As a Latina, I am fed up with President Obama’s lack of leadership on immigration reform.

Not addressing immigration head-on contributes to the invisibility of immigrants and fuels an atmosphere of discrimination and hatred against Latinos. This ultimately leads to an increase in hate crimes.

To be fair, Congress is not doing much on this issue, either.

Instead, the deep partisan divide is paralyzing our government and limiting Obama’s ability to lead.

By narrowly focusing on enforcement only and using the rhetoric of rewarding “law-abiding immigrants,” Obama, in his State of the Union speech, at best ignored the 11.5 million undocumented people — many of whom live in families with U.S.-born children — or, at worst, criminalized them.

Obama touched on the noncontroversial themes of our historical roots as a nation built by immigrants and yet the suffering of today’s immigrants, who are currently building this nation, was not mentioned. He failed to remind us that this nation’s immigration policy has historically excluded people from countries deemed racially inferior. He had an opportunity to call on us to move beyond such prejudices, but he missed it.

Yes, undocumented immigrants who have crossed the border without documents have committed a civil infraction. As it is also true that immigrants who overstay their visas also ignore civil law. Yet none of the immigration-related violations are serious crimes.

Undocumented immigrants are guilty of following human survival instincts by choosing life over death, by feeding their families instead of watching them slowly die of starvation.

In many cases, a destructive U.S. foreign policy has created the conditions that force people to leave their home countries and venture into ours. Some U.S. multinational corporations also share responsibility for driving people off their lands or for hiring them at a pittance, and then discarding them and moving operations to an even cheaper country. Abandoned, these people pack up everything and head north.

Latinos voted overwhelmingly to elect Obama, and it was our vote in swing states like Arizona, Florida and New Mexico that was critical to his win. Yet when it comes to immigration, one of the top issues in our community, so far he is doing worse than President Bush. We are now struggling to accept that the candidate we worked hard to elect has sold us down the river.

More immigrants have been deported in Obama’s first year than in the last year of the Bush administration. Obama and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano have found a behind-the-scenes strategy to get rid of immigrants. They have the immigration agency comb through local jails and place deportation holds on anyone suspected of being undocumented. Local police are piling on, even in “sanctuary” cities, by increasing their arrests of immigrants for minor crimes such as jaywalking and loitering.

These immigrants don’t get their day in court. Instead, they are sent to one of the country’s various detentions centers, many of them run by private companies that make large profits out of holding undocumented immigrants in abysmal conditions. 



We Latinos expected more from Obama. With his frequent quotes from Martin Luther King, with his appropriation of Cesar Chavez’s slogan “si, se puede,” we thought he would create an immigration policy based on equity and justice.

Instead, it’s been more of the same — or worse.

President Obama is at risk of losing his Latino base — and surrendering the moral high ground — unless he champions the rights of immigrants.

Ana C. Perez is the executive director of the Central American Resources Center (CARECEN) in San Francisco and the president of the Salvadoran American National Network (SANN). She can be reached at pmproj [at] progressive [dot] org.