Romney’s Immigration Clarification (Re-clarified)

NEW YORK TIMES (Blog)

By Lawrence Downes

October 3, 2012

http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/03/romneys-immigration-clarification-re-clarified/

For a moment there I thought Mitt Romney had had a change of heart about deporting young immigrant students who were brought here as children. Don’t I feel stupid.

People had been wondering for months whether Mr. Romney, as president, would continue President Obama’s policy of temporarily halting deportations for so-called Dreamers, young unauthorized immigrants who would have been eligible for legalization under the long-stalled Dream Act.

For months Mr. Romney refused to answer the question. Then he told The Denver Post on Monday: “The people who received the special visa that the president has put in place, which is a two-year visa, should expect that the visa would continue to be valid.”

Setting aside the fact that Mr. Romney apparently confused visas with deferred action, this was big news. It has been hard to pin down any specifics in Mr. Romney’s immigration views, but it had always seemed safe to say that he was not one to support giving illegal immigrants, even young striving students (or “aliens,” as he called them in a Univision forum) a break, since he’d promised to veto the Dream Act and favored a policy of mass “self-deportation.”

Turns out the major change was no change at all.

This was in The Boston Globe on Tuesday: “Responding to a Globe request to clarify Romney’s statement to The Denver Post, Romney’s campaign said he would honor deportation exemptions issued by the Obama administration before his inauguration but would not grant new ones after taking office.”

In other words – Dreamers are out of luck if Mr. Romney wins the White House.