IF HE WALKS LIKE A MINUTEMAN...:

Clueless on immigration (Ruben Navarette, 5/05/10, San Diego Union-Tribune)

Latino Democrats have been telling themselves that the reason Obama broke his campaign promise to work for immigration reform in his first year is because he had a full plate of other issues. They swallowed every disappointment – when the administration kept up the policy of raiding workplaces, when Obama dedicated just 37 words to immigration in his State of the Union address, when it was revealed that Immigration and Customs Enforcement uses quotas to ratchet up the number of deportations.

In the latest setback, activists are quietly fuming that Obama couldn’t summon a stronger word than “misguided” to describe Arizona’s racial profiling law – something for which The New York Times editorial page also took Obama to task.

Why would this surprise anyone? Obama has a poor record on immigration. As a senator, he joined Democratic leader Harry Reid in trying to kill an immigration reform bill with poison pill amendments – all to please organized labor, which preferred no bill to one with guest workers.

Obama has also been more than willing to play politics with the immigration issue for short-term gain. My theory is that Obama falls into the part of the liberal spectrum that is leery of immigration reform because of concerns that immigrant labor hurts blue-collar workers, especially African-Americans.