Mitt Romney on immigration: January 23, 2012 vs. April 2, 2012
Mitt Romney on immigration: January 23, 2012 vs. April 2, 2012
Now Mitt Romney
blames President Obama for Republican obstruction on immigration reform:
“This has always been a priority for the President he chooses to do nothing about,” Romney said. “Let the immigrant community not forget that, while he uses this as a political weapon, he has not taken responsibility for fixing the problems we have.”
Sure ... it's President Obama's fault that Republicans have blocked comprehensive immigration reform every single time it's come up during the last decade. It's Obama's fault that Mitt Romney's Republican Party won't even support the DREAM Act. It's got nothing to do with Republican extremism at all. Clearly, if you want to see immigration reform, you should trust Mitt Romney and a Republican Congress to get the job done:
“That is something that I will not just talk about in this campaign. This will be a priority of mine if I become president to make sure we finally reform our immigration laws step by step, secure the border, improve our legal immigration system, so we can keep people here and welcome people here who will make America a stronger nation,” he said.
I guess this is exactly what Romney's campaign was talking about when it said Romney would try to Etch-A-Sketch his primary positions away.
Just a few months ago, he was staking out such a hardline position on immigration that even Rick Perry said he "didn't have a heart." And when Newt Gingrich said he didn't want to deport otherwise law-abiding undocumented immigrants who had been here for a quarter-century, Romney thought it was a golden opportunity to attack Newt for being too pro-immigrant. Then, just to outdo himself, Romney not only said he favored an immigration policy that would lead to "self-deportation," he said Arizona's "Paper's Please" law was a model for the nation.
But now Romney wants to win over a different set of voters, so he says the he's the pro-immigrant candidate. He says that it's Democrats who've been blocking immigration reform. He says that he wants an immigration policy designed to "keep people here."
It's an amazing reversal, even by Romney standards. And the most amazing thing of all is that he expects people to believe what he says.
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