Hillary Clinton calls President Obama’s immigration action necessary, ‘historic’

By MAGGIE HABERMAN

Hillary Clinton made her first public comments on President Obama’s immigration order Friday night at a ritzy event at a hotel in New York City, saying it was necessary in the face of House inaction and that “this is about people’s lives.” “This is about people, I would venture to guess, who served us tonight, who prepared the food tonight” and those who end up in jobs like day-laboring, Clinton said during a question-and-answer session with writer Walter Isaacson at a New York Historical Society event at the Mandarin Oriental hotel at the Time Warner Center.

“It’s really the lives of people who are in many instances longtime residents and workers who have not only raised children, but made contributions [to society] and in many, many instances, because of the way our system operates, paid taxes already,” Clinton said. She added that Obama’s action is “historic.”

“It was in the face of not only past inaction but, I think it’s fair to say for those of us who have observed the Congress’s attitude toward immigration in the House of Representatives, likely to be the future as well,” she said, adding the focus now needs to be bipartisan legislation for comprehensive immigration reform.

The sentiments were in line with a statement Clinton issued the night earlier, shortly after Obama issued the order sparing roughly 5 million illegal immigrants from deportation.

But her focus on the human toll went further. It’s an emphasis that Democrats have stressed as Republicans have taken issue with the president acting unilaterally.

Aides to Clinton and Obama, who are frequently in touch, spoke in advance about what the president planned to do. Meanwhile, Clinton also went into a lengthy recollection about her time before she ran for New York Senate, during a discussion about empowering people to have faith in institutions.

“You’ve got to reconnect people into common purpose,” she said. “People right now distrust every institution.” She recalled that when she ran for Senate in New York, “as some of you may remember, I had not lived in New York.”

“I had no idea really what was going to happen but I knew that I couldn’t just parachute into New York and say, oh, I’m running for the Senate, and…succeed.”

She talked about her “listening tour,” saying, “I spent months and they were lots of very small events really listening to people and trying to understand what their aspirations were.”

They were upstate, in the city and in the suburbs, she noted, adding, “Over time, I got a better understanding of what I could do and people got a better feeling for what I would do … I think that there is a way to rebuild that sense of possibility.” Later, she was asked about how she views the future through the new prism of being a grandmother. She invoked a phrase she’s used often, although not in that context, that “talent is universal, but opportunity is not.”

Her granddaughter Charlotte has had opportunities, Clinton said, that the baby’s great-grandmother never had.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2014/11/hillary-clinton-obama-immigration-action-113109.html#ixzz3Juv3at7p