[lg policy] Spanish language media: GOP presidential candidates move forward with immigration policies despite Latino disapproval

[Harold Schiffman]

Spanish language media: GOP presidential candidates move forward with
immigration policies despite Latino disapproval
By Marcos Restrepo | 02.27.12 | 10:40 am



GOP presidential candidates have voiced their support for immigration
policies that leave out most Latino voters, who are looking for a
common sense solution to the issue, but Democrats are not doing much
better, participants in Spanish language Univision news show Al Punto
said Sunday.

Immigration policies supported by GOP presidential candidates “do not
articulate a poltical or economic position that is realistic,”said
Viviana Hurtado, of the Wise Latina Club, on Al Punto.

According to TIME magazine’s Tim Padgett, ”the Latino community,
especially the Mexican American community, do not want an open door
policy that lets anybody in.” What they want, said Padgett, “is a
common sense policy” – something neither Democrats nor Republicans
have offered.

Padgett added that “Democrats are doing well with Latinos only because
Republicans are doing so badly.”

Sylvia Manzano, of Latino Decisions, wrote Sunday that “Republican
candidates have devoted quite a bit of time to issues
disproportionately affecting Latinos, asserting their party and
ideological bona fides on topics like official English language laws,
immigration, Mexican border control, the DREAM Act, bilingual
education and various identification laws. From the vantage point of
most Latino voters, the Republican party champions positions opposite
to their interests.”

According to the The Guardian, Kris Kobach, author of the
controversial immigration enforcement laws in Arizona and Alabama,
”has been in direct discussions with [Mitt Romney] the presidential
candidate about possible changes to federal policy should Romney win
the Republican nomination and go on to take the White House.”

Kobach, current Kansas Secrettary of State, is a long-time supporter
of “attrition through enforcement” policies, which Romney himself has
called “self-deportation.”

While speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference earlier
this month, Kobach said that attrition through enforcement is a
rational enforcement of immigration law, adding that Arizona was the
first state to require E-Verify – a move that has led tens of
thousands of undocumented workers to self-deport. In Alabama, said
Kobach, “in the first month after the [immigration] law was enforced,
unemployment dropped 0.5 percent in one month.”

He added the U.S. could be headed toward a national attrition through
enforcement policy, because two GOP presidential candidates have said
they support the strategy.

“If you want to create a job for an American citizen tomorrow, deport
an illegal alien today,” Kobach concluded.

According to The Guardian, “Kobach estimates that within the first
four years of a new Republican presidency, as many as half of the
current pool of undocumented aliens – some 5.5 million – could be made
to flee by introducing much more aggressive enforcement of immigration
documents.”

The Immigration Policy Center has said that Kobach’s self-deportation
idea is “grounded in fantasy.”

“In what version of reality would we see undocumented immigrants,
two-thirds of whom have been putting down roots in the U.S. for a
decade or longer, simply get up and leave?” says the Center.

“Kobach’s fantasy ignores the impact of losing millions of workers,
consumers and taxpayers on the American economy,” notes the Policy
Center. “In Alabama, home to one of Kobach’s ongoing self-deportation
experiments, reports estimate that losses could be in the billions
because of Kobach’s law.”

http://floridaindependent.com/70809/spanish-language-media-gop-presidential-candidates-move-forward-with-immigration-policies-despite-latino-disapproval

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