Proving yet again that the president can (and should) walk and chew gum at the same time, Barack Obama is poised to announce a debate next month on creating a legal path for undocumented immigrants to become citizens.
In the brief story published Wednesday, the New York Times dutifully records opposing arguments that the White House should be solely focused on the economy and health care reform (and energy and the wars and foreign policy and natural disasters and the NCAA brackets and …). Unfortunately, the reporting is marred by the Gray Lady’s insistence on citing anti-immigration groups that have been repeatedly discredited as hate groups.
First, the latest federal immigration reform movement as reported by the Times:
While acknowledging that the recession makes the political battle more difficult, President Obama plans to begin addressing the country’s immigration system this year, including looking for a path for illegal immigrants to become legal, a senior administration official said on Wednesday.
Mr. Obama will frame the new effort — likely to rouse passions on all sides of the highly divisive issue — as “policy reform that controls immigration and makes it an orderly system,” said the official, Cecilia Muñoz, deputy assistant to the president and director of intergovernmental affairs in the White House.
Mr. Obama plans to speak publicly about the issue in May, administration officials said, and over the summer he will convene working groups, including lawmakers from both parties and a range of immigration groups, to begin discussing possible legislation for as early as this fall.
Sadly, the Times then falls into the covert race-baiting rabbit hole by quoting NumbersUSA and the Federation for American Immigration Reform.
In Lies, Damn Lies and Immigration Statistics, we followed the unsavory path of the groups, both of which are supported by eugenics-proponent and white supremacist John Tanton. A retired ophthalmologist from Michigan, Tanton has nearly single-handedly funded the Brooks Brothers-garbed white supremacist movement by posing his groups as legitimate social science researchers. Critics as wide-ranging as the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Wall Street Journal have publicly questioned NumbersUSA and FAIR’s facility with making up statistics to serve their ideological purposes.
Bad show, New York Times.
Also, noteworthy to Coloradans and fringe presidential campaign supporters, Tanton is tight with former Colorado Republican Rep. Tom Tancredo, who is now on the hunt for Muslim infiltrators in the White House.
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