Obama’s Immigration Policy: The Audacity of Manipulation

By Ruben Navarrette Jr.

When it’s time to use the immigration issue to manipulate Latino voters, President Obama’s audacity knows no bounds. He will say or do just about anything to fool people into supporting him.

Indeed, curiously enough for someone who has never shown the slightest interest in immigration reform throughout his public service career — who, in the first 26 months of his presidency, put it so far on the back burner that it fell off the stove — Obama suddenly can’t stop talking about the subject.

Of course, the president is only bringing up immigration now because his poll numbers with Latinos have dropped: nearly half of those who support him say they aren’t likely to vote for him next year.

So he needs a cynical ploy that is intended to give Republicans a chance to behave boorishly. By the way, that’s pretty much how Republicans tend to behave when discussing immigration. Obama sets the trap, and Republicans walk right into it. We all know this is how it works.

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