At the beginning of the year, it seemed possible that there might not be a single 2016 Republican presidential candidate who didn’t back some pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants. At the rate we’re going now, there might not be a single Republican candidate in favor of one by Iowa.
I’m exaggerating, of course. Jeb Bush has signaled his earned legalization program for illegal immigrants doesn’t have to be a pathway to citizenship, necessarily, but his overall position on immigration has been pretty stable. Lindsey Graham has supported this approach to immigration reform for over a decade.
But the Republican presidential contenders are backing away from what many conservatives regard as amnesty. Mike Huckabee has toughened his position on illegal immigration since his 2008 campaign. Rick Santorum has talked about reducing legal immigration. Marco Rubio is no longer pushing the Gang of Eight. Scott Walker has adopted Sen. Jeff Sessions’, R-Ala., concerns about the impact of mass immigration on jobs and wages, repudiating his past sympathy for a path to citizenship.
The latest candidate to say he no longer supports such a pathway is Chris Christie. The New Jersey governor told Fox News that it was an “extreme way to go.” He says he learned more about the issue and now understands that there is a better way forward on immigration, though he didn’t get into details about what that might be.
“We need to have an intelligent conversation about this and bring the American people along to where we can find consensus,” Christie said. “That’s been a failure of this president. You don’t build consensus by executive order, and it’s been a failure by those who are trying to just pander to make political points out of this.”
Immigration definitely hurt Rubio out of the gate, though he has rebounded sharply since his campaign formally launched. Other GOP candidates are steering clear of the immigration stance taken by George W. Bush and John McCain, two of the last three Republican nominees.
It’s a development that is likely to concern some party donors and strategists who view modifying the party’s image on immigration as essential to winning more of the Hispanic vote. Many Republicans seemed ready to embrace something like Gang of Eight in the aftermath of the 2012 presidential election, when Mitt Romney talked about self-deportation in the primaries and wound up carrying just 27 percent of Latinos.
Christie won a majority of the Hispanic vote — 51 percent to be precise — when he was re-elected as governor in 2013. Two of the highest profile Republican candidates, Rubio and Ted Cruz, are also Hispanic. Maybe Republicans aren’t as afraid of the immigration issue as they were following Romney’s defeat.
Will the last Republican candidate who supports a pathway to citizenship please turn out the lights?
