McCain Criticizes Obama On Immigration

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

In a bid to court the Latino vote, Senator McCain is accusing Senator Obama of jeopardizing an overhaul of immigration laws to placate organized labor.

However, appearing before a Hispanic activist group yesterday, the presumptive Republican nominee may have dampened his appeal to Latinos by insisting that border security measures be implemented before broader immigration legislation and by offering vague responses to questions about whether he would halt workplace immigrations raids.

In his speech to the National Council of La Raza conference in San Diego, Mr. McCain suggested that his Democratic opponent was a political opportunist when immigration changes were debated in Congress in 2007.

“Senator Obama declined to cast some of those tough votes. He voted for and even sponsored amendments that were intended to kill the legislation,” Mr. McCain said, apparently referring to Mr. Obama’s support for amendments to limit guest worker provisions in the bill.

“Senator Obama went out at the request of labor unions and voted for amendments that would have killed the legislation and that’s a fact,” Mr. McCain said as he took questions from the audience after his speech.

Mr. Obama’s camp has denied that the amendments were designed to kill the bill and has noted that Mr. McCain, who led the drive for so-called comprehensive immigration reform, previously praised the senator from Illinois for his role in the effort.

In his half-hour long speech, Mr. McCain did not make direct reference to a series of recent immigration raids in which illegal workers have been arrested at their workplaces by federal law enforcement. Immigrants-rights groups say the raids have disrupted families and sometimes left children without care, although federal authorities insist they often release detainees who are sole caregivers for children.

In the question-and-answer period, the senator from Arizona was immediately confronted by a woman demanding to know if he would stop such raids.

“In all due respect, what you’re talking about is a symptom of the problem rather than the problem itself,” Mr. McCain said. “Of course, we don’t want anything done that’s’ inhumane.” However, as he pressed on with his answer, he said at one point that it was “not the federal government doing that,” leaving it unclear whether the senator understood that the raids are carried out by federal officials in the Immigration and Customs Enforcement branch of the Department of Homeland Security.

In his speech to the same group on Sunday, Mr. Obama raised the issue of the raids, using vivid language to describe them. “The system isn’t working…when communities are terrorized by ICE immigration raids, when nursing mothers are torn from their babies, when children come home from school to find their parents missing, when people are detained without access to legal counsel,” the presumptive Democratic nominee said.

While Mr. Obama’s response seemed more empathetic than that of Mr. McCain, Mr. Obama also stopped short of promising to end the raids.

Mr. McCain also seemed to disappoint a questioner and many in the crowd yesterday by rejecting calls to return to his earlier strategy of making border enforcement and immigrant legalization measures part of the same legislation.

“We have to assure the American people that the borders are secured,” the senator said. “We have to have that done and, my friend, if you don’t want to do that, then I have to tell you from bringing it up twice…then we don’t pass the legislation. It’s not any much more complicated than that.”


The New York Sun

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