Mass Deportation: That’s the slogan that immigration and civil rights activists are using to describe the Republican Party in a new report by the Alliance for Citizenship issued on the same day as a GOP-controlled US House hearing on whether or not people born in the United States should get automatic citizenship.
In the report the activists highlight, among other things, anti-immigrant legislation being introduced by Republican members, Rep. Steve King (R-IA) among them, which they call the “deport them all” caucus, with no real chance of being signed into law, and using testimony from members of hate groups in Congressional hearings. Recently, Senator David Vitter (R-LA) introduced the “Birthright Citizenship Act” as an amendment to a human trafficking bill which would seek to end what he calls “ birthright tourism.”
Senator Robert Menendez, a Cuban-American and senior senator from New Jersey, took to the floor of the Senate and lamented how “…Eliminating Birthright Citizenship would create a perpetual class of undocumented immigrants, ironically growing the undocumented population by ensuring that undocumented children, and their children, and their children’s children, can never come out of the shadows and be equal before the law.”
At a news conference on the matter Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) commented that the Republicans were “feeding the most mean-spirited of their base who still don’t believe President Obama the child of an immigrant is legitimately the president after he was elected and re-elected,”
Following Mitt Romney’s defeat in the 2012 election to President Obama in which he garnered a mere 27% of the Latino vote, the GOP initiated a party “autopsy” in an effort find ways to appeal to a larger segment of voters including Latinos. The current crop of Republican candidates for the 2016 presidential nomination vary widely in their positions on immigration with no clear policy prescription being offered by the party. In light of the report’s findings, it’s clear that Republicans have some work to do to in order to convince Latino voters that they are the party with a message that speaks to their concerns.
Added the report, “the GOP-controlled Congress has all but cemented its anti-immigrant legacy and may meet its destiny in 2016.”
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