Immigration

Monday, Feb 7, 2000 11:00 AM UTC

So much for singing nuns

The rise of Joerg Haider forces Austria to face the truth about its history -- and puts the European Union in a bind.

By John Marks

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Last week, as hundreds of demonstrators took to the streets of Vienna to protest the entry of Joerg Haider’s anti-immigrant Freedom Party into the Austrian government and as European leaders denounced Haider himself for xenophobia and extremism, an odd little statement of outrage appeared on the Freedom Party (FPV) homepage.

“We were informed in September 1999 that a counterfeit of our website existed on the Internet,” the statement begins. “We distance ourselves expressly from the altered content and the links on this website. We have no relations whatsoever with these cyberterrorists.”

The cyberterrorists in question, as yet unidentified, have played a grim joke. On a site otherwise resembling the FPV address, tucked away under the heading Blue Links, are a few cheerily nationalist German phrases where lists of regional party headquarters should be. Each phrase hides a link. “Crusaders for our time” links to the Ku Klux Klan homepage. “We don’t understand the language, but the symbols are right” connects to France’s National Front, the right-wing party of Jean Marie Le Pen. And “Songs from the Homeland,” the most incendiary link of all, contains banned hate groups and their songs — everything from “Fuehrer, Fuehrer” by Romper Stomper and “Into the Oven” by Macht und Ehre (Power and Honor) to “Six Million Lies” by No Remorse and “Coon Shootin’ Boogie” by Aryan.

The butt of the joke may be Haider and his party. But the punch line touches on Europe’s deepest fears. The European Union members have reacted vehemently to the rise of the Freedom Party, imposing diplomatic isolation on Austria and, in the case of Belgium, hinting at expulsion. Having rebuilt themselves upon the ruins of two world wars, having survived a bloody century, the states of the EU have gone to great lengths to assure the rest of the world — and themselves — that the next century will be different.

In 1999, they adopted a single currency. Border controls have all but vanished (it is now possible to drive from Calais in northern France to Bari at the southern tip of Italy without a customs check). In November, several of the countries will begin to formalize a new military alliance. Slowly but surely, inch by bureaucratic inch, EU countries have been working toward a comfortable peace with one another, toward a trade-based harmony of languages, currencies, flags and cuisines.

Now, just as the road ahead seems clear, as the Balkan wars wind down, and even Turkey and Greece look ready to settle long-standing disputes, they find themselves confronted by Haider’s party, and everything that it represents — everything that the counterfeited links grotesquely imply — in the government of one of its own member states.

Austrians have not been thrilled by the EU’s reaction. Many have expressed shock at the threat of diplomatic isolation. After all, Haider’s party did not stage a military coup. It won seats in a legitimate election and stands to win even more if this new coalition falls apart and new elections must be held.

Some EU countries, Italy in particular, seem uncomfortable with the overweening tone of the response. In 1994, a neo-fascist party, the National Alliance, joined the government in Rome. Despite a lot of hand-wringing, nothing much happened, and like so many Italian parties, the National Alliance vanished as quickly as it had come.

The EU has not backed down so far, but its bark will be worse than its bite. Already, economic sanctions have been ruled out, if they were ever seriously considered.

In a sense, the message of the member states is not for Haider and the Austrians. It aims to cow far-right parties in their own countries, and to discourage coalitions with them. In France, where the National Front remains a force, this is a concern. And in Germany, where the mainstream conservative party faces the worst scandal in its history, politicians fear the possibility that large numbers of right-leaning voters will defect to the handful of extremist parties. To make themselves clear on this point, the Social Democratic governments that make up the bulk of the EU are more than willing to wax anti-democratic.

Haider, who recently turned 50, is a whisper of the past. His parents were committed National Socialists. He has praised the employment policies of the Third Reich and sympathetically addressed groups of aging SS veterans. His last name begins with H and has six letters. And the final blow, a taunt from ghosts: He’s an Austrian, as was Adolf Hitler. “Europe is no longer in the 1930s,” France’s foreign minister Hubert Vedrine said on French radio last week, as if to remind himself that it was so.

Austria had a catastrophic 20th century. It began as the 600-year-old, multi-ethnic Hapsburg Empire, run by a decrepit Kaiser and covering a territory that included most of what we now call Eastern Europe. One hundred years later, it ended up a prosperous but insignificant modern republic smaller than Maine and populated largely by Catholic German speakers. The metamorphosis explains some of the country’s current woes. To this day, Austrians haven’t quite let go of their Hapsburg pretensions, a superiority complex steeped in parochialism.

Other parts of the past haven’t been as readily embraced: Hitler, for instance. The future leader of the Third Reich was born in the crown lands and spent his formative years as an aspiring artist in Linz and Vienna, watching the erosion of Germanic culture and political authority by the empire’s bric-a-brac of ethnic populations, by its Slavs, Jews and Gypsies.

In 1938, Germany annexed Austria and Viennese crowds cheered Hitler’s arrival. But after World War II, Austrians painted the happy union as a hostile invasion. Hitler (the Austrian par excellence) and his cronies became de facto Germans. Austrians became their victims, the civilized, deeply horrified heirs of Beethoven (who was in fact German) attacked by ugly Teutons.

Pop culture lent a hand to cleaning up Austria’s image in the 1960s. The Broadway musical “The Sound of Music” transformed Austria into a land of musically gifted, politically persecuted children, nuns and admirals. In a coup de grbce, at the end of the 1965 movie version, a crowd of Austrians sings the country’s national anthem under the hostile glare of a Nazi official outraged by this show of national defiance.

In 1986, the truth about Austria’s past began to emerge. The country’s president, a former chief of the United Nations, Kurt Waldheim, had served with the SS, and he was castigated for this record internationally. The United States banned him from entering the country.

Under siege, the country made efforts to correct the record. “There has been some movement,” Edward Serotta, a well-respected chronicler of Jewish life in East Central Europe and a Vienna resident, told me. “Not enough, but there is some.” School textbooks now include the Holocaust, and, as in Germany, documentaries on the subject run frequently on national television. Austrian chancellors have visited Israel and admitted their country’s guilt; a Holocaust memorial is under construction.

But the past as an explanation for Haider only goes so far. His rise to power is more easily explained by popular discontent with the country’s ruling class than it is by an appeal to right-wing extremism. Ever since the end of World War II, Austria has been a fiefdom of two parties: the Social Democrats and the Christian Social Party. For most of the Cold War, when the country was officially neutral, the system worked well. Tourism boomed; the country’s inhabitants had one of the best-financed welfare states in Europe. Flush with cash, the two parties usually forged a coalition, dividing the spoils of government between them.

A recession in the 1980s tarnished their records and opened the way to Haider’s small third party, the FPV, which typically garnered about 7 percent of the vote with its attacks on immigrants and the money that they cost the average Austrian in social security and crime prevention. “Vienna must not become Chicago,” ran one of their more famous slogans.

In October, after years of rising fortunes, the party won 27 percent of the vote and placed second in national elections. At first, the two old ruling parties attempted to form the usual coalition, but in January talks broke down, and Austria, for better or worse, has entered a new phase of its history.

So has Europe. Whether or not Haider turns out to be as dangerous as his countryman — a distinct improbability — he does present a real challenge to the values of tolerance and free trade that the European Union has cultivated over the last half century. Haider doesn’t have to be Hitler to cause trouble.

The EU may have overreacted; it may have shown more nervousness than was strictly necessary. On the other hand, the counterfeit links on the FPV site may be more of a warning than a joke. If so, the warning has been heeded.

John Marks is the author of the memoir "Reasons To Believe: One Man's Journey Among the Evangelicals and The Faith He Left Behind." His latest novel, "Fangland," a story of vampires in the news business, is one of this nominees for the World Fantasy Award in fiction. He blogs at www.purplestateofmind.com. More John Marks.

Thursday, May 24, 2012 5:27 PM UTC

Will Latinos elect Obama?

Hispanic voters may not be as decisive a voting bloc as everyone assumes. Just look at the swing states

By Jefferson Morley

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(Credit: AP/Jae C. Hong)

The conventional wisdom is that the growing Latino vote is key to President Obama’s reelection prospects. By all accounts, Latinos favor the president over Mitt Romney by wider margins than they favored him over John McCain in 2008, when he won two-thirds of the Hispanic vote and captured crucial swing states with large Hispanic populations, including Colorado, Nevada and Florida. Bloomberg reported this week that lower-than-average unemployment in the key battleground states “coupled with the growth of adult minority populations in those states create a higher bar” for Romney in his quest to oust the incumbent.

But a closer look at the numbers is not so reassuring for the president. Much of the growth in the Latino population has occurred in California, Texas, Illinois and New York, which are not likely to be competitive come Election Day. While the Latino population is growing fast, the Latino electorate is not. Compared to other ethnic/racial groups, Latinos are more likely than whites to be under 18 years of age or to be non-citizens. “For every 100 Hispanic residents in the United States, only 44 are eligible voters aged 18 and over and U.S. citizens,” notes William Frey, demographer at the Brookings Institution. “In contrast, 78 of every 100 white residents are able to vote.”

Frey has argued that “minorities will decide” the 2012 election, but he acknowledged in a telephone interview that Latinos, as a group, do not loom large in most of the dozen battleground states. According to his analysis of 2008 and 2012 census data, Latinos comprise less than 2 percent of the voting population in Ohio and Virginia. In North Carolina, New Hampshire and Iowa, they comprise 3 percent or less of the electorate. In Wisconsin, they comprise 3.1 percent of voters, down from 3.7 percent in 2008. Even if Obama won an additional 10 percent of the Latino electorate in these states over what he did against McCain, the increase would be smaller than his margin of victory in 2008 in every case.

That leaves Florida, Nevada, New Mexico and Colorado, where the Latino vote appears to be large enough to be decisive in a close race. The good news for Obama is that many of those states could make the difference between winning and losing the White House. The bad news is that the outlook is distinctly less favorable to a more decisive Latino role than 2008.

As Frey has noted:

Minorities mattered in 2008 for three reasons: first, their relative sizes compared with whites increased in each state; second, their enthusiasm for the Democratic candidate was greater than in 2004; and third, white support for the Republican candidate (John McCain) waned in comparison to the previous election.

None of those factors appear to hold true in Florida. Latinos comprise about 15 percent of the state’s voters, unchanged from 2008. While a Gallup swing state poll earlier this month found Democrats are more enthusiastic about the president than Republicans are about Romney, they are also less enthusiastic about Obama’s candidacy now than they were in 2008, especially minority voters. As Real Clear Politics has noted:

Enthusiasm among non-white voters is down from 74 percent at this point in 2008 (vs. 58 percent for whites) to 48 percent today (the same goes for whites). And, indeed, in 2010, African-American turnout reverted to the mean. If this occurs in 2012, Democrats will need a massive surge in the minority population elsewhere to make up for this regression.

The most likely place for this to occur is within the Latino community. That population grew smartly over the 2000s. But — much less remarked upon — the Latino electorate did not. Indeed, since 2004, it has been almost perfectly flat, and it contributed only marginally to the decline of the white vote from 2004 to 2008.

Only in the three swing states of the Southwest — New Mexico, Nevada and Colorado — does the Latino vote seem big enough to be decisive. In New Mexico, Latinos are 38 percent of the electorate, down slightly from 2008. In Nevada, Latinos are now 17.3 percent of all voters, up from 13.3 percent from four years ago. And in Colorado, Latinos are now 12.1 percent of all voters, up from 11.3 percent in 2008. Only in these states does the combination of the size and growth of the Latino electorate and Obama’s edge on Romney appear capable of giving him a margin of victory he might otherwise lack. In the rest of the swing states, he’s going to need something else.

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Jefferson Morley is a staff writer for Salon in Washington and author of the forthcoming book, Snow-Storm in August: Washington City, Francis Scott Key, and the Forgotten Race Riot of 1835 (Nan Talese/Doubleday). More Jefferson Morley.

Tuesday, May 22, 2012 3:33 PM UTC

Rep. Steve King: Immigrants are like dogs

Updated: On Monday, the Iowa GOP rep used a degrading metaphor to describe how America should select immigrants

By Alex Seitz-Wald

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Rep. Steve King: Immigrants are like dogs

Steve King (Credit: Reuters/Larry Downing)

[Updated below]

Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, compared immigrants to dogs at a town hall meeting yesterday, telling constituents that the U.S. should pick only the best immigrants the way one chooses the “pick of the litter.”

King told the crowd in Pocahontas, Iowa, that he’s owned lots of bird dogs over the years and advised, “You want a good bird dog? You want one that’s going to be aggressive? Pick the one that’s the friskiest … not the one that’s over there sleeping in the corner.”

King suggested lazy immigrants should be avoided as well. “You get the pick of the litter and you got yourself a pretty good bird dog. Well, we’ve got the pick of every donor civilization on the planet,” King said. “We’ve got the vigor from the planet to come to America.” The liberal research group American Bridge captured the comments:

King has long been one of Congress’ most vociferous and toxic opponents of illegal immigration and “amnesty,” often partnering with notorious immigration hawks like former congressman Tom Tancredo and Maricopa County, Ariz., Sheriff Joe Arpaio. In 2010, he took to the House floor to declare that he could detect “illegals” by their footwear and his “sixth sense.”

Lately, however, King has backed off his inflammatory rhetoric, thanks to a tough challenge from Democrat Christie Vilsack. His bird dog comments suggest, however, that his mouth will continue to dog him.

Update: In a statement, Vilsack’s campaign said, “If we’re going to have a real discussion on immigration, we should start by acknowledging that immigrants are human beings. Iowans are taught in their community, in their church, and at the dinner table to respect each other, not to compare people to dogs. People expect a serious discussion between candidates and that’s what we’re committed to.”

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Alex Seitz-Wald is Salon's political reporter. Email him at aseitz-wald@salon.com, and follow him on Twitter @aseitzwald. More Alex Seitz-Wald.

Monday, May 21, 2012 9:52 PM UTC

Mitt’s new Latino hurdle

The conservative Hispanic group Romney will address this week once slammed "right-wing extremists" on immigration

By Alex Seitz-Wald

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Mitt Romney (Credit: AP)

As part of an effort to win back Latino voters, Mitt Romney will address a conservative Latino business group this week that has advocated immigration policy views in stark contrast to his own. Romney’s “self-deportation” policy put him well to the right of many of his GOP primary challengers, and the Latino Coalition once slammed “right-wing extremists” who opposed comprehensive immigration reform.

The presumed GOP nominee’s Wednesday speech to the Latino Coalition comes as polls show Romney way behind President Obama among Latino voters and with little hope of capturing the 44 percent of the bloc George W. Bush won in 2004, a highwater mark for the GOP. Even New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez (R) — whom Romney floated as a potential vice-presidential choice — mocked the presumed GOP’s immigration policy last week.

The Romney campaign’s response has been that immigration is irrelevant to winning over Latino voters — jobs and the economy are the only things that matter. But his speech this week underscores just how difficult an argument that will be for him to make: In the past, the Latino Coalition has argued that immigration reform is part of a pro-business platform, not separate from it.

These days, the only immigration issue the Coalition mentions on its website is the “Mexican Trucking issue.” But the group aggressively advocated for comprehensive immigration reform under President Bush. In 2007, the Coalition’s president slammed “far right extremists” who opposed “common-sense [immigration reform] legislation that is so important for the security and economic vitality of our country.” The group “urge[d] Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and the Democratic leadership in the House to demonstrate courage and leadership on this issue and take on immigration reform,” saying Pelosi could pass a bill “without the level of Republican support she is demanding.”

In the 2008 GOP primary, the Latino Coalition favored Rudy Giuliani — a veritable leftist on immigration reform compared to most Republicans — with the former New York mayor capturing 64 percent of the vote in a straw poll of the group’s members. Romney apparently finished behind Sen. John McCain and former Sen. Fred Thompson, as his name was not mentioned in the statement.

Meanwhile, the Chamber of Commerce, whose grand D.C. offices will host the event Wednesday, also supported comprehensive reform under Bush, similarly seeing it as a boon for free market capitalism. The powerful business lobby still calls for “an effective and streamlined temporary worker program so that employers can hire immigrant workers” and “a pathway to legal status for undocumented workers currently in the United States.”

This was essentially Bush’s policy too. But Romney’s infamous immigration advisor, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who authored the draconian anti-immigration laws in Arizona and Alabama, said his candidate would not support any kind of pathway to legalization for undocumented immigrants.

The Romney campaign briefly attempted to disown Kobach after Romney won the primary and the advisor’s utility was spent, but he may have to throw his entire immigration policy under the bus with Kobach if he hopes to win over the Latino business owners on Wednesday, let alone Hispanic voters more generally.

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Alex Seitz-Wald is Salon's political reporter. Email him at aseitz-wald@salon.com, and follow him on Twitter @aseitzwald. More Alex Seitz-Wald.

Thursday, May 17, 2012 9:15 PM UTC

Obama’s broken immigration promise

ICE said it would target dangerous immigrants, but it's actually deporting a higher percentage of non-criminals

By Jefferson Morley

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A man in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, stands next to the border fence as two U.S. law enforcement officers look on from the U.S. side of the fence. (Credit: AP/Raymundo Ruiz)

The Obama administration claims that it is deporting record numbers of illegal immigrants while focusing on those with criminal records. But new data from Immigration and Customs Enforcement shows that the number of deportation orders has declined dramatically since last summer and non-criminals comprise a growing percentage of those expelled from the country.

That wasn’t supposed to happen under a policy of “prosecutorial discretion” announced by ICE director John Morton last June. The goal of the policy, announced with much fanfare in the Spanish language media, was to spare “longtime lawful residents” from deportation and to focus on criminals.

Since then, the adminstration has deported many fewer non-criminal aliens. But non-criminals remain the vast majority of those deported. And those with no criminal record now actually comprise a slightly larger percentage of those forced to leave the country than they did before Morton’s announcement.

In the three months before the policy was announced last summer ICE filed for deportation proceedings against 61,192 people of whom 15 percent had criminal records. In the first three months of 2012, ICE sought 37,659 deportations orders, 14 percent of which involved people with criminal records.

“The agency continues to be headed in the opposite direction of its stated goals,” said Susan Long, co-director of the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, which collected the data from ICE via a Freedom of Information Act request.

The goal of prosecutorial discretion, Long said in a conference call with reporters, “was to target and bring before the court those with more serious criminal history. As yet we’re not seeing any change. They have not turned the ship around.”

The administration implemented prosecutorial discretion in response to complaints that young people with no criminal records continue to face deportation. But the new data will come as no surprise to student groups such as United We Dream, National Immigrant Youth Alliance and DreamActivist, which continue to highlight the cases of law-abiding young people facing deportation.

Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., has championed the case of a South Carolina man, Gabino Sánchez, a married father of two, who was arrested for driving without a license last year and now faces deportation.

“Gabino Sánchez has lived and worked and raised a family here for more than a decade and it is not in anyone’s interest to have him deported,” Rep. Gutierrez told Fox News Latino on Tuesday after a deportation hearing in North Carolina. ”I do not understand why ICE has not followed President Obama’s guidelines and decided to move on from this case to go after someone else, someone who is a threat to his community or a serious criminal.”

In response to the TRAC findings, Gutierrez said, “The president should make sure the Department of Homeland Security is actually following its own rules and he should proclaim proudly and loudly that he will not deport another DREAMer or anyone else who fits the prosecutorial discretion criteria.”

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Wednesday, May 2, 2012 4:20 PM UTC

Dreamers spurn Obama

Young immigrants feel tricked by the White House line on Marco Rubio's revival of the DREAM Act

By Jefferson Morley

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Supporters of the DREAM Act take part in a demonstration in front of the White House. (Credit: AP/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

Mohammad Abdollahi has not followed every twist and turn of the national immigration debate. He has been too busy trying to save a friend from deportation.

Last month, 20-year-old Izlia Luna of Medford, Ore., was stopped by police for a traffic altercation. The judge threw out the charges. But under the mandate of the Obama administration’s Secure Communities program, Luna’s fingerprints had been taken. She was found to be undocumented. Luna was brought to the United States from Mexico when she was 2 years old. Instead of being released she was sent to an ICE detention facility in Tacoma, Wash., 340 miles from her home.

“This is what immigration reform under Obama has gotten us,” says Abdollahi, who traveled to Tacoma to rally public attention to Luna’s case. “The right to spend up to $5,000 to get a loved one out of jail. When Obama says he isn’t deporting dreamers, he’s lying.”

“Marco Rubio is being a lot more authentic with us,” Abdollahi added.

The positive response of young immigrants to Rubio’s still-vague alternative to the Democrats’ DREAM Act is central to the changing politics of immigration in the 2012 presidential campaign. In a series of meetings in Washington, Rubio is shopping for support, hoping to put forward a legislative proposal in the next few weeks. The Washington Post endorsed the idea on Monday.

By flirting with Rubio, the DREAM activists — representing an estimated 1 million young Americans, or “dreamers,” who are now barred from a path to U.S. citizenship — have wrong-footed the Obama White House and given pause to reelection campaign officials who had been counting on Latinos to fall in line with the president’s reelection. They have also caught the interest of Republican strategists worried about Romney’s narrowing path for victory in November.

Rubio is expected to propose the creation of a non-immigrant visa that would ensure undocumented young people who don’t have criminal records would not be deported and could eventually become citizens. The original DREAM Act failed to pass the Senate in 2010.

“We are going to support whoever will come out and talk about the issue,” said Gabby Pacheco, a 26-year-old special education teacher from Miami and DREAM Act activist. “Rubio realizes this is key for us. Even if he is only doing it for political reasons, we’re willing to listen.”

The dreamers are backed by Latino Democrats on Capitol Hill, who feel betrayed by the Obama administration’s boasts of deporting a record annual average of 400,000 people over the last four years. After a friendly if inconclusive meeting with Rubio, Rep. Luis Gutierrez of Illinois told Politico his liberal allies accused him of being the Florida senator’s new “best friend.”

The Obama White House hates the idea. Last week, presidential advisors Celia Munoz and Valerie Jarrett tried to discourage the dreamers from embracing Rubio’s proposal, saying it put at risk the original DREAM Act, which laid out a specific path to citizenship. According to the Washington Post, they had a meeting with DREAM Act-eligible students in Washington, arguing that “Rubio had not demonstrated he could win support from fellow Republicans and that the president would use his clout to push an immigration plan next year. ”

Pacheco, who attended the meeting, was not impressed with the White House appeal.

“You can’t wait until next year if you’re getting deported this year,” she said. She described the White House officials as “very strategic” in their opposition to Rubio. She said the dreamers asked Munoz and Jarrett if the president could stop the deportations by taking administrative action that would not need to be approved by Congress, as Florida immigration activist Cheryl Little recently wrote in the Miami Herald.

“The thing that surprised us was they said no,” Pacheco told me. “They said, practically, ‘We don’t have the power to do this.’We’re trying to find out if that is true.”

It isn’t true, says Laura Lichter, an attorney in Denver and president-elect of the American Immigration Lawyer’s Association.

“The Obama administration could certainly be doing more and better to improve the situation for DREAM Act students and to make immigration law and policy predictable and fair for everybody,” Lichter said in a telephone interview. “Whether they’re willing to do that in any way that might look like reasonable treatment for the undocumented remains to be seen.”

Presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney, who has advocated “self-deportation” for the likes of Abdollahi and Luna and the estimated 1 million DREAM Act-eligible students, is noncommittal about Rubio’s idea. Romney’s hard-line immigration advisor, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, initially rejected the suggestion as “amnesty,” but has more recently said he can “work with” the Florida senator, a nod to the growing realization that running on a platform of “self-deportation” is Romney’s ticket to self-destruction among Latino voters in November.

Whether Rubio’s gambit can sway Republican votes on Capitol Hill is doubtful. House Speaker John Boehner described passage of such a bill this year as “difficult at best.” Helping the undocumented is not a priority for most non-Latino voters, according to Republican pollster Scott Rasmussen.

While elite Republicans like Haley Barbour have said positive things about Rubio’s idea, the conservative blogosphere is notably unenthusiastic. The Weekly Standard touted Rubio’s recent foreign policy speech while ignoring his much-publicized idea of helping young undocumented Americans closer to home. The National Review hyped Rubio as a Romney running mate without taking a stand on his proposal “to give the children of illegal immigrants a visa to continue their studies.” Talk radio stalwarts like Rush Limbaugh and Hugh Hewitt have yet to mention Rubio’s plan, while Mickey Kaus, the Daily Caller’s anti-immigrant blogger, notes conservative intellectuals can only agree to disagree on the issue.

If the Republicans’ intellectual base seems stumped by Rubio’s gambit, the Democratic incumbent comes off as arrogant. In a recent interview with Telemundo, President Obama said:

This notion that somehow Republicans want to have it both ways — they want to vote against these laws [like Arizona and Alabama] and appeal to anti-immigrant sentiment … and then they come and say, ‘But we really care about these kids and we want to do something about it’ — that looks like hypocrisy to me.

To the dreamers, Obama is just as hypocritical. “A lot of folks want us to be against it,” Abdollahi said. “At the same time we hear from Obama administration that they’re not deporting dreamers. They’re tricking us. That’s what makes us supportive of Rubio.”

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