Vice President Biden Says “We’re Breaking Our Necks on Immigration Reform,” Is it possible in Obama’s Second Term?

October 31st, 2012    Posted in Immigration News

Washington, D.C. – While President Obama is busy dealing with the aftermath of super storm Sandy, his surrogates and Vice President Joe Biden are on the election trail. In an interview on Enrique Sotos’ radio show Biden said he and the president were working hard to get immigration reform passed in Washington. But is it possible in a second term?

Both the President and Vice President say it’s possible.

Biden told Sotos, “Right now you’ve got the President and I and a lot of Democrats out there breaking our neck trying to get a real immigration law that that takes millions of people out of the shadows making sure that ‘Dreamers’ don’t go back in many cases to a countries where they’ve never been.”

The Romney campaign is hitting Democrats hard, saying that Mr. Obama’s promise to reform immigration in his first term failed and asserts he didn’t follow through even with a majority in Congress. The President took full responsibility for this, telling a Univision audience that it was one of his biggest failures.

It’s important to note that Democrats only maintained a 60 vote majority in the Senate which is necessary to pass such sweeping legislation for just a few months in the first two years of President Obama’s term.

And the President tried to have the DREAM Act passed, but it was blocked by the Republican dominated Senate. So, the Obama administration used executive privilege to offer deferred action on deportation for hundreds of thousands of young immigrants. This program was met with criticism from the right, but got widespread approval form immigration attorneys, advocates and the Latino community.

Vice President Biden thinks immigration reform is possible, because of the Republican attitudes toward immigration and Latino voter turnout could send a message to the GOP that immigration reform is necessary.

“If the Latino vote comes out, the Hispanic vote comes out and changes the election, all of the sudden those guys who paid no attention to attention to you, no attention the Hispanic community, no attention to the Latino community. All of the sudden they are going to say, ‘Oh my Lord, I guess we better get in line with the President. I guess we better start moving in the direction of paying attention to this incredible, this incredible pool of talent we have out there. So this is a chance to gain influence that’s almost disproportionate to the impact that you may have directly in the election.”