New York Times (Blog)
By Lawrence Downes
October 22, 2012
Mitt Romney has a new Spanish-language campaign ad, about immigration reform, that’s misleading and fraudulent even by his own slippery standards. Univision, among others, conducted a fact-check that reveals how the ad uses vagueness, misdirection and omission to create the false impression that a President Romney would enact reforms that immigrants favor.
“As governor, Mitt Romney worked with Democrats to achieve solutions,” the ad says – which may be true about some things, like health care, but not immigration. Governor Romney wasn’t about achieving immigrant-friendly solutions. He vetoed the Massachusetts version of the Dream Act, which would have given in-state tuition to undocumented students. He opposed giving undocumented immigrants driver’s licenses. And in the presidential campaign he promised to veto the federal Dream Act, which would legalize youths who were brought here illegally as children if they go to college or serve in the military.
The ad continues: “Romney and the Republicans will fight for bipartisan reform to bring families together. To establish a program for work visas. And to achieve permanent solutions for undocumented youth.”
Bipartisan reform? Family togetherness? Work visas and “permanent solutions”? This is where the ad goes off the deep end, and why immigrant advocates have called on the Romney campaign to take it down.
Mr. Romney has said he would end, not continue, President Obama’s temporary deportation reprieves for undocumented students, which are giving thousands of young people the chance to work legally for the first time. This has left many of them feeling jerked around and anxious about the upcoming election, as Julia Preston reported last week. It takes courage to come forward, but if President Romney ends the program, those who did so will be heading back into the shadows, surely feeling more vulnerable to arrest and deportation for having outed themselves to the federal government. And they will also be out of work, or back to working off the books.
As for reform, the Republican Party has spent much of the last decade beating back efforts to streamline the system or to make life for the undocumented easier, fairer, safer or more lawful. Former moderates like John McCain and Lindsey Graham have retreated into hard-line restrictionism. Extremists like Kris Kobach – a Romney supporter and adviser – have defined the party’s no-compromise immigration stance.
Mr. Romney is now making vague, unsupported promises of “solutions” in hopes of snagging a few Latino votes. But the only solution he has offered so far is “self-deportation,” the choice to leave the country.
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