Tuesday, June 28, 2016

Julianne Hing writes for The Nation:

The Supreme Court’s one-sentence non-ruling in the most important immigration case of the year landed Thursday with an enormous impact. The 4–4 deadlock effectively killed President Obama’s deportation-deferral program for the rest of his presidency. In the immediate, the estimated 4 million undocumented immigrants who would have benefited from the initiative are returned to their precarious lives. In the short term, the Supreme Court’s result revives a longstanding debate about where immigration advocates ought to pivot—to return the focus to a full congressional overhaul of the system or keep pushing for more creative executive action to stop deportations.

The past eight years have shown that Latino and immigrant voting power, which helped propel Obama to victory and reelection, does not on its own determine immigration policy. Congress and the Republican Party, now the Party of Trump, have made a weapon out of doing nothing. That’s why, the Court’s ruling notwithstanding, congressional politics are still not at the top of all immigrant advocates’ priority list. They remain focused on demanding that Obama put a moratorium on deportations.

. . .

Hillary Clinton, acknowledging that, has even painted herself into the kinds of corners Obama did as a candidate to emphasize her sympathies. In February Clinton pledged to keep immigration as among her top priorities and, pressed by MSNBC’s Jose Diaz-Balart at a town hall, said she’d introduce comprehensive immigration-reform legislation in the first 100 days of her presidency. Immigration watchers have heard those promises before.

“We’ve heard that talk before, but let’s take it at face value,” Kica Matos, director of immigrant rights and racial justice at the Center for Constitutional Change Action, told me. “Ultimately our goal is to bring about comprehensive immigration reform.” Matos said that especially in the wake of the Supreme Court decision, the dozens of immigrant-rights groups she worked with across the country had arranged their political activities with that goal in mind. The main priority now, especially as DAPA winds its way back through the courts, will be to mobilize Latino and immigrant voters to head to the polls in November, Matos said. CCC Action plans to focus on three key battleground states—Colorado, Florida, and Nevada—which all have large immigrant and Latino populations. Matos said her group has also identified a handful of Senate races they want to affect outside of those battleground states: Republican Senators Mark Kirk of Illinois, Ron Johnson in Wisconsin, and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania. And the reality is, no matter how pro-immigrant Clinton may be as president, the future of comprehensive immigration reform depends on the composition of Congress.

CCC Action’s goal is to create the conditions for comprehensive immigration reform to be politically viable come 2017. But some of the changes that are necessary for that to occur sound like wishful thinking. They include not only a Clinton win in November but also a Democratic retaking of both houses of Congress, and still at least some of the Republican Party will have to do a 360 on immigration, “after they realize they need to get right with this issue unless they want their party to disintegrate completely,” Matos said. “I know these are a lot of variables to take into consideration, but we have been thinking through what it will take to win and at least if we are successful with civic engagement efforts and mobilizing voters, there is a possibility we will be able to bring about comprehensive immigration reform.”

These promises for the future can seem awfully far off. The immigrant-rights movement, with so much at stake, faces few easy options from here. Read more...

bh

https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/2016/06/what-now-for-immigrants-and-immigrant-rights-advocates-after-us-v-texas.html