Obama Administration's Immigration Policy

The administration's apparent new willingness to take on immigration reform might seem like a ray of light in an increasingly bleak landscape for immigrants, especially of the unauthorized variety But at a time of deep economic downturn, and with anti-immigrant sentiment strongly in the air, the chances are slim, to say the least, that Congress will pass legislation aimed at easing the repressive laws and exclusion endured by immigrants. (Figueroa, pp.105)

Among the most obvious signs of continuing anti-immigrant sentiment are the so-called Birthers, who regard Obama as an "illegal alien" of sorts, born outside the United States and thus ineligible to stand as president; South Carolina representative Joe Wilson's shout of "You lie!" in response to Obama's assertion during his State of the Union address that proposed health reforms would not insure unauthorized immigrants; and the continuing rants about the country's "broken borders" on right-wing radio and television.

The first sign that Obama had failed to break out of this narrow view was his selection of Napolitano to head the Department of Homeland Security in November 2008. As governor of Arizona, Napolitano declared a state of emergency along the state's boundary with Mexico in 2005, saying that "the federal government has failed to secure our border," which, she said, threatened the well-being of all Arizonans. The move freed up $1.5 million for Arizona border counties so as to, in Napolitano's words, "provide our law enforcement community with another valuable tool to fight crime related to illegal immigration."4 The following year, she deployed the state's National Guard along the divide in support of the Border Patrol, the growth of which she has long supported. (Castañeda, pp. 45)

The second sign was in May, when Obama submitted his first budget proposal as president, maintaining a force of 20,000 Border Patrol agents for fiscal year 2010. 5 Few have grasped how conservative - and simultaneously radical - such a proposal is compared with border policy in the recent past. It was not until 1976-77 that the total number of Border Patrol agents surpassed 2,000, more than 50 years after the agency was created. In 2009, the Obama administration championed funding ten times that number as the federal government's task for a single year. By contrast, Bill Clinton's first budget proposal (released in early 1993) actually called for a reduction of 93 agents in the Border Patrol.6 Around the same time, the Office of Management and Budget told the Border Patrol it would have to "do more with less" in the future. (Muñoz, pp. 321)

Of course, the Clinton administration ended up bestowing huge amounts of resources on the border-enforcement apparatus after the national political environment changed in the early to mid-1990s. Today, Obama's very suggestion to preserve such a large number of Border Patrol agents reflects the dramatic growth in the boundary and immigration enforcement apparatus since the early years of the Clinton presidency. Between fiscal year 1994 and the end of fiscal year 2000, for example, the number of Border Patrol agents more ...