Romney announced to the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials on Thursday that he will one day have an immigration policy, but that he doesn't really know what it is, but that it's better than Barack Obama's, whatever you happen to think that is.
Romney's speech was made especially urgent following Obama's executive order last Friday halting the deportation of DREAM Act-eligible undocumented immigrants. The move was a game-changer (yeah, I hate the term, too, but sometimes it's appropriate), in that it should massively increase Hispanic turnout in swing states like Nevada and Colorado, and showed the President's testicular fortitude against a stallwart Congress at a time when he really needed to break through the stasis of the economy.
The EO put Romney in a tight spot, as his primary positions on immigration, which were already alienating Latino voters, now seem even more extreme in comparison to Obama's action. We've known since the day Romney endorsed SB 1070, made out with Jan Brewer and Joe Arpaio, and claimed he'd make life for illegal immigrants so miserable that they'd self-deport, that he didn't quite mean any of it—it was what he was saying to get through a severely conversative GOP primary. (For some reason a party's presidential candidate changing his position on a major issue for different constituencies is okay.)
| Related: GOP Feels [Coming Soon] About Immigration |
Even worse, the GOP doesn't want to go anywhere near the issue. Yesterday, Mitch McConnell punted the issue right back to Romney, making it clear that they're letting him take the front line fire on whatever he decides to do in response to Obama's exective order.
Which is what, exactly?
Some people have asked if I will let stand the president's executive action. The answer is that I will put in place my own long-term solution that will replace and supersede the president's temporary measure.
So....whatever the fuck that means. Romney's vague and shifty comments on immigration in the past few days have reached the point of "strategic obfuscation," in the words of Adam Serwer, in which his statements are "just vague enough to give the impression that Romney has moderated on immigration policy without making an actual commitment to any policy changes."
This speech didn't do much to his policy proposals down. Via Serwer:
Calling [the above excerpt] an "answer" doesn't make it an answer. Romney's statement completely avoids the question it supposedly addresses. Is Romney committing to some kind of comprehensive immigration reform? What is this "long-term solution"? Will it allow some undocumented immigrants to stay? He doesn't say.
Romney's main point of criticism about Obama's EO—he still won't come out and criticize the action directly—is that it's a stop-gap measure. But Obama was blatant that his order was a temporary measure because Congress wouldn't allow anything else through (read a good, quick history of Congress cockblocking of all immigration-related legislation, including the GOP's refusal to pass the DREAM Act in late 2010, here), so Romney's merely pointing out the necessity of Obama's action in the face of GOP intransigence.
| Related: Obama's Order To Halt Deportation Overwhelmingly Popular With Voters |
Romney got down into a few specifics on how he'd work with legal applicants:
Too many families are caught in a broken system that costs them time and money and entangles them in excessive red tape. For those seeking to come to America the right way, that kind of bureaucratic nightmare has to end. And we can do this with just a few common-sense reforms. As president, I'll reallocate green cards to those seeking to keep their families under one roof. We will exempt from caps the spouses and minor children of legal permanent residents. And we will eliminate other forms of bureaucratic red tape that keep families from coming together.
In other words, a big gummiment argument. Raise your hand if you think red tape is the biggest problem with our immigration system. Thought so. This is reminiscent of conservative responses to health care reform, in which they squeak about state-to-state insurance exchanges and tort reform, neither of which even approach systemic reform. On both immigration and health care, conservative ideology so hamstrings lawmakers that they seem not to understand the scope and nature of the problems.
Romney did propose giving greencards to families that threatened to be split apart, to those that attain advanced degrees, and to those that serve in the military, a pared-down version of DREAM Act-ish stuff, but did not address the fact that many of these solutions have already been proposed, but have been unable to pass through Congress due to Republican opposition. He also did not propose anything about illegal immigration, except to say he would "address the problem of illegal immigration in a civil but resolute manner." So...whatever the fuck that means.
If Romney was hoping to triangulate the Latino vote with this speech, he fell far short. That's a major problem: a poll this morning showed Obama regaining the lead in Florida, Romney's only major swing state in which he was leading. The Romney campaign, intuiting that it had no chance of making substantive inroads with the Latino vote, had previously been trying to depress Latino voters into staying home. Obama just excited them all over again, and if they turn out, they could mean the difference in the midwest and western swing states, and Florida. If Romney has only vague, non-committal responses to this, he's flat out going to lose these states, and the election along with them.
PoliticOlogy will have a full analysis of Romney's immigration policy (what there is of it) on Monday.
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