Fox News hosts cherry-picked quotations from President Obama's 2006 autobiography, The Audacity Of Hope, claiming that the President's sympathizing with Americans concerned about illegal immigration conflicts with his current plans to take executive action to prevent deportations. But Obama's autobiography clearly explained that those concerns are no reason to deny immigrants the “rights and opportunities” that Americans enjoy.
Obama recently announced a plan to issue executive actions to protect up to five million undocumented immigrants from deportation. The New York Times reported that the president's actions would likely “allow many parents of children who are American citizens or legal residents to obtain legal work documents and no longer worry about being discovered, separated from their families and sent away.”
The co-hosts of The Five painted Obama as a hypocrite on the November 17 edition of the show, highlighting selected quotes from Obama's autobiography in which he expresses that he understands Americans' concerns about illegal immigration. Co-host Eric Bolling asked whether “those comments that he just spoke in Audacity Of Hope ... conflict with what he's saying now?”
Later, Fox host Bill O'Reilly ran a similar segment on the quotations in Obama's autobiography claiming that “the president had a different take [on immigration] in 2006.”
In their rush to accuse Obama of reversing himself on immigration, the Fox hosts left out important nuance in the president's autobiography. Obama explained frustrations between blacks and Latinos and confessed to experiencing some of his own biases (emphasis added):
But with the public in a sour mood, their fears and anxieties fed daily by Lou Dobbs and talk radio hosts around the country, I can't say I'm surprised that the compromise bill has been stalled in the House ever since it passed out of the Senate. And if I'm honest with myself, I must admit that I'm not entirely immune to such nativist sentiments. When I see Mexican flags waved at pro-immigration demonstrations, I sometimes feel a flush of patriotic resentment. When I'm forced to use a translator to communicate with the guy fixing my car, I feel a certain frustration.
But Obama concluded that ultimately, such “nativist sentiments” are unfounded and pointed out the injustice of denying immigrants “rights and opportunities that we take for granted”: because “America is big enough to accommodate their dreams” (empahasis added):
But ultimately the danger to our way of life is not that we will be overrun by those who do not look like us or do not yet speak our language. The danger will come if we fail to recognize the humanity of Cristina and her family-- if we withhold from them the rights and opportunities that we take for granted, and tolerate the hypocrisy of a servant class in our midst; or more broadly, if we stand idly by as America continues to become increasingly unequal, an inequality that tracks racial lines and therefore feeds racial strife and which, as the country becomes more black and brown, neither our democracy nor our economy can long withstand. That's not the future I want for Cristina, I said to myself as I watched her and her family wave good-bye. That's not the future I want for my daughters.
Their America will be more dizzying in its diversity, its culture more polyglot. My daughters will learn Spanish and be the better for it. Cristina will learn about Rosa Parks and understand that the life of a black seamstress speaks to her own. The issues my girls and Cristina confront may lack the stark moral clarity of a segregated bus, but in one form or another their generation will surely be tested-- just as Mrs. Parks was tested and the Freedom Riders were tested, just as we are all tested-- by those voices that would divide us and have us turn on each other. And when they are tested in that way, I hope Cristina and my daughters will have all read about the history of this country and will recognize they have been given something precious. America is big enough to accommodate all their dreams.