By EARL OFARI HUTCHINSON

President Obama is walking a tightrope on what’s still the most volatile, contentious and potentially life-threatening political issue to Democrats: immigration reform.

At first glance, the political stars seemed to be aligned for him to do what George W. Bush failed twice at, which is getting a deal on immigration reform.

The light trial balloon that he floated on reform punched the right buttons. He has respected GOP South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham on board and working on a reform package with key Senate Democrats. This drew barely a ripple of comment and ignited no loud denunciations from anti-immigration foes.

The Federation for American Immigration Reform, which whipped anti-immigration sentiment up to a fever pitch about two years ago, barely mentioned the Obama proposal on its Web site. The group issued no impassioned action alerts demanding that immigration talks be stopped in their tracks. The Minuteman groups that made a clownish spectacle of themselves with their gun-toting antics at the Mexican border are long gone.

There is no visible organized Senate opposition. The majority of Democrats in Congress backed reform bills in 2006 and 2007 and will back an Obama immigration reform bill again. The Latino vote is big, vocal, active, and getting antsy that no progress has been made on immigration reform. Latino leaders repeatedly demand that Obama back up his campaign pledge to push a reform bill through. They’ve also saber rattled Republicans, that they can again kiss Latino votes goodbye if they dig in their heels and stonewall reform again.

The guest worker plan that infuriated anti-immigration activists in the previous failed bills was yanked off from the current proposed bill. Obama and the Democrats have gone even further and given the GOP senators pretty much what they demand as the price for getting a bill through.

Undocumented workers must pay hefty penalties, pay all taxes, learn English, and wait for an extended time before attaining citizenship and assure that failure to comply might result in deportation.

Obama must also pledge to hermetically seal the border to stop the flow of immigrants.

A December America’s Voice poll found that a majority of voters, including Independents and Republicans, back comprehensive immigration reform. The number who said that undocumented workers should get the summary boot from the country has plunged.

But there was a cautionary note in the poll, as with other similar polls: A majority of them are just as adamant that undocumented workers should not be given an easy stroll down the pathway to citizenship. They demand strict enforcement of the provisions that undocumented workers pay taxes and a penalty, and patiently wait for approval, and that the borders be secured.

There’s also much devil in the details in the plan Graham and New York Democrat Charles Schumer have outlined so far. It’s the vagueness in those details that can be twisted and mangled by anti-immigration foes to again try and torpedo reform. The foes have not totally disappeared.

There’s still the loose network of anti-immigration organizations, and the legions of right-wing talk jocks, tea baggers, and Fox News Network talking heads who can stir the troops to oppose any reform. A far-right group sent out a panicked alert mocking Graham as Graham-nesty and railed against him for backing amnesty for illegal immigrants. The stock attack charge that any immigration reform bill is a de facto reward for breaking the law still stirs anger and passion in many Americans.

The loss of thousands of jobs, with official unemployment still nudging double digits, and with low-wage American workers bearing the brunt of the downturn also presents a wedge for anti-immigration foes. They almost certainly will again hammer that undocumented workers snatch jobs from needy American workers.

Immigration reform can’t be separated from partisan politics. The November midterm elections are months away and Democrats have already suffered three hammer blows in losing a revered Senate seat in Massachusetts, and governorships in Virginia and New Jersey.

Many Democrats will be squeamish about the risk of more losses if immigration opponents gather steam and again turn immigration into a finger-pointing, contentious and polarizing issue.

Obama still has a major fight on his hands to get a health care reform bill passed. The bill is not on life support. However, there’s still no guarantee to get a bill — any bill — passed.

To risk stoking the voter fury over immigration that health care has would be political folly.

Obama gave immigration reform short shrift in his State of the Union address. But he’s put it back on the nation’s table. That’s a good thing. Now that he has, the watch is on to see how hard or light he’ll tread on the issue.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His nationally heard talk show is on KTYM-AM 1460 AM Los Angeles, Fridays, 9:30 a.m., and KPFK Pacifica Radio 90.7 Los Angeles, Saturdays at noon, PST. He also hosts the Los Angeles Urban Policy Roundtable Community forum Thursdays, 7 p.m., at Lucy Florence Cultural Center, 3351 W. 43rd St., Los Angeles, (323) 383-6145.

BY MAYA RUPERT

CONTRIBUTING WRITER

Black children are an endangered species. And the fault for that, apparently, lies with black mothers.

Recently, a billboard campaign in Atlanta has received national attention for drawing what some believe is a questionable link between race and abortion. The billboards, sponsored by The Radiance Foundation and Georgia Right to Life, make the endangered species claim, and then direct viewers to www.toomanyaborted.com, where the argument is made that black women are being targeted for abortions in an effort to reduce the black population.

The Web site points out that, historically, forced sterilization and eugenics, or selective breeding with the goal of “improving” humanity, have been used in an effort to make sure black women did not reproduce. It claims that abortion is simply the latest permutation of a disturbing trend of using reproductive technology to slow procreation in the black community. The site points out that facilities providing abortions are more prevalent in predominantly black communities than they are elsewhere, which subtly encourages more black women to terminate their pregnancies. 

While it’s true that reproductive technology and advancements have been used in the past to rob black women of their bodily integrity, it is misleading and dangerous to characterize abortion as a part of that history.

Casting efforts to ensure reproductive freedom as a conspiracy to coerce black women to abort misses the point.

Pro-choice advocates are just that: Pro-choice. The difference between forced sterilization and eugenics and the right to choose to have an abortion is the difference between robbing a store and buying something on sale.

If the concern is that black women are choosing to have abortions at a higher rate than other women, the solution is not to shame them into not making that choice.

Although roughly 13 percent of the U.S. population is African American, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates black women receive about 37 percent of all abortions, the L.A. Times recently reported.

This number illustrates a problem: Black women are having a disproportionately high number of abortions. But it’s overly simplistic to act like the answer lies in pedantically telling black women to have fewer abortions. The solution is to ask why it is that black women are having a larger number of unwanted pregnancies.

Interestingly, the Radiance Foundation advocates for abstinence-only education, even though studies have shown that teens who benefit from comprehensive sex education are 50 percent less likely to have unplanned teenage pregnancies than those who receive abstinence-only education. If the concern is really to reduce the number of abortions in the black community, these organizations should focus on reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies.  

This campaign also ignores the realities that the black community still disproportionately faces, such as lower socio-economic status, inadequate access to quality health care, and inadequate access to quality education, all of which have an impact on the likelihood that a woman will choose to have an abortion.

Changing these realities would be a more comprehensive and effective way of decreasing the number of abortions that take place among black women.

Instead, this campaign takes aim only at the women acting responsibly and deciding whether to terminate their pregnancies. It turns a blind eye to the complexities of the societal issue and essentially blames black women for participating in their own ethnic genocide.  

There are a lot of areas in public life where racism creeps in and negatively affects the black community. However, the effort of abortion providers ensuring the reproductive freedom of black women is not one of these areas.

This campaign is exploiting racial statistics in order  to pressure black women into denying themselves the choice to decide how to begin their families.

Making abortions accessible in black communities isn’t racist — but publicly shaming the black women who make this choice in a simplistic shock campaign is. Sadly, as it garners more attention, we should expect to see more of this and similar campaigns in communities outside of Georgia, attempting to further stigmatize a vulnerable community making a difficult choice.