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“Regressive And Counterproductive”: What A Romney-Rubio Administration’s Immigration Policy Would Look Like

Mitt Romney is the presumptive Republican presidential nominee now that Rick Santorum has dropped out of the race, and Sen. Marco Rubio’s (R-FL) name has frequently been mentioned as a possible vice presidential pickfor Romney to help him win over Hispanic voters.

But if Romney chose Rubio as his vice president and won, what would a Romney-Rubio administration set for its immigration policy? Nothing that would help fix the nation’s dysfunctional immigration system, according to a new analysis by the Center for American Progress, based on their existing polices:

A Romney-Rubio administration would advance the following counterproductive legislative priorities:

-Make E-Verify, the nation’s flawed internet-based work-authorization system, mandatory for all employers in the hope that undocumented immigrants will self-deport
-Pursue a “DREAM-less” DREAM Act, which would grant legal status but no path to earn citizenship for unauthorized immigrants who were brought here at a young age

We can also be certain that a Romney-Rubio administration would adopt the following regressive administrative priorities:

–Support for states seeking to pass anti-immigrant laws like Arizona’s S.B. 1070
-Implementation of a comprehensive “self-deportation” strategy for undocumented immigrants in which the government would make life as miserable as possible to try to force undocumented immigrants to leave the country on their own
-Elimination of prosecutorial discretion that helps enforcement agents prioritize serious criminals over nannies and busboys
–Construction of another 1,400 miles of border fencing despite the exorbitant cost

“Voters should ask themselves whether they want to support a potential administration with immigration positions far more extreme than their own,” the reports’ authors write.

Romney has tried to woo Hispanic voters in his campaign, even winning a majority of the demographic in the Florida GOP primary. But his extreme immigration stances have also alienated Hispanic voters. A recent poll showed that President Obama is leading Romney among Hispanic voters 70 to 14 percent. Judging from the policies that could be expected, Romney may need more than Rubio as a potential vice president to win over the fastest-growing segment of the population.

 

By: Amanda Peterson Beadle, Think Progress, April 11, 2012

April 12, 2012 Posted by | Election 2012 | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Non-Citizen For Life”: The Republican “American Apartheid Dream Scheme”

The Senate GOP seems to be banking on the assumption that Latino voters are stupid, don’t read the fine print — or are not paying any attention at all.

Panicking from a series of polls that show their years of bashing Latinos haven’t been endearing them to Latino voters, prominent Republicans are scrambling for a solution. They seem to have found one, at least for now, in a new attempt by Florida Sen. Marco Rubio to rewrite the DREAM Act, the widely popular bill that the Senate GOP derailed in late 2010.

Rubio has come up with a “non-citizen-for-life” concept as he rejiggers the DREAM Act to make it pretty much dream-free. It’s a tough trick: How do you create the illusion of a law that looks like it’s giving something to Latinos, but which the Tea Party knows means nothing?

The authentic DREAM Act offers a path to citizenship for children who were brought to the country without documentation, who graduate from high school and go on to college or the military, allowing them to create a stable life and give back to the country that they call home. Rubio’s dream-free proposal gives these young people a nebulous legalized status, so that rather than become American citizens, they will have permanent second-class status — allowed to live, work and pay taxes in the only country they have ever known, but never permitted the ability to vote or exercise any of the rights of full citizenship.

The real cruelty of this Republican proposal is that it seeks to take advantage of the desperation of some DREAM Act-eligible youth to avoid deportation. The Republican proposal offers them that in the short term, but at the price of second-class status for the rest of their lives. They deserve better. Of course, it doesn’t have to be this way: Not long ago, before the Tea Party drove the GOP’s agenda, the authentic DREAM Act enjoyed the support of many Republicans in the Senate. The GOP has paid the price for abandoning the authentic DREAM Act and promoting numerous anti-immigrant policies. Senate Republicans are living in a fantasy land if they believe they can win back Latino voters by inventing a new second-class status for these young people.

They should take a lesson from history. I went to South Africa over 30 years ago, where the government created many different levels of citizenship as a means to keep an unjust system going in a modern world. In addition to “Whites,” different categories of “Blacks,” “Coloureds,” and “Asians” for South Asians, South Africa had to create the category of “Honorary Whites” to accommodate the Japanese and Chinese. We should learn from the lessons of apartheid and the dangers of creating different levels of citizenship for different people.

That system, thankfully, has fallen, and it has been rightfully judged an historical disgrace, but if today’s Republican Party has considered history at all, they’re not learning the right lessons. Instead of pushing towards more equality for all people, they’ve perfected a method of legalizing discrimination by inventing new classes of citizenship for those on whom they don’t want to bestow full rights, creating a unique and disturbing American apartheid.

Add these new immigrant ersatz citizens to a growing list. Republicans want gay people to have a form of citizenship that doesn’t include marriage rights — and if they had their way gay Americans wouldn’t be allowed to serve their country in in the military either. Muslims can be citizens, but must fight legal and PR battles just to exercise their First Amendment right to the freedom of religion. People who have served their time in jail for felonies are citizens — but in many states, they aren’t allowed to participate in our democracy by voting. And Republican-controlled state legislatures pass laws that make it harder for young people, the elderly, and low-income people to vote – again, all citizens, legislated out of one of their fundamental constitutional rights.

For a party that claims to be interested in limiting government, today’s GOP is surprisingly eager to create new levels of bureaucracy for the sole purpose of depriving some Americans of their rights. Whatever happened to simple? How about an America with equal rights and equal justice for all and a fair path to citizenship for hard-working people who play by the rules?

With the new dream-free DREAM Act, Republicans are trying to create one of their patented new levels of citizenship while pulling a fast one on Latinos and others who care about the fate of immigrants. The problem is, American voters are smarter than they give us credit for — and we know when they’re trying to fool us.

 

By: Michael B. Keegan, The Huffington Post, March 29, 2012

March 30, 2012 Posted by | Citizenship, Immigration | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“A Path To Second-Class Citizenship”: Marco Rubio Takes The Dream Out Of “DREAM Act”

Senator Marco Rubio missed the mark on the DREAM Act today when he said that he’d consider offering a path to legal status, but not citizenship, for undocumented students. As a Latino Republican, Rubio has been criticizedfor his stance against the DREAM Act, which in its original form would permit students who had completed high school and either gone to college or joined the military, a path to eventual citizenship.

During a radio interview with Geraldo Rivera today, Rubio teetered between defending his current opposition to the DREAM Act and trying to find a way to appease Latino voters who will prove an important demographic for Republicans during the election season. Rubio delved into his new position on the DREAM Act:

The DREAM Act, as it is currently structured, has a series of problems that not only denies it the support that it needs, but I think would be counterproductive to our goal of having a legal immigration system that works. … It could be expanded to millions of people, which is problematic. But I do think that there is another way to deal with this. And I think that one of the debates that we need to begin to have is there is a difference between citizenship and legalization. You can legalize someone’s status in this country with a significant amount of certainty about their future without placing them on a path toward citizenship. And I think that is something that we can find consensus on and it is one of the ways to address the issue of chain migration.

Rubio’s suggestion for a DREAM Act would mean that potentially millions of kids who grew up in the United States without the right papers would be forced to be non-voting residents of their home country. Rubio may be using the rhetoric of defending Latinos against right-wing attacks, but the Republican policies don’t play out well for Latinos, specifically on the DREAM Act. The Republican presidential candidates are running on extreme immigration policies, and it would take a lot for Latinos to regain trust in the party. Offering a path to second-class citizenship is not exactly the olive branch Latinos are looking for.

 

By: Annie-Rose Strasser, Think Progress, March 15, 2012

March 16, 2012 Posted by | Immigration | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Angry And Unstable”, The Birthers Eat Their Own

Say what you will about the birthers, but don’t call them partisan.

The people who brought you the Barack Obama birth-certificate hullabaloo now have a new target: Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, a man often speculated to be the next Republican vice presidential nominee. While they’re at it, they also have Bobby Jindal, the Republican governor of Louisiana and perhaps a future presidential candidate, in their sights.

Each man, the birthers say, is ineligible to be president because he runs afoul of the constitutional requirement that a president must be a “natural born citizen” of the United States. Rubio’s parents were Cuban nationals at the time of his birth, and Jindal’s parents were citizens of India.

The good news for the birthers is that this suggests they were going after Obama, whose father was a Kenyan national, not because of the president’s political party. The bad news is that this supports the suspicion that they were going after Obama because of his race.

When I heard of the birthers’ latest targets, from a participant in my online chat, I figured it was a joke. But, sure enough, Alex Leary of the St. Petersburg Times reported that various bright lights of the birther community – Mario Apuzzo, Charles Kerchner and Orly Taitz – were casting doubt on Rubio’s eligibility.

“Senator Marco Rubio is not a natural born citizen of the United States to constitutional standards,” Kerchner writes on his blog. “He was born a dual citizen of both Cuba and the USA. He is thus not eligible to serve as the president or vice president.” A few months ago, Kerchner used the same logic to proclaim, “Jindal is NOT a natural-born citizen of the United States. His parents were not U.S. citizens when he was born.”

This relies on a rather expansive interpretation of “natural born.” At this rate, it is surely only a matter of time before birthers begin to pronounce candidates ineligible if they were born by C-section, or if their mothers were given pain medications during childbirth. Will Donald Trump demand to see their medical records?

The absurd accusations of the birthers by themselves won’t stop Jindal or Rubio from becoming president. There are far more serious impediments in their way—most recently a devastating report by The Post’s Manuel Roig-Franzia proving false the central narrative of Rubio’s political rise: that he is the son of exiles who fled Cuba under Castro. In fact, his parents left the island, apparently for economic reasons, 21/2 years before Castro came to power.

But the wild new turn the birthers have taken should serve as a timely reminder to Republican leaders that they need to push back more forcefully against the angry and the unstable in their ranks. Too often, they have done the opposite. Jindal, for example, encouraged the birthers this year when he announced his support for legislation that would require candidates for federal office to show proof of their U.S. birth before being allowed on the ballot in Louisiana. It was, as many pointed out, a sad gesture for a man born Piyush Jindal.

Similarly, few of the Republican presidential candidates have condemned the spectators at the presidential debates who applauded the death penalty, the idea that those without health insurance should be left to die and the sentiment that the jobless are to blame for being unemployed. And it seems doubtful that we’ll hear from Republican leaders about Tea Party Nation’s new effort to get business leaders to pledge not to hire people until the Democrats’ “war against business” ends.

Of course, extremism isn’t a uniquely Republican problem. My colleague Jennifer Rubin, noting a number of anti-Semitic messages seen at Occupy Wall Street events, asked last week: “Respectable politicians and media outlets, where is the outrage?” There’s no evidence that the demonstrators blaming Jewish bankers for the nation’s troubles are anything but a small minority. But that doesn’t excuse public figures from an obligation to push back against the extremes.

The higher prominence of loons of all stripes is a natural consequence of a political system that has lost every last vestige of a political center. But in the Obama age, this is particularly a problem for Republican lawmakers who are cowed into silence by the fear that any criticism of the crazies will invite a primary challenge. Now that the birthers have begun to eat their own brightest prospects, perhaps Republican lawmakers will finally feel compelled to say something.

By: Dana Milbank, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, October 21, 2011

October 24, 2011 Posted by | Bigotry, Birthers, Conservatives, Democracy, Donald Trump, Elections, GOP, Ideologues, Ideology, Media, Racism, Right Wing | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Why The Tea Party Should Stop Fearing Compromise

Among tea party voters, there is a belief that the right is always getting sold out  by the political establishment. In their telling, Reagan-era conservatives agreed to an amnesty for illegal immigrants on the condition that the law  would be enforced going forward, then deeply regretted having done so.  George H.W. Bush broke his “no new taxes” pledge. The  Contract with America failed to deliver on many of its promises. George  W. Bush joined forces with Ted Kennedy on No Child Left Behind, changed  positions on campaign finance reform, and closed out his presidency by  bailing out undeserving Wall Street firms. In all this, he was abetted  by GOP legislators.

These tea party voters  are sometimes justified in feeling betrayed. Other times, they misinterpret what happened. Right or wrong, however, they’re powerfully averse to compromise. Mere mention of the word aggrieves them. They  don’t think of it as a means of bringing about a mutually beneficial  change in the status quo, where one of their priorities is addressed in return for giving up something on an issue they care less about. When  they hear the word compromise, the knee-jerk reaction is to oppose it.  In their experience, going along with compromise is tantamount to  getting screwed. The insistence that pols “stand on principle” is a  defense mechanism.

This attitude helps explain why tea partiers  are so frequently attracted to relatively inexperienced politicians like Sarah Palin, Marco Rubio, and Michele Bachmann. More experienced pols  have been forced to compromise as the price of achieving something, just as a President Palin, Rubio or Bachmann would be forced to compromise  in order to pass the parts of their agenda most important to them. Having  gotten so little of substance done in their careers, however, they haven’t yet had to give up anything significant, so they can maintain the fiction that they never would. As Daniel Larison puts it, “Bachmann’s lack of  achievements is in some ways a blessing for her, because it is proof  that she has never compromised. In today’s GOP, that is very valuable,  and she doesn’t have many competitors in the race who can say the same.”

The tea party movement should know better. The Founding Fathers engaged in an endless series of compromises. Abraham Lincoln  compromised. Franklin D. Roosevelt compromised. So did Ronald Reagan. Every consequential leader in the history of the United  States has had to compromise.

It defies common sense to think the next  Republican president will be different. So why are tea party voters asking  themselves, “Which of these presidential candidates is least  likely to compromise?” They ought to be pondering different questions, such as: “What  style of negotiation and compromise does this candidate employ? How much have they  gotten in the past for what they gave up?”

“Do the issues they’ve treated as most important align with my priorities?”

Viewed in  that light, Mitch Daniels’ talk of a truce on social issues in order to  focus on the budget deficit should’ve appealed to a large faction of tea partiers. He laid out his  priorities. They aligned perfectly with tea party rhetoric: it is a movement focused on economic issues and individual liberty far more than social conservatism if you trust what its typical adherents themselves assert. But even tea partiers who  shared Daniels’ priorities didn’t like that he talked of compromise.

They got self-righteous about it.

Tea partiers would be better off accepting that every politician cares about some things  more than others, that there is no such thing as successfully governing America as an uncompromising social, economic and national security conservative, and that pretending otherwise results in choosing candidates who are  marginally less likely to choose the best compromises.

Another way to put this is that if tea party voters were  less naive about the centrality of compromise to politics — and more  willing to believe that a principled person can compromise — they’d  feel  less victimized by an unchangeable fact of democracy. They’d also be  more frequently empowered to bring about  policy outcomes that better align with what they care about most.

 

By: Conor Friedersdorf, Associate Editor, The Atlantic, July 15, 2011

July 16, 2011 Posted by | Budget, Congress, Conservatives, Debt Ceiling, Deficits, Democracy, Economic Recovery, Economy, Elections, GOP, Government, Government Shut Down, Ideologues, Ideology, Iowa Caucuses, Liberty, Politics, Republicans, Right Wing, Taxes, Teaparty, Voters | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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