Mike Huckabee used to be fairly reasonable on immigration. He supported in-state college tuition for children of illegal immigrants and opposed an immigration raid of a poultry plant that led to the deportation of illegal immigrants. More recently, he endorsed Bush’s immigration policy, denounced in right-wing circles as “amnesty.” Huckabee insisted that he supports measures that “provide[s] a path for workers to become legal,” and denounced conservative critics of immigration reform, condemning them for being “driven by racism or nativism.”
But that was before Huckabee was a leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination. Now he’s teaming up with the Minuteman Project, denounced as “vigilantes” by the president just two years ago.
Mike Huckabee, under fire for some of his immigration stands while governor of Arkansas, picked up an endorsement in Council Bluffs, Iowa, from the ultimate illegal immigration opponent: Jim Gilchrist, founder of the Minuteman Project, the group that has roamed the border for the last several years operating effectively as an independent border patrol. […]
“Frankly, Jim I’ve got to tell you there were times in the early days of the Minutemen I thought what are these guys doing, what are they about,” Huckabee said. “I confess I owe you an apology.”
As if that weren’t quite embarrassing enough, Gilchrist praised Huckabee’s new hyper-conservative immigration policy with the highest possible praise: “It was a plan I myself could have written.”
Got that? A Republican who was perceived as an amnesty-embracing apostate up until very recently has an immigration policy that the Minuteman Project not only likes, but could have crafted itself.
The policy is, on its face, silly: within four months, a Huckabee administration will get 12 million people who entered the United States illegally to go home, en masse. If Huckabee were capable of shame, now would be a good time for it.
But as the WaPo’s editorial board noted today, the absurd proposal speaks to a larger problem.
[T]he rhetorical excess that has accompanied the proposals, and the suggestions that millions of people might be expelled or hounded from the country, not only respond to popular disquiet; they also whip it up. According to the latest FBI statistics, from 2006, hate crimes against Hispanics had increased by more than a third since 2003.
America has had its paroxysms of anti-immigrant fervor in the past, also accompanied by spasms of violence and persecution. Today, as in the past, the national atmosphere is subverting the discussion, drowning out reason. Look at the uproar that overwhelmed New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s sensible, safety-minded proposal to make illegal immigrants eligible for driver’s licenses, and you will see logic defeated by posturing, political cowardice and the poisonous diatribes of talk radio. Sen. John McCain, the Arizona Republican who championed comprehensive reform, is now chastened by the ferocity of the demagogues who mischaracterized it as an “amnesty”; he says he “got the message” and will now speak only of enforcement in the near term. In such an ugly environment, the best one can hope for is candidates who can appeal to the nation’s self-interest as well as its better instincts; who can explain that resolving the immigration mess through a comprehensive approach is not only an economic imperative but also the only realistic way out of a political swamp.
And yet, at least in the short term, there are no consequences for stupidity. Indeed, Huckabee’s ridiculous policy barely registers as odd in Republican circles, because it tells them what they want to hear.
The GOP is going to have to lose a few election cycles, I suspect, before all of this sets in.