TIME
By Zeke J. Miller
June 11, 2014
Sen.
Rand Paul has walked a fine line on comprehensive immigration reform
for months. The Kentucky Republican has courted advocates of an overhaul
by embracing the need
to do something, while carefully avoiding specifics that could run
afoul of the GOP grassroots.
Paul’s
support of reform is part of a pattern for the 2016 presidential
hopeful, who is trying to have it both ways on a variety of policy
issues. In one sense, Paul is
caught between a rock and a hard place—a grassroots that is opposed to
reform, and a party establishment that believes the legislation is vital
to its demographic survival. But Paul has managed to use that situation
to his advantage, telling both sides exactly
what they want to hear. On foreign policy, he’s told Republican donors
wary of his isolationist tendencies that he is “evolving” on the
subject.
On
a Wednesday call with reporters organized by the Michael
Bloomberg-backed immigration reform group Partnership for a New American
Economy, Paul said “I still am for
it, I say everywhere I go that I am for immigration reform.”
“If we do nothing, the status quo continues,” Paul said.
But
Paul opposed the Senate bill that passed last year, a vote he explained
Wednesday was because the bill didn’t go far enough in expanding legal
immigration or tightening
the borders.
“I
don’t feel like anybody really wanted by vote because they never really
considered any of my suggestions,” he said. Paul offered an amendment
to the Senate immigration
bill to tie reforming immigration laws to an annual certification by
Congress that the border is secure, but it was rejected by the Senate.
“Amnesty’s
a word that’s kind of trapped us,” Paul said. “I like no deportation in
the sense that I think mass deportation is a real problem for us, that
it needs to be
done in a process, a legal process figuring out who would be safe to be
here and who would want to work here,” Paul said. “But at the same
time, if you take that literally if you’re not deporting people, does
that mean you’re normalizing them. Is that amnesty?
And some people define amnesty as only giving the right to vote, and
other people say amnesty is only if you have no penalty and there’s not
process for trying to become legalized. So we’re trapped in a word that
means different things to different people.”
He
continued to highlight the emerging issues of unaccompanied minors
crossing the border and whether military veterans should be granted
legal status or citizenship,
but carefully avoided presenting his opinion
“Just
the other day people who were for immigration reform were standing up
and I was listening to them speak and they’re now horrified that the
whole world thinks you
can just come here if you’re a kid,” Paul said. “We’ve got 47,000 kids
supposedly on the Texas border who are being shipped over to Arizona and
so if the signal goes it. … And this is the complicated part of
immigration reform. Do I have sympathy if you served
in our military that we ought to find a place for you in our country?
Absolutely. But do I want to send a signal to everyone in mexico that if
you come and join our military you get to be a citizen, that’s a bad
signal. But that’s sort of the signal that’s
going out now across central America.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
No comments:
Post a Comment