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Eli Kantor is a labor, employment and immigration law attorney. He has been practicing labor, employment and immigration law for more than 36 years. He has been featured in articles about labor, employment and immigration law in the L.A. Times, Business Week.com and Daily Variety. He is a regular columnist for the Daily Journal. Telephone (310)274-8216; eli@elikantorlaw.com. For more information, visit beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com and and beverlyhillsemploymentlaw.com

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Thursday, April 30, 2015

Mike Huckabee Tells Hispanic Evangelicals U.S. Is Losing Its Way

Wall Street Journal
By Colleen McCain Nelson
April 29, 2015

Mike Huckabee, a likely presidential candidate, made an impassioned appeal to Hispanic evangelicals Wednesday with promises to protect life and religious liberty, telling them that he may not speak the same language but he shares the same faith.

“I do not come to you tonight with the ability to speak Spanish,” Mr. Huckabee, a Republican and former Arkansas governor, said during an appearance at the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference. “But I do speak a common language. I speak Jesus.”

Mr. Huckabee, who is expected to announce his bid for the Republican presidential nomination next week, told the group that the U.S. is losing its way and letting go of foundational values that were taken from scripture.

As he reached out to Hispanics, a voting bloc that GOP candidates have struggled to connect with, Mr. Huckabee cast himself as an Arkansas everyman who grew up having more in common with the kitchen staff than those seated at the head table.

Mr. Huckabee’s speech to Hispanic evangelical conference came after former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush wooed the same crowd, speaking both in Spanish and English. Mr. Bush promised to fix a broken immigration system and give undocumented workers a chance to earn legal status.

Mr. Huckabee, during a dinner address, offered no insights into his views on immigration policy, saying there was no time to argue the issue this evening.

Earlier, though, during his availability to media, Mr. Huckabee expressed support for a fence to secure the U.S.-Mexico border.

“Fences are not negative,” he said, suggesting that immigrants in the U.S. would agree that it is appropriate for the government to control the border.

“I don’t think that that’s an insult to anybody,” he said. “If I were a person immigrating here, I would want to know that the doors that I came through were also secure.”

Mr. Huckabee declined to say whether he would support a pathway to citizenship or legal status for immigrants who had come to the U.S. illegally. First, the border must be controlled, he said, and until that is accomplished, such discussions spark unnecessary controversy.

In 2006, Mr. Huckabee called a pathway to citizenship a “rational approach,” but he has used tougher language in recent years and has been a critic of President Barack Obama’s executive actions giving safe harbor from deportation to many illegal immigrants.

At the dinner Wednesday night, Mr. Huckabee warned that these are “perilous times, where people who are Christian are on the brink of being criminalized for their convictions.” He previously suggested that allowing same-sex couples to marry would lead to the criminalization of Christianity.

As the Supreme Court wrestles this week with the question of same-sex marriage, Mr. Huckabee said he respects the court but that it can’t “change what God created.”


“It is not the supreme being,” he told an enthusiastic crowd that repeatedly interrupted his remarks with applause. “It cannot overrule God.”

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