Note to the DCCC on Obstructionism

By Jerry Kammer on November 10, 2014

Over the weekend, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee sent out an email to boost partisan spirits with this explanation of last week's election debacle: "[T]he Republicans broke Washington. Then, they spent millions of dollars of secret money running against a broken Washington."

The email included an observation by Paul Krugman that "the biggest secret of the Republican triumph surely lies in the discovery that obstructionism bordering on sabotage is a winning political strategy."

I think Krugman is right about Republican obstructionism, most especially on policy regarding climate change. There, as Krugman observed, "the party is dominated by climate denialists and to some extent by conspiracy theorists who insist that the whole issue is a hoax constructed by a cabal of left-wing scientists."

But to see that Republicans have no lock on obstructionist zealots, most especially when it comes to immigration policy, look no further than the president's top adviser on immigration, Cecilia Munoz, director of the Domestic Policy Council.

As journalist Roberto Suro observed, the National Council of La Raza, where Munoz for many years was the chief immigration lobbyist and immigration enforcement obstructionist, "fought employer sanctions at every turn."

Employer sanctions — civil and even criminal penalties that Congress in 1986 promised would be imposed upon those who hired illegal immigrants — were a linchpin of the compromise legislation known as the Immigration Reform and Control Act.

That name is now notoriously a misnomer. The employer sanctions provisions were shattered by liberals like Cecilia Munoz who now advise President Obama on immigration policy. When Munoz was still with NCLR, she helped devise a smear campaign that claimed that organizations that want to restrict immigration are a cabal of right-wing racists, xenophobes, and haters.

At the Domestic Policy Council, Munoz has put the president in an immigration policy bubble, from which he issued this post-election promise to take executive action on immigration: "Before the end of the year, we're going take whatever lawful actions that I can take that I believe will improve the functioning of our immigration system, that will allow us to surge additional resources to the border where I think the vast majority of Americans have the deepest concern."

I don't know if the president was being naïve or cynical with his suggestion that his major concern is to apply additional resources to enforcing immigration law. Everyone knows that his executive order would provide legal status to millions of people who succeeded in breaking immigration law with the assistance of the obstructionists led by the National Council of La Raza and their friends in places like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Before he came under the sway of Cecilia Munoz, Mr. Obama understood the stakes of such broken immigration policy. When he was Senator Obama he wrote this in his book, The Audacity of Hope:

The number of immigrants added to the labor force every year is of a magnitude not seen in this country for over a century. If this huge influx of mostly low-skill workers provides some benefits to the economy as a whole — especially by keeping our workforce young, in contrast to an increasingly geriatric Europe and Japan — it also threatens to depress further the wages of blue-collar Americans and put strains on an already overburdened safety net.

But that was long ago. Now the president has joined the ranks of the Democratic denialists who fail to see the effects of unrestricted immigration. Now, while he says he wants to "surge additional resources to the border", he and his aides dream of surging additional Democrats into the electorate through mass immigration.

In 2006 Paul Krugman offered this explanation of the stakes for American workers:

While immigration may have raised overall income slightly, many of the worst-off native-born Americans are hurt by immigration — especially immigration from Mexico. Because Mexican immigrants have much less education than the average U.S. worker, they increase the supply of less-skilled labor, driving down the wages of the worst-paid Americans.

But fear not, said the DCCC in its weekend email, urging signatures on a statement of support "to say you're still standing with President Obama. ... He's fighting for working families who are in desperate need of a minimum wage increase."


Topics: Politics