To believe Obama’s promise, one would have to ignore both his tenure in office so far and his prospects in a second term. Obama did almost nothing on the issue of immigration when he could. And if re-elected, he will face a Congress that will let him do even less.

Yesterday, Obama put the blame on Republicans — easy enough to do, given that most of them oppose reforms as “amnesty.” “We’re going to have to see how many Republican votes we need to get it done,” Obama said. “Ultimately, I cannot vote [on behalf of] Republicans.”

It’s as if he’s forgotten that until recently, he had a Congress that would have passed a serious immigration reform measure. In June 2010, when Hispanic political leaders noticed he wasn’t moving on the issue, he brought them to the White House to convince them to shut up, wait, and instead help him use the issue to win the midterm

elections.

As the Washington Post recounted, they were told “they had to stop their public complaining about how slowly he was moving and instead direct their fire at Republicans.” That phrase encapsulates Obama’s entire interest in the immigration issue. The election strategy failed — Hispanic voters did not “punish their enemies” or “reward their friends” as he’d hoped.

And given how insurmountable the 2012 and 2014 Senate maps look for Democrats, that was probably the last dying gasp for immigration reform. Through most of 2009, Democrats controlled the House of Representatives and 60 Senate seats. At that time, Obama would not have needed support from a single Republican to pass immigration reform.

Even after the death of Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., and his replacement by a Republican in February 2010, there was still hope. We know because after the 2010 election, in the extreme circumstances of a lame-duck Congress, there was a vote on the Dream Act. That bill, which would have legalized some who immigrated illegally as children with their parents, was opposed by some pro-reform Republicans simply because it was viewed as a bad-faith political stunt by a Democratic Party just thrown out of power.

Yet it still received three Republican votes in the Senate, and fell short of 60 only because of Democratic crossovers. With that in mind, just imagine if the Obama White House had placed any weight behind a serious immigration proposal — one that actually struck a balance between regularizing immigrants and increasing border security.

Had this occurred at any time in the preceding 24 months, Obama probably could have reformed the immigration system. Of course, we can never know for sure, because he never tried.

People also forget that the last time a serious attempt was made to reform immigration, under President George W. Bush, Obama was there in the U.S. Senate.

He voted for and proposed amendments that at the time were called “poison pills” and, as the AP put it, were “potentially fatal blows to the fragile coalition backing the bill.”

Taken in their best light, these actions were attempts by Obama to get a better bill later. But when? To quote him from 2008, “by the end of my first term as president of the United States of America.”

Obama had his chance on immigration reform, and he won’t get another, whether he gets a second term or not. If it’s an important issue to you, Obama is not a friend who deserves to be rewarded.

David Freddoso is The Examiner’s online opinion editor. He can be reached at [email protected].