Hillary Clinton will be making her biggest policy pronouncements to date on immigration Tuesday and the big question hanging in the air is, how far will she lean in? What Clinton says during a roundtable at Rancho High School in Las Vegas, Nevada, will indicate just how much she is breaking away from the old Rahm-inspired conventional wisdom that immigration is the third-rail of politics.
Her campaign has been reaching out to a wide array of immigration advocacy groups and activists in advance of the speech, reports Adrian Carrasquillo.
While most advocates expect to hear her endorse immigration reform and a pathway to citizenship, they also want to know how invested she is in the issue and whether she will commit to taking executive actions that may even go further than those that President Obama has already taken.
“I want to hear, ‘In my first year, immigration reform is getting done and it’s getting done well,’” said Angelica Salas, from the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA), who often visited with the White House during the 2014 run up to the executive actions.
Janet Murguia, president of National Council of La Raza (NCLR), who made waves last year after calling Obama the “deporter-in-chief,” said that until Congress acts, the Latino community expects the next president to not only commit to making immigration legislation a priority, but to “expending political capital to achieve immigration reform.”
“For us, it means placing it at the top of her legislative agenda, working with Congress to broaden pathways for people to work and providing an accessible path to citizenship for longterm residents,” she said...
“What would get me to put a Hillary sticker on my car is if she said the president’s executive actions didn’t go far enough and didn’t exercise the totality of discretion,” said one activist whose organization has hit Clinton for her public comments on immigration.
For more on Clinton's roundtable event, head below the fold.
Immigration activists have been burned before. In 2008, Obama committed to getting immigration reform done in his first year in office, but he failed to prioritize the issue during the narrow two-year window in which Democrats held control of Congress.
Now, some organizations are pointing to the electoral successes that Democrats have had when they pushed immigration concerns. Here's America's Voice:
Nevada is the site of one of the best examples of the new politics of immigration. During his 2010 reelection campaign, Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) defied many pundits and won reelection handily by leaning into immigration issues and maximizing Latino voter turnout in the process.
It's also worth remembering that after Obama failed the immigration community in 2009/2010, the Democrats took a drubbing in the midterms. But after enacting the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program in June of 2012, Obama went on to win re-election with the
enthusiastic support of immigration activists.
Obama's 2012 DACA announcement entirely flipped his numbers with Latino voters in battleground states, with a plurality (41 percent) saying they were "less enthusiastic" about Obama before he announced DACA, and a plurality (49 percent) calling themselves "more enthusiastic" about Obama after he announced the program. That's a net enthusiasm shift of +35 points.
Clinton's remarks Tuesday will be a major indication of how committed she is to energizing that same community in 2016.