For some reason, conservative criticisms of Barack Obama's policies tend to focus on telepathic mind-reading about a hidden radical agenda rather than on what he's actually doing. The conversation over immigration is no different -- conservative groups, bolstered by complaints about lax enforcement from the employee union that represents Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, are accusing the administration of "favoring amnesty" over enforcement. As Elise Foley notes, conservatives have pounced on the union's complaints in order to accuse the Obama administration of not being "particularly concerned about curbing illegal immigration and enforcing the rule of law.”
The thing is, this already is outside the realm of the theoretical. The Obama administration has deported illegal immigrants at a higher rate in the past two years than any time during the Bush administration. It has expanded the SB 1070-like "Secure Communities" program to every county along the Southwest border. It has done all this without any meaningful steps toward comprehensive immigration reform, and the only thing on the administration's agenda that can be plausibly described as "amnesty" is its effort to prevent high school graduates whose parents brought them to the U.S. prior to the age of 16 from being deported. Given that these are the kind of diligent, English-speaking, Americanized immigrants Republicans say they want, and their presence here is no fault of their own, the proposal shouldn't be half as controversial as it actually is.
As I noted in my column last week, as far as Obama's actual behavior goes, he's an unapologetic immigration hawk. But for some reason, the conversation over immigration policy continues to take place in some imaginary realm where assumptions about Obama's hidden sympathies trump what's actually happening in the real world. I'm not sure what exactly is going on at ICE, but the numbers speak for themselves.