President Barack Obama and Democrats have stridently stuck to a "one-solution issue" for immigration reform, rejecting solutions that Republicans have championed for years, Hispanic Post founder and editor-in-chief Clara Del Villar says.
Speaking on Newsmax TV Thursday night after Obama's announcement of far-reaching orders on immigration to shield nearly 5 million undocumented migrants, Del Villar called the president's charge that Republicans never tried to deal with the immigration issue "disingenuous at best and cynical at worst."
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"He started his speech tonight by saying the Republicans would not introduce any resolutions or any issues that would be helpful towards immigration reform and I would really beg to differ," she said. "There were some amazing amounts of congresspeople and policy people that indeed introduced the guest worker pass as an alternative to dealing with the immigration reform issue."
The idea was simply cast aside by the Democrats and the president, she said.
"When any kind of discussion of this was held in the last two or three years, the Democrats, the president had a one-solution issue," she said. "It was comprehensive reform or nothing so they backed Republicans into a corner."
Del Villar said former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush "wrote a book advocating guest worker pass as an interim solution to deal with this issue."
"Everything was struck aside," she charged. "Republicans should really hold the notion that the congressional legislative process is not part of this resolution and that's bad, not good."
Del Villar noted the president's order also ignores gaping holes in visa tracking.
"Sixty percent of the undocumented workers have expired visas," she said, questioning how an already struggling immigration administrative bureaucracy can now add millions of people to its rolls.
And even with the new order in place, what guarantees do the newly shielded immigrants have, she asked.
"My question is to all the legal immigrants that are going through the process, the registration, the time and energy, and all of a sudden what's their time and energy worth if all of a sudden with the wave of a pen the president can make a decision?" she noted. "[T]he process here the president introduced is broken."
Del Villar said legal action against the presidential orders "is a sensible place to start" the fight against the presidential order.
"It's a much more productive place to start than talk about government shutdown," she said. "And impeachment is just not a productive way to go. Challenging the notion that the congressional authority is not part of this process is a place to go and also when you really think about it, the president has rebuked his own stated view of what democracy is all about. He said all along that he lacked the authority as president o make a unilateral decision."
Republicans have plenty of time "to sow the seeds of doubt" about the presidential order, she added.
"Without congressional authority, this is not a robust or substantive law that can hold on for years to come," she said. "In my opinion, my fear is that we now have a two-tiered Hispanic community in the United States. Those that are here legally and went through the process and those now that have questionably presidential authority behind them."
Political commentator Rachel Campos Duffy added Hispanics want immigration reform to fix a system that's "broken." But the debate should be in Congress, she said.
"There's no debate when this is resolved or done in the White House," she said. "That's something that I'm concerned about as an American and as a Hispanic. I mean so many of us have left countries where there's no rule of law, where there are dictators, where there is no representation for the people…"
"What they want is a real solution," she added, calling the president''s order "a temporary fix that serves his political purpose. It can be overturned by a court, it can be overturned by a future president."
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