John Edwards will no doubt draw the intense ire of the Republican Party and its base after announcing yesterday that he believes as many Mexican immigrants who want to come to the United States should be welcome. As Edwards explained it, Mexican Americans are exemplary citizens who have brought “great vitality, skills and energy to the American experience.” He concluded, “The more the merrier.”
Wait, did I say Edwards? I meant Mitt Romney. And did I say Mexican Americans? I meant Cuban Americans.
“I can tell you my inclination would be to say as many Cubans as want to come here should come in,” Romney said in an interview Tuesday with The Tampa Tribune editorial board. […]
Romney replied that Cuban Americans are exemplary citizens who have brought “great vitality, skills and energy to the American experience.”
“In my opinion, the more the merrier,” he said.
As Amanda noted, “Romney’s embrace of all Cubans seems to be a pander to Florida’s strong Cuban-American community, ‘a coveted voting bloc in past presidential elections.’ In 2000, President Bush ‘won Florida by a mere 537 votes, but his advantage among Cubans was about 4-to-1.’ In a poll right before the 2004 election, Bush drew 81 percent of the Cuban vote.”
I find much of the Republicans’ demagoguery of Mexican-American immigrants to be pretty incoherent, but it’s probably worth taking the time, now and then, to remember that if Mexican-American voters were a reliable Republican voting bloc, the “immigration debate” would largely disappear.
There’s always been two standards. Listening to Republican rhetoric, one of the principal arguments is that those wishing to immigrate should “wait their turn” and not “jump to the front of the line.” Fred Thompson summarized the standard GOP line last night.
“[T]o place somebody above them or in front of them in line is the wrong thing to do. We’ve got to strengthen the border, we’ve got to enforce the border, we’ve got to punish employers — the employers who will not obey the law, and we’ve got to eliminate sanctuary cities and say to sanctuary cities, if you continue this we’re going to cut off federal funding for you; you’re not going to do it with federal money.”
When it comes to immigrants from Cuba, those guidelines are thrown right out the window.
Now, I can appreciate the differences. Obviously, immigrants from Mexico are leaving a democracy; immigrants from Cuba are fleeing a communist dictatorship.
But if Republicans want to make that argument — that we should bend the rules as they apply to immigrants from one island, not another — they should. Instead, we mostly hear a garbled mess that argues for an aggressive crackdown, with one loophole for a large voting constituency that almost always backs Republicans in a key battleground state with 27 electoral votes.
(Oddly enough, Bush considered applying a more even-handed standard in 2003, when his administration suggested that Cuban immigrants should be screened like all other immigrants to prevent potential terrorists from sneaking into the U.S. South Florida erupted in criticism, and the administration backed off.)
There’s a credible argument that a carve-out exception to Republican immigration policies is fine — but the leading candidates don’t really want to make it. When they’re in Iowa and South Carolina, saying, “I want fewer Spanish-speaking immigrants from one country, but more Spanish-speaking immigrants from another country,” doesn’t seem to work.
So, we’re left with incoherence. It’s kind of embarrassing.