Category Archives: Trump Executive Orders – Immigration

President Obama’s Comments on Immigration From His Final Speech

Today’s statement from Former President Obama supporting this weekend’s protests against President Trump’s recent immigration policy made me look up his final speech. (Since it was referenced in the statement today.)

Here’s what Obama said regarding immigration in his final speech:

But as I said before, I’m still a citizen. And I think it is important for Democrats or progressive who feel that they came out on the wrong side of this election to be able to distinguish between the normal back-and-forth, ebb-and-blow of policy. Now, are we going to raise taxes or are we going to lower taxes? Are we going to, you know, expand this program or eliminate this program? You know, how — how concerned are we about air pollution or climate change?

Those are all normal parts of the debate. And as I’ve said before, in a democracy sometimes you’re going to win on those issues and sometimes you’re going to lose. I’m confident about the rightness of my positions on a lot of these points, but we’ve got a new president and a Congress that are going to make their same determinations.

And there will be a back-and-forth in Congress around those issues. And you guys will report on all that.

But there’s a difference between that normal functioning of politics and certain issues or certain moments where I think our core values may be at stake. I put in that category if I saw systematic discrimination being ratified in some fashion. I put in that category explicit or functional obstacles to people being able to vote, to exercise their franchise.

I’d put in that category institutional efforts to silence dissent or the press. And for me at least, I would put in that category efforts to roundup kids who have grown up here and for all practical purposes are American kids, and send them someplace else, when they love this country.

They are our kids’ friends and their classmates, and are now entering into community colleges or in some cases serving in our military, that the notion that we would just arbitrarily or because of politics punish those kids, when they didn’t do anything wrong themselves, I think would be something that would merit me speaking out.

President Obama’s Statement on refugee/travel ban via Kevin Lewis – January 30, 2017

Here’s the statement typed out so you can cut and paste from it. (I needed this to be easily accessible to my class, so I retyped it here 🙂

President Obama is heartened by the level of engagement taking place in communities around the country. In his final official speech as President, he spoke about the important role of citizens and how all Americans have a responsibility to be the guardians of our democracy – not just during an election, but every day.

Citizens exercising their constitutional right to assemble, organize and have their voices heard by their elected officials is exactly what we expect to see when American values are at stake.

With regard to comparisons to President Obama’s foreign policy decisions, as we’ve heard before, the President fundamentally disagrees with the notion of discriminating against individuals because of their faith or religion.

 

 

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Update 12:34 pm PST: I found the tweet by President Obama’s Spokesperson Kevin Lewis. I still don’t understand why this isn’t up on a web page somewhere :-/

I couldn’t find this thing anywhere except in a Tweet from Hill reporter Jordan Fabian. I don’t know why it isn’t available anywhere else yet. But I took the liberty of typing it out below.