Obama Set to Radicalize Immigration System
on November 15, 2014
28 Comments
Brace yourselves...executive action on immigration policy is coming.
Next week, President Obama is scheduled to reveal a 10-point, comprehensive immigration reform plan through executive action. The plan's most controversial provisions would expand deferred action and halt deportations for millions of illegal immigrants.
Although Republicans have repeatedly warned Obama against going over the heads of the House and Senate on the issue of immigration, the President has vowed "not to wait" for Congress to act.
Republican warnings don't seem to have as much persuasive power as donor dollars, and Obama has those flowing in by the bucket. Immigration reform has become a pet project of the left, and over the last decade left wing organizations and NGOs have pumped millions into groups backing radical immigration reform---and now those groups are expecting Obama to keep his promise to stop deportations.
The calls started shortly after President Obama’s news conference on the day after the midterm elections. He had said he would go ahead with action on immigration before year’s end, in spite of warnings from Republicans that he could wreck relations with the new Congress they will control. White House officials were calling immigrant advocates to talk strategy and shore up their support. The officials wanted to reassure them, several activists said, that the president, after delaying twice this year, was ready to take the kind of broad measures they had demanded to shield immigrants here illegally from deportation. The White House calls — and the president’s decision itself — reflected the clout the immigrant movement has built up in recent years, as it grew from a cluster of scattered Washington lobbying groups into a national force. A vital part of that expansion has involved money: major donations from some of the nation’s wealthiest liberal foundations, including the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Open Society Foundations of the financier George Soros, and the Atlantic Philanthropies. Over the last decade those donors have invested more than $300 million in immigrant organizations, including many fighting for a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.
