After spending a few minutes talking about his opponent and his other policy proposals, Obama got his loudest cheers with these lines: “This election is about the 12 million people living in the shadows, the communities taking immigration enforcement into their own hand. They are counting on us to stop the hateful rhetoric filling our airwaves, and rise above the fear, and rise above the demagoguery, and finally enact comprehensive immigration reform.”
Obama complimented John McCain for championing the comprehensive immigration package that died in the Senate last year — and that helped (temporarily) sink his primary campaign. The bill, which would have created a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, inflamed widespread anti-immigration sentiment. Congress was deluged with calls, emails and faxes expressing opposition.
Since then, most politicians have kept the issue out of the spotlight. McCain has even made a pledge to tackle border security before any other changes — a reversal Obama made sure to point out Wednesday.
“Well, I don’t know about you, but I think it’s time for a president who won’t walk away from comprehensive immigration reform when it becomes politically unpopular,” he said.
Obama makes frequent mention of his healthcare and energy proposals on the stump, and his aides have said those will be the top priorities in the first year of his administration. A deal on immigration could still be elusive even with bigger Democratic majorities in Congress, given the success of Republican opponents who stopped two previous attempts to get the bill past the Senate in the summer of 2007. Those proposals had the support of President George W. Bush.
Obama pointed out that the Republican Party platform didn’t include language on a comprehensive immigration deal, saying McCain didn’t “stand up to opponents of reform at his own convention.”
Fierce debate broke out among the delegates when many saw this as unconstitutional and would mean changing the 14th amendment of the constitution, which states, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States. . .are citizens of the United States.” Charles Mifsud, a delegate from Ohio said he was in favor of a crackdown of illegal immigration, but opposed the amendment because “anchor babies” represent the “symptom not the problem,” which he sees as securing the border. The term anchor baby is a controversial expression that refers to illegal immigrants who give birth to babies in the United States and are then “anchored” to this country.
Sandra McDade from Louisiana said she was not trying to stick her finger in John McCain’s eye, but was “aiming for a little higher” and then tapped her head insisting that by adopting this amendment they would be sending a strong message to their candidate. She called on her fellow delegates to approve the amendment, “We don’t have to be politically correct. We are Republicans!”
David Chung, a delegate from Iowa adamantly supported the amendment saying that the very act of crossing the border illegally makes illegal immigrants “invaders” and their children should not be afforded the rights of citizenship. After the heated debate, the amendment failed, but the topic came up later when the question of counting illegal immigrants in the census came up.
Kris Kobach, a delegate from Kansas proposed an amendment that would eliminate the counting of illegal immigrants in the 2010 census. The delegates were split almost entirely in half with many delegates supporting only counting legal residents in the census, but the other half were concerned that by only counting legal immigrants that local governments and health care and education services in the country would be totally overwhelmed. Many of these services rely on census data to function and the amendment ended up failing.
Obama ended his speech with the words “si se puede,” the Spanish version of his campaign chant “yes we can.” His words were not so much a translation as much as a return to a native tongue — the phrase was used widely in Spanish before Obama adopted it, most often for protest marches and demonstrations.
