01/13/12 The rap on Mitt Romney is that he is a political opportunist who lacks core principles. No wonder. The Romney campaign's efforts to simultaneously run two very different campaigns in South Carolina and Florida serve only to confirm Romney's shape-shifting ways.
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01/12/12 As we highlighted, yesterday Mitt Romney proudly trumpeted the endorsement of Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R) –the leading architect of costly and inhumane state-based, "papers, please" anti-immigration laws like Alabama's and Arizona's.
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01/11/12 Today, FOX News Latino published an article titled, Mitt Romney Pushes Hardline on Immigration in South Carolina. That's no surprise given Romney's increasing hard-line stance on immigration reform. As we have reported, two weeks ago, Romney stated that he would even veto the DREAM Act.
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01/11/12 Today, Mitt Romney issued a press release highlighting his endorsement by anti-immigrant ringleader Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R). Kobach is the leading architect of the "papers, please" anti-immigration laws in states like Alabama and Arizona and has a long track record of opposing positive immigration reforms—including those that would benefit U.S. citizens.
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01/09/12 Why is it that Republican politicians in Nevada can't learn from recent history when it comes to Latino voters and the politics of immigration? In a key development for one of the 2012 cycle's most prominent Senate battleground races, Senator Dean Heller (R-NV) used the occasion of a meeting with Hispanic community leaders last Friday to reiterate his opposition to the DREAM Act and birthright citizenship.
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01/06/12 "A Republican probably can't win without about 40 percent, minimum, of the Hispanic and Latino vote." You've heard that many times from America's Voice. Now, it's coming from Larry Sabato, "a well-respected election prognosticator."
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01/03/12 In case you missed, it over the holiday weekend, Mitt Romeny told Iowa caucus voters that he would veto the DREAM Act if elected president. We all knew Romney was running to the far right on immigration in Iowa, but this was his most definitive stance to date.
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12/19/11 As the Republican presidential campaign moves into the homestretch before the first caucus and primaries of the 2012 campaign, it's increasingly clear that the candidate field is lacking a true moderate on immigration reform in the style of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.
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12/14/11 A series of media outlets reported yesterday that a key phrase used in Mitt Romney's stump speech and campaign advertisements, "Keep America American," turns out to be a slogan the Ku Klux Klan used in the 1920s to protest the arrival of Irish immigrants.
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12/12/11 "The best of Congress is to be found far from the polarized, dysfunctional politics on Capitol Hill in a year when the American people have given Congress the lowest approval ratings in the history of polling," wrote Juan Williams in the Hill today, in a post where he names his favorite Congressman of the Year: Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL).
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12/12/11 At Saturday night's Republican presidential debate, most of the candidates continued to demonstrate how out of step they are with the public's wishes on immigration. As new Fox News polling makes clear, Mitt Romney and other candidates espousing mass deportation positions appeal to a very narrow sliver of anti-immigrant voters in the primary.
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12/07/11 Despite many pundits and commentators saying that Newt Gingrich would face a primary campaign backlash over his immigration comments, several new polls show that likely Republican caucus-goers in Iowa are less uniformly hard-line and less animated by the issue of illegal immigration than conventional wisdom would suggest – just like Republicans throughout the nation.
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12/05/11 On CNN's "Face the Nation" Sunday, 2008 presidential nominee John McCain (R-AZ) offered this advice to the Republican field: "The Republican Party has to discuss [immigration] in as humane a way as possible. We have to have empathy, we have to have concern and we have to have a plan."
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12/02/11 It's not that we care about what GOP Presidential candidate and former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum thinks. Rick Santorum is polling at about 4% in the primaries, behind Herman 'I guess I did make payments to that woman' Cain, Rick Perry, and Michele Bachmann.
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11/30/11 While Newt Gingrich does not have the right policy answer on how to fix our broken immigration system, his recent immigration remarks have helped isolate the key question that fellow GOP candidates like Mitt Romney and Rick Perry were hoping to avoid – what to do about the 11 million undocumented immigrants currently living and working in America?
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11/30/11 On a press call today, experts in Latino politics and public opinion discussed the recent back and forth over immigration in the Republican presidential primary contest and helped to put the debate over immigration into its proper policy and political context.
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11/28/11 Earlier this fall, we wrote about the hoops that the 2012 GOP presidential candidates were jumping through to earn the endorsement of notoriously anti-immigrant Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Now, in what the Atlantic calls "one of the many mind-bending absurdities of the 2012 race," Arpaio has chosen a fellow dance partner: Texas Governor Rick Perry.
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11/28/11 Mitt Romney has officially staked out the most extreme immigration position possible: the removal of every undocumented immigrant in the nation.
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11/23/11 In case you missed it, immigration really erupted as an issue at last night's foreign policy Republican debate. For months, the candidates have fallen back on fence-first and border-security-first sound bites to answer to answer the various immigration questions that have come up. Last night, they were finally forced to answer questions about what they would do with the 11 million undocumented immigrants currently settled in the United States.
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11/17/11 Talking Point Memo's Evan McMorris-Santoro reports on how anti-immigrant SB 1070 has changed the political landscape in Arizona -- and not in the way its sponsors would have expected. Arizona "really is a swing state in 2012."
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11/10/11 Tuesday’s defeat of notorious anti-immigrant Arizona State Senator Russell Pearce (R) by fellow Republican Jerry Lewis in a recall election continues to resonate in Arizona and beyond. The architect of the state’s notorious “papers, please” immigration law, Pearce’s stunning defeat is a cautionary tale about the political dangers of anti-immigrant extremism and wedge politics.
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11/07/11 A leading conservative religous voice spoke up this past week over the nativist rhetoric that runs unchecked through the GOP party. Richard Land, a.k.a. "Chief Red Bull" (according to his Wikipedia page), is president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention.
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11/07/11 The news that Mitt Romney is deploying automated attack calls in Iowa against Rick Perry on immigration should come as little surprise, given Romney's hard-line stance on immigration thus far in the 2012 cycle. What is notable, however, is that the anti-Perry calls feature an Arizona sheriff named Paul Babeu, who makes the claim that "Rick Perry is part of the illegal immigration problem."
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11/03/11 One year out from the 2012 election, we've released a report that the Republican Party's stance on immigration—and what it means for their candidates' ability to compete for Latino voters—is shaping up as one of the major storylines this election cycle. The report finds that as Republicans continue to embrace hard-right positions on immigration, the Party is distancing itself not only from the legacy of Ronald Reagan and other past Republican leaders, but also from Latino voters in numerous states that are shaping up to be 2012 battlegrounds.
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10/28/11 Another prominent Republican is speaking out against the vicious anti-immigrant rhetoric occurring in the GOP presidential contest. In his column at the Washington Post, Michael Gerson, who served as chief speechwriter for President George W. Bush, challenges the tactics of Mitt Romney and Rick Perry.
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10/27/11 Freshman Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) remains a Tea Party favorite and, despite his protests to the contrary, the leading vice presidential candidate for the Republican Party in 2012. Central to Rubio's appeal is his Cuban-American heritage.
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10/27/11 The Wall Street Journal makes an excellent point about immigration today. Yesterday, before Janet Napolitano was to face a number of bullying Republicans at an Oversight Hearing held by the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) wrote an op-ed in Politico calling Obama's record deportation numbers "a trick."
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