Ted Cruz made his play for more of Trump's supporters at Tuesday night's GOP presidential debate, finally answering the question of whether he would support legalization for the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the country.
“I have never supported legalization, and I do not intend to support legalization,” Cruz said.
Cruz's campaign chairman, Chad Sweet, told reporters after the debate that the candidate "unequivocally" rejects granting undocumented people legal status. [...]
When asked about enforcement, Sweet said the campaign supports "attrition through enforcement," which some Hispanic groups who met with Cruz's campaign said they are concerned means self-deportation, or making life so difficult for undocumented people that they return to their home countries. Mitt Romney supported self-deportation as the Republican nominee in 2012.
This puts Cruz solidly to the right of Rubio, who does support legalization after a lengthy process that includes paying fines and taxes and waiting for at least 10 years. (Plus, Rubio's "border security first" schtick would likely make his lengthy process irrelevant for the foreseeable future anyway.)
But while Rubio is deemed a traitor to his cause by many immigration activists, Cruz is now trumpeting the ideas of a right-wing group that's been circulating white nationalist propaganda of late. That group is the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), headed by National Review contributor Mark Krikorian, and its recent embrace of white nationalism is really just a return to its roots, as the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) explained in 2009.
Although you'd never know it to read its materials, CIS was started in 1985 by a Michigan ophthalmologist named John Tanton — a man known for his racist statements about Latinos, his decades-long flirtation with white nationalists and Holocaust deniers, and his publication of ugly racist materials. CIS' creation was part of a carefully thought-out strategy aimed at creating a set of complementary institutions to cultivate the nativist cause — groups including the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) and NumbersUSA. As is shown in Tanton's correspondence, lodged in the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Tanton came up with the idea in the early 1980s for "a small think tank" that would "wage the war of ideas."
That's the inspiration behind CIS, which bills itself as an "independent" think tank. But the Syrian refugee crisis has really prompted CIS to rip the veneer off its white nationalist underpinnings. Here's SPLC in October of this year:
CIS circulates a digest of immigration articles to its supporters. It’s usually a hodgepodge of anti-immigrant articles. But in the recent weeks, CIS has started circulating articles from known white nationalists, all focusing on the Syrian refugee issue.
So that's the organization Krikorian runs and here's his very own explanation of how "Attrition Through Enforcement" works, posted at CIS in 2005.
"By deterring the settlement of new illegals, by increasing deportations to the extent possible, and, most importantly, by increasing the number of illegals already here who give up and deport themselves, the United States can bring about an annual decrease in the illegal-alien population, rather than allowing it to continually increase. [...] The result would be a shrinking of the illegal population to a manageable nuisance, rather than today's looming crisis."
Ted Cruz may not be calling for mass deportation like Trump, but that's partly because people like Krikorian admit that "we simply don't have the capacity" to deport 11 million people expeditiously.
Krikorian and Cruz are realists and they want something workable. That “something” is making the lives of undocumented immigrants a living hell.