Immigration reform: Stuck in the shadows

[pampango]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/16/AR2010031604611.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

"On Sunday, tens of thousands of Americans who supported Barack Obama's presidential campaign in 2008 will gather on the Mall to protest the president's lack of action on a cause to which he had committed himself throughout the campaign: immigration reform."

"...the immigrant leaders called a march on Washington that, as Gutierrez says, "is primarily directed at President Obama and his administration." In that sense, the march comes straight out of the A. Philip Randolph playbook. Randolph, the president of the old Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, called the first March on Washington in 1941 to pressure Franklin Roosevelt to issue an executive order desegregating defense factories. When Roosevelt issued the order, Randolph agreed to call off the march. But he called for such a march again in 1948 to pressure Harry Truman to desegregate the armed forces -- and when Truman issued that order, Randolph again called off the march. The third such march he called -- in the summer of 1963, to demand the passage of civil rights legislation -- famously and gloriously took place.

The civil rights leaders who have called this march don't doubt that if Obama could enact immigration reform by executive order, he would. In his meeting with them last Thursday, the president affirmed his commitment to the cause. Whether it will become his legislative priority is another question: Congress is waiting to see what Obama does, even as Obama says he needs to see some GOP willingness to enact reform (and this is certainly a cause that some leading Republicans, most notably John McCain, have supported in the past)."

But like other key groups within the Democratic base (such as labor) that saw their signature issued deferred and now fear that the ability to enact progressive legislation will end in November, the Latino leadership feels it can wait no longer. "I'm very hopeful" that the president will agree to push for legislation, says Gutierrez. "The ball is in his court." And if the president doesn't agree? "We will go into the field," says Gutierrez, "like the civil rights movement and the suffragists did." "We will escalate," says Gustavo Torres of Casa de Maryland, "to civil disobedience."