WASHINGTON & SANTA FE, NM (By Pili Tobar, America's Voice Yesterday, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) and Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) each introduced their own versions of mandatory E-Verify legislation.
Freshman senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) is an original cosponsor of the Grassley bill.
Marco Rubio might have stayed out of the immigration debate in Florida but he definitely isn’t staying out of the national debate.
After E-verify failed in Florida because of opposition from the business and Latino communities Marco Rubio is now throwing his support behind a bill that would nationalize and make mandatory that same program.
Florida Republican State Senator and farmer J.D. Alexander has direct experience with E-verify in his own company. He led the opposition to the state bill in April ― because he thinks the program is flawed and “this E-verify system is far from perfect."
You would think Senator Marco Rubio would be able to come to the same conclusion. Instead, Rubio has become a go-along Washington insider over night and turned his back on the immigrant community that helped elect him in Florida – his own people – and supporting a 50% fail rate, big government E-verify program.
Marco Rubio is throwing Hispanics under the bus in order to cozy up to anti-immigrant ‘leaders’ in Congress like Sen. Grassley and Rep. Lamar Smith.
By cosponsoring Smith’s bill, Rubio is endorsing Smith’s mass deportation fantasy to drive 11 million undocumented immigrants and their families – most of whom are Latino ― out of the country. Rubio is not helping himself and definitely not helping the GOP with their Latino vote problem.
He is incapable of being a real bridge to the Latino community for the GOP.
A new poll from Latino Decisions and Impremedia shows immigration continues to be the top issue for this fast-growing sector of the electorate, beating jobs and the economy by 16%.
It is not surprising given the current Republican attitude to immigration reform more voters trust Democrats than Republicans on the issue by a 65% to 19% margin. More than half of Latino voters know someone who is undocumented and over a quarter know someone who has been deported.
Latinos see, up close and personal, how the broken immigration system affects their family members, neighbors, coworkers, and friends every day.
The Republican Party has to change its extreme position on immigration reform if it wants to compete for Latino voters and remain a viable national Party.
‘Get out’ sounds the same whether it’s coming out of Lamar Smith, Chuck Grassley, or Marco Rubio’s mouth.
