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President Obama and Eddie
“Piolín” Sotelo |
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Obama, "Piolin" and Immigration
Reform
WASHINGTON (By John Rudolph, FI2W)
February 24, 2009
—
For a new president who is still in
the process of defining his
administration’s policies, the media
scrutiny can be intense. Almost
immediately after taking office
President Obama experienced what
it’s like to be under the microscope
as he and his White House team began
to grapple with the economic crisis.
Reporters guided by the advice to
“follow the money” in the stimulus
package began pulling apart the
president’s proposals even before a
penny was spent.
But, it seems, all issues do not
rise to the same level of media
attention – even highly
controversial ones like immigration
reform. Last week Mr. Obama went on
the popular Spanish-language radio
program Piolín por la Mañana and
stated that his administration will
start to draw up comprehensive
immigration reform legislation,
“over the next several months.” The
president also told the show’s host,
Eddie “Piolín” Sotelo that before
proposing new legislation:
“We’re going to start by really
trying to work on how to improve the
current system so that people who
want to be naturalized, who want to
become citizens, like you did, that
they are able to do it; that it’s
cheaper, that it’s faster, that they
have an easier time in terms of
sponsoring family members.”
Mr. Obama’s comments – striking in
their specificity — were reported by
Spanish-language media, but
virtually ignored by mainstream
English-language newspapers, TV and
web sites. It’s a continuation of a
pattern that was established during
last fall’s presidential campaign.
When he was running for president,
virtually the only place where Mr.
Obama talked about the issue of
immigration was in Spanish-language
media. His Republican rival, Senator
John McCain, followed an almost
identical strategy. As a result,
consumers of Spanish-language media
heard a debate over the two
candidate’s positions on immigration
that was missing from mainstream
media.
According to The Washington Post’s
James Rainey, by making himself
available to the often-marginalized
ethnic press, the president “has
signaled that he may shake up the
traditional protocols of Washington
journalism.” But there’s more to it
than that. Even as Mr. Obama says
“we are one America” he seems to
understand that there are groups –
including journalists – in this
country that don’t talk to one
another, never compare notes, and
hardly acknowledge each other’s
existence. The powerful
anti-immigrant sentiment that can be
found across the country is, at
least partly, a product of immigrant
and native-born communities that
exist side-by-side, but seem to
inhabit parallel universes. And it
is the anti-immigrant forces that
the president will have to win over
if meaningful changes to the
nation’s immigration laws are to be
enacted.
You can’t fault the president for
his choice last week of a friendly
environment to talk about
immigration reform. But at some
point Mr. Obama will have to take
his proposals to the whole country,
not just the Spanish-language radio
audience. That’s when the gulf
separating the different sides in
this debate will come more sharply
into focus. It will be the
president’s challenge to bring all
the factions together to find a way
to fix an immigration system
everyone agrees is broken.
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