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With Three Words

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Originally posted in Spanish at MaribelHastings.com.

ObamaWe were waiting for three words to fall from President Obama’s lips: “Reforma Migratoria Integral”—or “comprehensive immigration reform,” for those who speak the language of Shakespeare.

But what we heard from Obama in his State of the Union address was that “we should continue the work of fixing our broken immigration system.”

Certainly, we have to repair our failed immigration system—and doing so requires those three magic words: comprehensive immigration reform.

As Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s Voice, said, “we expected the Obama mention of immigration reform would be a drive by, we just didn’t expect it to be at 75 miles per hour.”

I won’t go off on a diatribe about what Obama should or shouldn’t have said and how he should have said it. But I will say that he could have shown more leadership and forcefulness when talking about immigration, and urged Congress to work in a bipartisan fashion to resolve the issue once and for all, since no matter how hard they try to ignore the issue, it won’t go away. Or he could have linked immigration reform to economic recovery and explained that legalization would generate billions of dollars in tax revenues for the country’s coffers.

The odd thing is that many of these arguments were included in the “viewer’s guide” the White House circulated.

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