Sen. Marcio Rubio is once again trying to establish himself as a GOP heavyweight with a new book in which he reportedly attempts to
"thread the needle" on immigration. Oh, where to start?
First off, Politico reports that he devotes "the final pages" of a single chapter within a 240-page book to the topic. That's not threading anything. It's turning tail and running.
Second, within those few pages, he's already peddling lies.
The senator criticizes President Barack Obama for executive action and argues the tens of thousands of unaccompanied migrant children who entered the country last year shows how insecure the border is.
Um, those children walked to the border and searched for border agents so they could give themselves up. They didn't infiltrate anything.
Then there's this bit of wisdom:
“We must begin by acknowledging, considering our recent experience with massive pieces of legislation, achieving comprehensive immigration reform of anything in a single bill is simply not realistic,” [Rubio] writes. “Having tried that approach, I know this to be true firsthand.”
If memory serves, what he really knows firsthand is how to bend to the political winds.
Finally, and most importantly, he's now calling for piecemeal immigration legislation. It's the perfect ploy for politicians who want to pass elements of the bill that play to certain interest groups (like big business, which wants more H1-B visas, or tea-party types who want to "secure the border") while leaving many of the undocumented behind.
Makes me wonder what his mother, Oriales García Rubio, who grew up in Cuba sharing a one-room house with a family of nine, thinks of his new approach. Time's Michael Grunwald reported a bit of advice she gave him in Dec. of 2012.
[S]he called her youngest son, Marco Antonio Rubio, the 41-year-old Senator from Florida and great Hispanic hope of the Republican Party—or, as she calls him, Tony. She got his voice mail. “Tony, some loving advice from the person who cares for you most in the world,” she said in Spanish. “Don’t mess with the immigrants, my son. Please, don’t mess with them.” She reminded him that undocumented Americans—los pobrecitos, she called them, the poor things—work hard and get treated horribly. “They’re human beings just like us, and they came for the same reasons we came. To work. To improve their lives. So please, don’t mess with them.”
Is he messing with them now?