Las Vegas Sun

March 19, 2024

Why Obama chose Las Vegas to rally public support for immigration plan

Obama

Carolyn Kaster / AP

President Barack Obama speaks in the East Room of the White House in Washington on Wednesday, Nov. 19, 2014.

President Obama at UPS in Vegas

President Barack Obama speaks at a UPS facility in Las Vegas Thursday, Jan. 26, 2012. Launch slideshow »

A Las Vegas high school will serve as President Barack Obama’s backdrop Friday when he touts his plan to reform the country’s immigration system without the approval of Congress.

Obama plans to take executive action to defer deportations for up to 5 million undocumented immigrants and extend visas for highly skilled workers. Joined by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, he’ll announce his plans to the nation in a prime-time TV address at 5 p.m. PST Thursday. On Friday, he'll head to Del Sol High School for an event to sign the executive actions.

The Las Vegas trip is meant to serve as a rally for his reforms. Del Sol makes sense for political, demographic and symbolic reasons.

Here they are:

Obama has visited Del Sol before, and his return is symbolic.

This is the president’s third trip to the campus. He visited in 2008 as a presidential hopeful and again in 2013 fresh after re-election to launch his campaign to overhaul the immigration system.

State records show 63 percent of students at Del Sol are Hispanic. Only 16 percent are white. In fact, a lot of them come from immigrant families — according to Del Sol’s Facebook page, many students don’t speak English and that prompted school district officials to create a special language academy. About 18 percent of Nevada’s students have parents who are undocumented immigrants, according to Pew research.

The school is also logistically convenient for the president: It’s a stone’s throw from the airport.

“It’s like four blocks away,” Dave Flatt with the Nevada Parent Teacher Association said. “He can just do what he needs and get back to the airport.”

The campus sits in U.S. Rep. Joe Heck’s congressional district. Heck, a Republican who just won re-election to his third term in Congress, has a varied view on immigration reform. He has publicly supported a path to citizenship for immigrants brought to the country unlawfully as children. But Democrats, including Reid, have accused Heck of flip-flopping on the subject.

Nevada is a heavily Hispanic swing state with lots of undocumented immigrants.

The state is 28 percent Hispanic, according to 2013 estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. Las Vegas, meanwhile, is 30 percent Hispanic, and that number is only projected to grow: By 2030, the number of Latinos here is expected to match the number of whites.

Pew research shows Nevada has the fifth-biggest percentage of Hispanics in the country. Its eligible voter pool — U.S. citizens age 18 and older — is 16 percent Hispanic, and about 39 percent of the state’s Hispanic population can vote.

Nevada has the highest population share of undocumented immigrants in the country, according to Pew. Those 210,000 undocumented immigrants make up about 10 percent of the labor force, higher than any other state.

“I think (Obama) recognizes that we live in a place with a lot of undocumented people who have really worked hard for stability,” said Laura Martin, a spokeswoman for the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada. “Nevada is a great place to have this conversation.”

The visit could give Reid a boost for 2016.

Reid, reeling from the Democrats’ loss of the Senate majority this month, plans to run for re-election in 2016. He’ll need help from Latinos.

The soon-to-be minority leader eked out a narrow victory in 2010 by taking 90 percent of the state’s Hispanic vote, according to research website Latino Decisions. The Washington Post has called Reid the “most endangered Democrat in the Senate,” and to win in 2016 he’ll have to solidify his reputation with the Hispanic community.

Reid has urged Obama to “go big” on immigration, an issue Latino voters have consistently listed as the country’s most important.

"This is personal to me,” Reid said in a statement. “There is no issue I have worked on more in my time as Democratic leader than immigration reform."

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