Since threatening not to vote isn't doing the trick:
The nation’s rapidly growing Latino population is one of the most powerful forces working in President Obama’s favor in many of the states that will determine his contest with Mitt Romney. But Latinos are not registering or voting in numbers that fully reflect their potential strength, leaving Hispanic leaders frustrated and Democrats worried as they increase efforts to rally Latino support.Interviews with Latino voters across the country suggested a range of reasons for what has become, over a decade, an entrenched pattern of nonparticipation, ranging from a distrust of government to a fear of what many see as an intimidating effort by law enforcement and political leaders to crack down on immigrants, legal or not.
Can't imagine what could be bothering them:
[I]t was an uncomfortable moment when Bhargava looked in Obama’s eyes and told him that he was presiding over a “moral catastrophe” in immigrant communities. He asked Obama to use executive powers to stop many deportations, said it was time to “lean in” on revamping the country’s immigration system and listed a number of Republican senators he should lobbyThe president grew visibly frustrated as each successive advocate spoke. He said that the advocates, too, should be pressing Republican lawmakers, that he sympathized with their concerns but that he did not have the legal authority to stop deportations.
Tensions mounted when Obama argued that his administration’s policy was to focus on deporting criminals and others deemed to be security threats.
“No, Mr. President, that’s not what’s happening,” interjected Angelica Salas, the head of the Los Angeles-based Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights. She was seated directly across the table from Obama and leaned toward him as she spoke, her hands trembling and her voice rising. “You’re deporting heads of households, mothers and fathers.” She said that “young people are sitting in detention centers when they should be sitting in the best universities in the country,” according to meeting participants.
Obama looked taken aback by the direct confrontation from Salas and then turned to aides seated against the wall, according to several participants. The aides affirmed that, yes, criminals were the priority.
Turning back to Salas, Obama asked: “What do you want me to do, not enforce the law?” He explained that he could not just ignore laws he didn’t like. *
The president spoke sternly. Several participants described him as defensive. One person said that, at times, Obama was “pissy" [...]
Since 2009, the Obama administration had been removing immigrants at a rate of nearly 400,000 a year---more than under any previous president.
What's really maddening about this, of course, is obvious:
Standing in the parking lot outside a Family Dollar store in Manassas, Virginia, Vicki Tucker agrees. Asked how the last few years have been for her family, Tucker spits out a one-word answer: “Struggling.”Tucker, a school bus driver, and her husband, who works in construction, scrimp to keep their son in college. She resents what she sees as the president’s support for “the illegals” at the expense of working Americans.
“I’m voting for Romney,” Tucker says, loading groceries into her white Jeep. “It’s not what I like about him. It’s what I don’t like about Obama.” (Emphasis added.)
I hope that, one day, the President and his supporters will wake up and realize that their myriad "get tough" policies---against the unwashed hordes of wogs, wetbacks and whistleblowers---is never going to achieve its desired effect, i.e., as a means of appealing to working-class whites who've been conditioned for decades to regard his political party as "soft" on crime and terrorism. The people who've come to believe that nonsense mostly get their information from the usual (Fox/CNN) sources, and they will almost never vote for a Democrat---and certain not for a black one---unless perhaps that Democrat can offer them a job and put some money in their pockets. And even that offer might not be good enough.
This isn't 1996. The electorate is more politically polarized than it has likely been since the Civil War, and no amount of triangulation and co-opting of Republican talking points is going to win over so-called "swing" voters, of whom I'm predicting---based on what happened in Wisconsin last week---there will be very, very few this time around. I just hope the administration comes to its senses before November 6, and realizes that it's a losing strategy to alienate the base to placate people who are never going to vote for them, no matter how hard the President tries to please. It hasn't worked up to now, and that's because it never will.
---Vitelius* Exempting the Fourth, Fifth and Eighth Amendments to the Constitution as they pertain to the powers of the Unitary Executive to preempt alleged terror-related program activities.