Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney onboard Romney's 2012 campaign plane.
When Republican lawmakers in the House passed sweeping anti-immigrant measures in the bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security this week, they immediately introduced a new question for Republican presidential hopefuls: Do you support efforts to roll back deportation relief for Dreamers and undocumented parents of American kids?
Immediately after the vote, this tweet circulated on Twitter.
No response from Bush or Romney camps so far to our queries on whether they support House DHS bill and its rollbacks on immigration
— @ericawerner
Every GOP presidential candidate will eventually be required to answer that question and, frankly, they’re damned if they do and damned if they don’t. If they say, "No, I don't support the House bill," then they are explicitly breaking with tea party Republicans and setting themselves up for attacks as a pro-amnesty sellout. If they say "Yes," they follow Mitt Romney down the fateful path to getting the just 27 percent of Latino vote in 2012 (the polling firm Latino Decisions actually put him at 23 percent).
“What the House did is a nightmare for any Republican candidate who understands they need to win more than 40 percent of the Latino vote in 2016,” says Frank Sharry, executive director of the pro-immigration group America’s Voice.
George W. Bush garnered 44 percent of the Latino vote in his 2004 re-elect, and John McCain came in at 31 percent in 2008. Romney famously suggested in a 2012 debate that “self-deportation” was the best way to handle illegal immigration.
“The answer is self-deportation, which is people decide they can do better by going home because they can’t find work here because they don't have legal documentation to allow them to work here,” Romney said. “We’re not going to round them up.”
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That last sentence was likely meant to highlight the softer side of Romney's immigration policy. But the answer inflamed immigration advocates and Romney was stuck with it for the rest of his campaign.
At a Republican National Committee meeting in Boston the following year, RNC chair Reince Priebus pounced on the remark. "Using the word 'self-deportation'—I mean, it's a horrific comment to make," Priebus told reporters. "It's not something that has anything to do with our party. But when a candidate makes those comments, obviously it hurts us."
That was back in the days when the GOP was presumably still trying to talk the talk of their infamous autopsy report following the 2012 drubbing. “We must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform,” the report said. “If we do not, our Party’s appeal will continue to shrink to its core constituencies only.”
Now the Republican Party has taken a stunning turn on immigration that also has very real human costs associated with it. “House Republicans just voted to take work permits away from 600,000 Dreamers and block upwards of 5 million parents of American children from being able to stay in the country without threat of deportation,” Sharry says.
That’s far worse than self-deportation, adds Mario Carrillo, communications manager at United We Dream. “It's important to note how far to the right they have gone,” says Carillo. “In 2012, Republicans were promoting self-deportation. Now, they’re promoting mass deportation.”
Immigration advocates take the move as a direct attack on their families and the gains they’ve made through the executive actions taken by President Obama, first for Dreamers in 2012 and then again last November for undocumented parents of U.S. citizens and legal residents.
“Do GOP leaders think that there won’t be a political price to pay for votes to deport millions of parents like mine?” Cristina Jimenez, managing director of United We Dream, wondered in a statement to reporters.