Latino voters have shown that the exercise of their citizenship is intertwined with our nation’s treatment of noncitizens. Today, an estimated 2,000 American-born Latino citizens will turn 18, and 2,000 will turn 18 tomorrow and every day for the next decade. They will remember which party demonized immigrants and made legal immigration more difficult.
The vast majority of Americans who favor humane immigration policies will not patiently wait until January 2017 for a change in the way this country treats immigrants and their families. Now that Republicans have failed to act, the focus will be on what President Barack Obama can do within existing law to keep families together, target record-breaking deportations on actual criminals and security threats, and make due process and humanity the rule in our immigration system. No president, especially Obama, wants to go down in history as the one who deported the most immigrants. He will act boldly this year, within the confines of our out-of-date laws, to add rationality to our irrational immigration and deportation system.
It is a sad moment for the House of Representatives and for our democracy, which was built and sustained largely — and proudly — by immigrants over the generations. Republicans have failed us and failed themselves. Those of us committed to justice must work toward the day when America embraces its immigrant brothers and sisters, allows them to seek opportunity legally and continues the progress of building a great nation by incorporating those who were born in other nations.
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