Catholic Magazine Commonweal Does A Whitewash On Obama's Immigration Record

The Catholic Mag that is a tad more in the progressive camp , Commonweal , has done a article Santorum, Obama and immigrant families

Good Grief where to start. First let me say I very much disagree with Rick Santorum on this issue ,and agree with Thomas Peters over at Catholicvote.org that he has room to grow. In fact he better grow because if he does not not I fear he might lose the election.

My active support will largely go to either Santorum or Romney based on which one of the that is first to show grounds of growing. Before I get to Obama let me examine this part of Santorum statement.

..So yeah, I feel bad. I mean, I don’t like to break up families. But you know, the family can go back. We’re not sending them to Siberia. We’re not sending them to any kind of, you know, difficult — they’re going to Mexico, which is a great country, a nice country and they can go back like every other Mexican wants to come to America and come here legally.

Now let's not deal with the Gospel concerns here. In fact lets not deal with the debate how exactly Mexico is nice or not very nice right now. What's being talked about here is families of mixed legal status.

First , as to a possible child that is the American Citizen what if he does not want to a town that is gang infested? Does he have no rights

Second ,and here is the point that is often missed, why does Rick Santorum think Mexico would take the non Americans in such numbers? Why this is assumed I don't know. In fact the problem is now when deportation occur many countries will not take the spouse or kid of the deported even if they wanted to go.

Now on to Obama. This seems like a replay of 2008 when John McCain's positives ( from a Commonweal standpoint) on immigration did not matter much and Obama's past sins was not talked about.

Obama in 2007 pretty much played a leading role in killing immigration reform in the Senate.

The best immigration reporter , that appears not to be on many Catholic magazines Rolodex or they just ignore ,Reuben Navarrette always reminds people of this Judas moment.

In the latest setback, activists are quietly fuming that Obama couldn’t summon a stronger word than “misguided” to describe Arizona’s racial profiling law – something for which The New York Times editorial page also took Obama to task.
Why would this surprise anyone? Obama has a poor record on immigration. As a senator, he joined Democratic leader Harry Reid in trying to kill an immigration reform bill with poison pill amendments – all to please organized labor, which preferred no bill to one with guest workers.
Obama has also been more than willing to play politics with the immigration issue for short-term gain. My theory is that Obama falls into the part of the liberal spectrum that is leery of immigration reform because of concerns that immigrant labor hurts blue-collar workers, especially African-Americans.

It also helped Obama that Bush ,and thus the GOP could have been associated with a win to help them with LATINOS. In the short run it really would have helped McCain with Latinos since he was leading the charge and taking the arrows for Latinos and other as to immigration reform. The fact that progressives Catholic just continue to ignore this is sad. Well yall got Obama and so what if the problem went unsolved for now 5 years and families broke up.

I guess it was a small price to pay for health care.

Obama the President has not been much better. See this extensive piece here Immigration unlikely to be Obama priority in 2008. That prophecy was pretty much correct. It was after the democrats lost the House , and thus making reform much harder, that Obama started to get more vocal.

That was quite convenient was it not?

I disagree with Santorum greatly here. But at least he is honest about his views ,and he was no Judas Iscariot like Obama was when it mattered.