, contrary to widely held beliefs, Reagan was not a persuasive president.

Polling shows that public support for programs that the president opposed (welfare, urban problems, environmental protection, etc.) increased while the president was in office, and those that he supported (defense expenditures, aid to the Contra rebels in Nicaragua) decreased. In other words, "people were less persuaded by Reagan when he left office than they were when he took office."

Reagan, it turns out, was not alone in his inability to move public opinion. After Clinton's barnstorming tour, his popularity tanked, his health care bill died, and his party lost control of the House. Bush's 60-day tour occurred simultaneously with plummeting support for the privatization of Social Security, forcing him to abandon the issue altogether. And the more Obama took to public forums to sell his health care bill, the more its popularity fell.

Tuesday’s State of the Union, considered by many to be the ultimate annual “persuasive” speech of any president’s tenure, was no different. A Gallup study of 30 years of polling data found that State of the Union addresses "rarely affect a president's public standing in a meaningful way."

George Edwards has convincingly shown that the conventional wisdom is wrong. The rhetorical presidency is an appealing and enduring theme in the collective American understanding of politics, but it is more fiction than fact. Immigration activists need not worry that the president didn’t push hard enough for immigration reform in his speech. He wouldn’t have gotten too far.

But the president is avoiding a full push on immigration reform for a more critical reason. With incipient bipartisan support for an immigration bill, the fastest way for the president to kill the bill is to have his name attached to it. As The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein put it, "by staying out, at least for now, the Obama administration is making it easier for Republicans to stay in."

Frances Lee, a professor of political science at the University of Maryland, suggests in her book Beyond Ideology “that presidential persuasion might actually have an anti-persuasive effect on the opposing member of Congress.”

This seems to have materialized in Republican obstruction to nearly every one of Obama’s priorities in his first term. But more importantly, in a divided government, the president’s aggressive leadership on a bill increases partisanship and decreases the probability that a bill will pass Congress.

Polling already shows that when Obama’s name is attached to a path to citizenship, support for it drops from 70 percent (when asked in the abstract if the proposal was favored) to 59 percent (when the pollster mentioned that Obama has proposed the measure). As The Post's Chris Cillizza put it, “Republicans don’t mind the idea in theory but loathe it when attached to Obama.”

Obama’s strategy with immigration reform will reflect these political truths. As House Speaker John Boehnerpointed out to reporters, the president getting involved in the bill’s details will only be getting “in the way.”

If this bill becomes Obama’s immigration bill, it will scare off congressional Republicans—and without them, a deal is unlikely to happen.

So, no, the president didn’t spend much time discussing immigration reform, but for good reason. His involvement in the process would scare Republicans away. And he wouldn’t be able to move public opinion anyway. Immigration activists shouldn’t fret about his approach; it’s the best hope we have.

Tyler Reny has studied and lived in Barcelona, Spain, and Buenos Aires, Argentina; interned for Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, in Washington; researched state welfare policy for the Rockefeller Institute in Albany; and now manages research and evaluation and crafts the social media presence for the New American Leaders Project. He graduated summa cum laude from Skidmore College and plans on pursuing a Ph.D. in political science.

When President Obama delivers his fifth State of the Union address tonight, here at NALP we’ll be looking forward to:

 1) The four DREAMers who will be in attendance as guests of elected officials.  This day marks the first time undocumented immigrants will be present at the State of the Union Address, which we hope means that the President will outline definitive plans to overhaul the nation’s immigration policy.

 - Alan Aleman, a biological sciences student born in Mexico City will be the guest of First Lady Michelle Obama.  He was recently featured in the President’s immigration speech in Las Vegas last January.

 - Juliet Garibay, also originally from Mexico City, has a Masters in Nursing from Texas and is a guest of Representative Marc Veasy (D-TX).

 - Gabino Sanchez, who is married with two U.S. born children is a guest of Representative Luis Gutierrez (D-IL).

 - Amber Pinto, who has fought for the Virginia DREAM Act, hails from Bolivia and is currently a student in that state.  She arrives as a guest of Senator Mark Warner (D-VA). 

2) President Obama’s agenda to address immigration reform, specifically the need to overhaul a system that fails undocumented workers and foreign-born students whose encounter visa hurdles despite their stellar educations.

3) A frank discussion on improving the economy, which has shown to be the number one issues for all Americans, including Latinos, Asians and African Americans.

4) Senator Marco Rubio’s (D-TX) rebuttal speech, which will be conducted for the first time in both English and Spanish.  As a member of the Senate’s “Gang of 8,” the bipartisan group created to address immigration policy reform, we look forward to a roadmap which addresses the nation’s 11 million undocumented immigrants, students, and STEM workers.