The Presidency of Barack Obama: A First Historical Assessment by Julian E. Zelizer

Author:Julian E. Zelizer [Zelizer, Julian E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780691160283
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2018-01-15T07:00:00+00:00

12

A Promise Unfulfilled, an Imperfect Legacy

OBAMA AND IMMIGRATION POLICY

Sarah R. Coleman

When President Obama entered office, the content, scope, and partisan nature of immigration policy debates had been re-formed in the face of a profound demographic shift in the United States over the previous forty years largely due to immigration. As a result of these changes to the debates, the Obama administration’s efforts at comprehensive immigration reform, a signature 2008 campaign issue, were blocked. Obama’s legacy on the issue is marked by the contrasting policies of trying to bring unauthorized immigrants out of the shadows through executive action while at the same time removing unprecedented numbers of unauthorized immigrants. Policy toward refugees in the wake of the Arab Spring and subsequent upheaval in the Middle East was also heavily contested. The Obama administration contended with the need for security versus a commitment to addressing a humanitarian crisis. In both immigration and refugee policy development, President Obama’s expansive vision of inclusion was frustrated by partisan political opposition.

Fulfilling the Promise

With the passage of the Hart-Celler Act in 1965, the United States entered a new era of immigration, both in terms of scale and in demographic profile. Migration from Latin America, Asia, and the Caribbean grew while European migration fell; by 1975 approximately 75 percent of immigrants to the United States were from the developing world. Immigration was also of a much larger scale than seen in previous decades, and by 1981, annual documented admissions were already double those of 1965. By 2000, new immigrants and their offspring accounted for half the total growth in the U.S. population during the previous decade.1 Immigration, as a political issue, became more prominent over the period. As the boundaries of the physical nation-state seemed, in the eyes of many, to become infinitely more porous, social policies, such as access to health care, that impacted immigrants became central to the politics of immigration policy in a profound way. During the Obama administration net migration with Mexico actually fell in the wake of the Great Recession, with estimates showing a net loss of 140,000 from 2009 to 2014, but these figures were all but forgotten as the rising demographic trends of the previous decade and growing restrictionist sentiment continued to dominate the headlines and shape the political debate.2

The politics of immigration policy were also being remade. Immigration policy had long been an issue that divided the parties internally and policy changes were made by compromises among strange bedfellows.3 When Obama came into office, immigration was moving from an issue that traditionally drew bipartisan alliances to an increasingly partisan issue.4 Changes within both parties recast these debates with enormous consequences for Obama’s immigration policy.

In earlier eras of mass immigration, organized labor had formed strong Democratic opposition to increased immigration, but over the previous two decades the growing influence of unions representing service workers led organized labor to support immigration reform with a path to legalization. In 2000, the AFL-CIO officially reversed its earlier opposition to liberalizing immigration policy, representing one of the most significant reversals of policy on the Democratic side.

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