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Obama Lets Us Down Again

Ruben Navarrett Jr. on

SAN DIEGO -- President Obama has a new foil. He spent his first term blaming George W. Bush when things went wrong. Now that he broke his promise to take executive action on immigration this summer, and left many of his supporters angry and disillusioned, he's pinning the blame on -- of all people -- those child refugees from Central America who came across the U.S.-Mexico border to escape violence and mayhem at home.

When did our leader become such a louse?

One thing we can say: On immigration, Obama has been remarkably consistent. As in consistently bad for the cause he promised to champion: comprehensive immigration reform, which includes a path to legal status for some of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States.

It's clear to those of us who try to follow every bounce of the dizzying immigration debate that the president never intended to pull the trigger on some sort of executive action to improve the lives of people he doesn't care anything about.

Based on his actions while in office, Obama is allied with the restrictionist wing of the Democratic Party, which believes that illegal immigrants undermine U.S. workers by competing for jobs and lowering wages. For those who subscribe to this view, it follows that legalizing millions of immigrants would make matters much worse by putting them in a position where they're able to compete for more jobs.

Why doesn't the president just admit where he's coming from, rather than blaming a bunch of kids who sought refuge from conditions that anyone in his right mind would try to escape?

 

Obama told "Meet the Press" moderator Chuck Todd that the recent surge of unaccompanied minors changed the political equation.

"The truth of the matter," Obama said, "is that the politics did shift midsummer because of that problem."

Unbeknownst to many Americans, the administration has, as Obama said in that interview, "systematically worked through the problem" -- to the point where the number of minors crossing the border has dropped significantly since its peak in June. All it took was abandoning principles and backing off earlier assurances that the kids would be given a fair hearing. It turns out that having "worked through the problem" is a euphemism for denying en masse applications for asylum, emptying shelters that had been housing child refugees, and deporting thousands of desperate children back to dangerous places without due process.

Finally, the president said, "When I take executive action, I want to make sure that it's sustainable."

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