El Paso: the city hears the first battle cries in America’s explosive immigration debate

A wave of migrants entering the US from a Mexico bloodied by the drug war promises to be the most divisive issue in the 2012 elections A few paces from the most dangerous city in the world, President Barack Obama embarked on his 2012 re-election campaign last week by clutching the thorns of its most potentially divisive issue: immigration. The location for a landmark speech could not have been more cogent: Chamizal Memorial Park was built to commemorate the last in more than a century of frontier disputes between Mexico and the US, settled in 1963. Obama’s itinerary added another theme: trade. He toured the cargo yards beside the Bridge of the Americas, beneath a vast, billowing Mexican flag – trade between Mexico and the US is worth $340bn a year, and rising, to America’s battered economy. It was, surprisingly, Obama’s first visit to the frontier. In El Paso, the issue of immigration entwines crucially with another: border security, and the abyss into which El Paso’s twin city on the other side of the Rio Grande, Ciudad Juárez – cauldron and kernel of Mexico’s drug war – is sinking. El Paso, meanwhile, is the second-safest city of its size in the US, and so the immediate message was clear. “We have strengthened border security beyond what many believed was possible,” said Obama. How the crowd, mostly Hispanic, loved him when he added that, of course, the Republicans would try to “move the goalposts” and demand more. “Maybe they’ll say we need a moat. Maybe they’ll want alligators in the moat!” he suggested. But a speechwriter’s wit will not settle the issue that is pulling the US apart, as demonstrated by two rival protests outside the entrance to the visit’s ticket-only area, while the band played: one by immigrant rights groups demanding Obama live up to his campaign promises and act more firmly and swiftly over immigration reform, and another brandishing the Republican party’s favourite slogans: “Border security first” and “Amnesty? Never!” Immigration is as decisive as it is divisive with the burgeoning Latino populations of border and western states. Meanwhile, the backlash among white populations means that, down here, “national security” means controlling migration. There are an estimated 11.2 million illegal immigrants in the US, mostly from Latin America, and there is bitter division over whether these are people with rights and are essential to a failing economy, or criminals worthy of no more than a deportation flight. The backstage action behind last week’s campaign launch is a bitter, crucial and highly symbolic court battle between the federal government and a potentially increasing number of western and border states, starting with Arizona, through which half of all illegal immigrants pass and where the lines of political combat were also drawn last year. The state passed “SB

Posted by on May 14, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.