LITTLE ROCK — Eduardo Alfaro, a fellow native of Nicaragua, has been much on my mind in recent days. He’s a good man, a family man who works hard and believes wholeheartedly in the promise of America.
My friend Eduardo has felt the pain of unenlightened immigration policy and paid a steep price for the legal residency he enjoys today, and he has done it without sinking into bitterness—a leap a man of lesser character might not have been able to make.
I think of Eduardo when the president voices support for comprehensive immigration reform, but stops short of committing the full power of his office to achieve fair treatment for immigrants and their families.
The president’s belief in the need for change is not at issue. Hispanics believe him when he says of immigrants that “regardless of how they got here, the overwhelming majority of these folks are just trying to earn a living and provide for their families.” We know he means it when he says “the United States of America should not be in the business of separating families.”
But despite the administration’s focus on deporting immigrants with criminal records—70 percent more in 2010 than in 2008, according to published reports—far too many good, hard-working people are also being deported, often with the separation of families as a terrible result.
The fact is that the policy is broken, and it has been so for decades. Just ask Eduardo. He was deported in 1993 after having lived quietly for years in the United States, working and raising a family with his wife, Maritsa. Their children were 12, eight and three at the time. He spent the next 11 years away, until he could return legally. By then, his two oldest children were young adults, and he had missed the childhood of his youngest.
As it happened, three years into his exile, I was working for the U.S. Department of Commerce and traveled to Managua on official business. I looked up my old friend and visited him at his apartment. I saw a solitary, broken man, lost without his family, and I remembered the look in my own mother’s eyes when, before Eduardo was deported, she asked, “You can’t help this man?”
I wondered why I was involved in government when I could do nothing for this family.
Indeed, there was nothing I could do, but I was not the president of the United States. Presidents have power, and many in the Hispanic community wonder why he does not use it to quickly reduce the number of deportations.
Although we understand his point when he observes that immigration activists want him to “bypass Congress and change the law myself,” we do not understand his insistence on congressional action as the sole pathway to achieving change. It rings hollow in the face of implacable Tea Party-fueled Republican opposition.
The fact is that the president has many legal, effective tools at his disposal (which do not require congressional approval), such as deferred action, extended voluntary departure, deferred enforcement departure, humanitarian parole and parole in place. Such executive action would provide some immediate relief, even as efforts to achieve comprehensive immigration reform proceed.
That would be a tangible commitment. It would demonstrate to Hispanic voters—who supported Obama overwhelmingly two-and-a-half years ago—that he has the courage to face ferocious political opposition to do what is right, even as he respects the rule of law and the principles of democracy and representative government. We agree with the president’s assertion in El Paso that “we are a nation of laws,” and nothing we propose conflicts with that position.
Undeniably, the president is in a hard place—caught between well-financed, organized, relentless political opposition and the demands of his progressive base—even as he seeks re-election and tries to focus on doing what is right for the country.
But that is when a president’s courage and character are most on display. All across the United States, families like the Alfaros—and those who care about them—will be watching.
Gus West is chair of The Hispanic Institute.
Perspective, Pages 74 on 08/07/2011