Romney’s Team isn’t Helping Him on Immigration

With 2012 being an election year and November quickly approaching, there is no way around the fact that everything has political overtones in Washington today.  As the immigration whirlwind of the last few weeks blows around the country from Jan Brewer’s touting of the decision of SB 1070 in Arizona to Obama announcing that he would change the deportation guidelines for the Department of Homeland Security from the Rose Garden, it’s been affecting the polls.  Obama’s move gives DREAMers most of what Rubio’s bill would have given had it survived Lamar Smith and his oversight committee.  This was basically Obama pulling a seat out from under Rubio and claiming it just after he had run out and bought the damn thing just for this occasion.

In response to the SB 1070 ruling, Arizona’s ACLU is ordering new phones and getting calling centers ready for complaints against SB 1070 abuses, while Jan Brewer is doing a grotesque celebration dance in front of the cameras with a speech about her outrage which she obviously prepared long in advance of said outrage.  all this local politicking will hurt Romney: he needs his side to shut up on the immigration question because the more the public thinks about immigration, the worse Romney looks to the pivotal Latino voter block.

Recently, Supreme Court Justices struck down Section 3, 5(C) and 6 of SB 1070 as preempted by federal law.  These are the sections which make it a state misdemeanor to not carry around immigration documentation, allows state police to arrest without a warrant in certain situations and makes it unlawful under state law to apply for employment without federal work authorization.  The justices, however, upheld the portion allowing state police to investigate someone’s immigration status when they’re stopped, detained or arrested upon reasonable suspicion.

At a Scottsdale fundraiser which boasted $2 million, Romney said “I would have preferred to see the Supreme Court give more latitude to states, not less.  And the states, now under this decision, have less authority, less latitude, to enforce immigration law.”  This is consistent with when he said that he wanted SB 1070 to become a model for the nation.  It smacks of when the federal government didn’t step in to undo laws which banned mixed-race marriage.  In fact, it feels as though it falls into a broad category of racially-charged laws that came out at the state level, particularly in the South, and the government only acted against when popular sentiment was already strongly in favor of change, i.e. racial marriage statutes and Jim Crow.

Chris Hayes brought Kris Kobach, Kansas Secretary of State, on his show to speak about immigration.  He dug right into it, opening up with a question about SB 1070’s ruling.  Kobach tried to polish that turd a bit, talking about how, even though 3 of the 4 provisions were struck down, there were 8 provisions to the law, 4 of which weren’t even challenged, so 5 of 8 provisions were upheld.  He called 2 of the provisions that struck down “relatively minor.”  It reminds me of the desperate argument of a fighter who lost the judges decision, so he goes on and on in the locker room about how he would have beaten him if the fight just went to the ground, so somehow he’s still the better fighter as he ices down his broken nose.

“…convince me and convince others on the other side that this is not motivated by racial animus.  Which is to say a movement against immigration to restrict immigration, to ramp up enforcement, [could be divided into] before the recession and after the recession, before 9/11 and after 9/11.  It seems to me like the rationales are reverse-engineered from the desire to come down on immigration, to get those people out, rather than reaction in good faith to events that are happening.”  This cutting down to the heart of the matter was after Hayes had stomped on Kobach’s employment argument, reminding him that, in Alabama (where they chased the local undocumented immigrant population out with H.B. 56) they were finding American citizens not filling the jobs vacated by fleeing Mexicans.  Instead, the entire farming sector of the economy is tanking, and most likely Republicans will try to pin this very Republican downturn on Obama.

Add to this Obama’s new DHS policy and Romney’s aversion to addressing it, then saying he would get the least functional congress since the civil war to replace it with something permanent, and he looks like a transparent joke to Latino voters.  He carefully walked around the question of the DHS policy three times without directly answering whether or not he would repeal it at his interview with Face The Nation alone.

Between Romney’s dodgy answers on the DHS policy, opinion on SB 1070 and Obamas smooth Espaniol, at events like NALEO, it isn’t surprising that Obama had the big applause lines, while Romney got a firm handshake.