Washington Post (Plum Line)
By Paul Waldman
September 24, 2015
If
you were a presidential candidate sitting at five percent in national
polls, you probably wouldn’t be leaning back in your chair and saying,
“Excellent. It’s all falling
into place, just as I planned.” But that may be what Marco Rubio is
thinking. And that could explain why he just took a step to the right on
immigration. But more on that in a sec.
Despite
the fact that Rubio has been languishing in single digits, it’s
plausible to think that the Republican nomination race is heading toward
a place where — just as
the smart people thought from the beginning — it will ultimately be a
contest between two candidates, one representing the establishment and
one representing the grass roots. Despite everything that has happened
to him over the last few years, Rubio could
be the latter.
Let’s
look first at Rubio’s comments this week, in which he said he would not
pursue a path to citizenship for at least 10 or 12 years:
“I
don’t think it’s a decision you have to make on the front end. The
first two things you have to do is stop illegal immigration, then second
you have to modernize our
legal immigration system, and then third you can have a debate about
how to even legalize people to begin with,” Rubio said. “And then
ultimately in 10 or 12 years you could have a broader debate about how
has this worked out and should we allow some of them
to apply for green cards and eventually citizenship.”
Rubio’s
campaign says that this isn’t a change from what he has been saying all
along, but what’s different is that he put a time frame around a path
to citizenship —
“in 10 or 12 years” — one that says that it won’t happen while he’s
president. While that isn’t quite the same as saying he opposes a path
to citizenship, in practical terms it’s the same thing, since he is
explicitly acknowledging that President Rubio will
not be offering undocumented immigrants the thing they want most.
Rubio’s
evolution on the issue of immigration is in many ways a microcosm of
what his party has gone through in the last few years. He came to the
Senate in 2010 as a
Tea Party hero, hailed as the future of the GOP. After its defeat in
the 2012 election, the party insisted that it needed to pass
comprehensive immigration reform in order to have any chance of winning
the support it would need from Hispanics if it were to
take back the White House. Rubio joined the “Gang of 8″ to craft a
comprehensive bill, which passed the Senate in the summer of 2013 but
died in the House. After being called a traitor and a coddler of illegal
aliens by the same conservative activists who
had lifted him up not long before, Rubio abandoned his effort at
comprehensive reform. As a presidential candidate, he has focused on the
same “Secure the border first!” message as most of the Republican
field.
Throughout,
Rubio has said that a path to citizenship would be at the end of a
lengthy process that begins with border security. But by saying it won’t
happen while he’s
president, he’s making explicit what was implied before: if your plan
is “secure the border first,” you don’t ever have to move beyond that,
because you can always say the border isn’t yet 100 percent “secure.”
This
does move Rubio to the right of other candidates who have said they’d
support an eventual path to citizenship, if only because they maintain
the fiction that it might
happen while they’re president. In that way, you could look at Rubio’s
immigration statement as less calculated than candid. With a Republican
Congress that has no interest in comprehensive reform, particularly in
the House, where most GOP members come from
safe conservative districts and fear only a challenge from the right,
there’s little or no chance that comprehensive reform would actually
pass.
So
let’s return to the question of how this could work out in the primary
campaign. The bizarre events of this nomination race should discourage
anyone from making predictions,
but let me lay out what surely must be Rubio’s preferred scenario.
First, the Republican electorate’s flirtation with the troika of
outsider candidates (Donald Trump, Ben Carson, and Carly Fiorina) winds
itself down, as each in turn moves through the familiar
cycle of fascination to scrutiny to rejection. More of the
lower-performing candidates drop out — perhaps Rand Paul, Bobby Jindal,
and Chris Christie. The ones who are left, like Ted Cruz and Mike
Huckabee, find it difficult to move beyond their core of committed
supporters. Before you know it, this looks like a race between Jeb Bush
and Marco Rubio.
A
contest between Bush and Rubio would bring the immigration issue to the
fore, because they are the two who have the greatest potential to court
Hispanic voters. One
is an actual Hispanic, while the other is married to a Mexican
immigrant and speaks Spanish at home. While their positions are broadly
similar, they’re distinguished from much of the rest of the field
because they talk about immigrants as though they were
actual human beings.
As
it happens, Bush doesn’t actually support a path to citizenship for
undocumented immigrants. While he has said, “I believe that DREAM Act
kids should have a path to citizenship,” on undocumented immigrant adults, his position is that
they should have a path to “legal status,” which means they would be
able to stay here on a permanent basis, but would not be citizens. But
the fact that Rubio is the one who’s Hispanic by
birth could enable him to position himself to Jeb’s right: he could
court conservative voters (who don’t like Bush to begin with) and still
assure the party establishment that he’d be able to bring in a healthy
chunk of the Hispanic electorate in the fall
just by virtue of his heritage.
There
are reasons why the latter might not prove true — Mexican-Americans and
those who trace their heritage to other countries in Latin America
might not feel much cultural
affinity with the Cuban-American Rubio, and the policy differences
would play a large role in their calculation as well. But it’s not an
unreasonable case to make. And it could mean that Marco Rubio now thinks
he might be the Republican savior after all, even
if he is at just five percent in the polls.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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