President Barack Obama's attention to the illegal immigration crisis, which could lead him to issue executive orders early next week to delay deportations and grant work permits to as many as 6 million migrants, has soured many of his core voters: African-Americans.
Many blacks, who twice voted for Obama in record numbers to elect him — and keep him — as the nation's first African-American president, are angry that he has neglected the problems facing inner cities while working on the border crisis.
These big-city ills include chronic black unemployment, poor housing conditions, steep prices for food and services, low high-school graduation rates, and high crime rates.
"Black people are being played," Herman Cain, the 2012 Republican presidential candidate, told Newsmax. "They have been taken for granted by Democrats for decades. Now they've reached a boiling point with this whole crisis on the border, and some of them are speaking out."
By all accounts and as reported by Brietbart.com, the number of Border Patrol arrests of illegal immigrants since Oct. 1 stands at 174,000 and is still rising.
Cain and other African-American conservatives charge that Obama "manufactured this crisis" through a 2012 executive order that created the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.