Obama Has No Appetite and Hispanics are Nauseated

Barack Obama made that statement almost casually, while chatting with the journalists aboard Air Force One. He said last Wednesday that Congress may lack the “appetite” to take on immigration reform this year. He could have said it louder, but not any clearer: Immigration reform does not interest the American political class, nor congressmen who are only thinking about potential votes in the upcoming congressional elections in November, nor the U.S. president, who told the journalists that he had been left exhausted by months of fighting to get his health care reform bill through.

With declarations that indeed denoted fatigue, Obama tried to explain to the journalists that he had been calling various Republican senators to request their support for the promised immigration reform, but to no avail. In other words, the president, too, “lacks the appetite.” Period.

The passion and enthusiasm the President had displayed in defending health insurance for the millions of Americans who cannot afford it is now conspicuously absent from another of his great campaign promises: that of a reform that would relieve more than 12 million immigrants (mostly Mexicans) of their illegal status.

Obama forgets that the Hispanic community played a decisive role in his electoral triumph back in November 2008, that they voted en mass because the Democrat urged them to trust him, that he would fight to have them integrated into those new United States, as many were hoping for when they cast their vote for the black Democratic candidate.

It is not enough that Obama thought of Hispanics for important positions in his administration and even pushed for the admission of a member of this minority, for the first time in the history of the United States, into the very select club of judges in the Supreme Court, an even more praiseworthy act considering that this was a woman, Puerto Rican Sonia Sotomayor.

The U.S. president is still reluctant to fulfill his main promise, that of pressing Congress to pass a bill that would legalize the 12 million illegal workers and their families, despite having demonstrated to the Republicans legislators (and to some Democrats, too) that without them, the economies of many states would collapse and that their clandestine status only encourages the black market, human trafficking, tax fraud among companies that hire illegal immigrants and even slavery.

The worst part of it all, however, is that the lack of an immigration reform that would integrate those who are already in the United States (even if this came with a tightening of the control measures to curb illegal entry at the border) is what is inciting the Hispanic “hunt”, with arbitrary arrests (imagine the fate of a man with Latin features who is detained by the police without all his papers in order!) and mass deportations.

Today, it is Arizona that stands as the ultimate symbol of racism and intolerance. Tomorrow, who knows.