This month, polls are showing a decrease in President Obama’s popularity among Latinos in the United States. Some say that the numbers reflect growing frustration over Obama's inaction on immigration reform.
"You have large segments of the Latino population who have as their number one legislative priority immigration reform," said Rep. Charlie Gonzalez, D-San Antonio. "The bottom line is that they haven't seen evidence of the legislation being moved in congress."
At the end of April, amidst widespread criticism of Arizona SB 1070, Obama announced that he was dropping immigration reform from his administration’s agenda this year.
A May 1st immigration rights rally (Photo Credit: National Immigration Forum)However, controversy surrounding legislation like SB 1070 has provided an important catalyst for grassroots mobilization pushing for comprehensive immigration reform. It’s a critical time to keep the pressure on Obama and on our Congressional representatives. And based on the polls, Obama will have incentive to pay attention.
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It is odd that there has been this big spike in right wing idiocy coming out of Arizona though. Texas has a higher background level of crazy and right now Arizona is like a supernova taking the attention. I wonder how long it will last.
ReplyDeleteActually it isn’t that strange. Arizona has been moving gradually towards the middle over the last twenty years. The population has doubled in that time and a big part of that spike wasn’t old retirees who tended to be conservative, but a lot of younger families moving from blue states, etc. In 2008 McCain only received 53.4% of the vote here in Arizona, his sixth lowest vote total among the states he won. Now think about that, his home state was one of his least supportive states. Had McCain been from Texas, Florida, etc., he likely would have lost Arizona.
This state has a long history of very conservative, often racist politics and the supporters of those policies aren’t happy that they are consistently losing ground to moderates and liberals (simply termed as liberals in their tirades). Because of how the state legislature is set up conservatives still have a major majority in both houses but, when Napolitano was governor, she vetoed a lot of their stupidity. In fact she set the record for vetoes in the history of the state. You take her away, bring in Brewer who is a wing-nut’s wing-nut, and you see incredibly stupid legislation that was shut down by a reasonable governor make it out of the state house. At the same time you see an increase in non-conservative population as well as an increase in non-white population and the far white err, right is freaking out.