President Obama plans to pivot this week from foreign affairs and the targeted killing of terrorist Osama bin Laden to a domestic issue that continues to bedevil his administration: comprehensive immigration reform.
Or the lack thereof.
Given the expectations preceding the president's scheduled speech Tuesday in El Paso, Texas, on immigration reform and border security, a comprehensive overhaul appears as elusive as the Sept. 11 mastermind proved to be.
Politicos — even those in the president's own party — are largely ignoring the Texas messaging effort, and Hispanic leaders are taking what can charitably be described as a wait-and-see attitude.
"Latinos see the disjunction between the rhetoric and the reality of what the administration is saying about immigration, and what they're doing about immigration," says Sylvia Manzano, a political science professor at Texas A&M University.
"He brought up reform; he campaigned on it," she says, yet the situation has, in many ways, worsened under his watch.
Bipartisan congressional efforts have hit dead ends, hung up in large part on how or whether the estimated 11 million immigrants living here illegally should be offered a path to citizenship.
States such as Arizona and Indiana have been taking immigration enforcement into their own hands. Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer announced Monday that she plans to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn a lower court ruling barring some of the more controversial aspects of her state's new immigration law.
And the administration's stepped-up deportation efforts have both angered Latino groups and been dismissed as too little by critics like Dan Stein of the Federation for American Immigration Reform.
"The president is going to El Paso to engage in political theatrics," Stein asserts. "It's a cynical attempt to drive a wedge between the Hispanic voter and the rest of America."
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