In 2013, as he worked feverishly to pass the Gang of Eight comprehensive immigration reform bill, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., admitted to having one big worry. If it didn’t pass, Rubio — one of the bill’s primary authors — said he feared President Obama would simply use executive authority to give legal status to millions of currently illegal immigrants.
“Here’s my big worry,” Rubio told me during an interview while the bill was making its way through the Senate. “I fear that if this thing fails, the president will basically say to anyone in the U.S. who has been here more than three years, who has not committed a serious crime…he’ll say, ‘We’ll do for you what we did for the DREAM kids.’ And the problem with that will be you will have 10 million people legalized in the United States by executive order, so that when there is a new president, if it is a conservative, a Republican, one of the first decisions they will have to make is whether to yank that status from those people and deport them. I cannot imagine a scenario where a future president is going to take away the status they’re going to get. I believe it’s what [Obama] will do. Maybe not all 10 million, but he’ll do it for six million.”
Could any prediction have been more spot-on? The Gang of Eight bill did indeed fail, and all the rest came to pass, pretty much exactly as Rubio said.
And now, as Rubio officially begins his 2016 presidential campaign, perhaps the biggest question surrounding his future is whether Republican primary and caucus voters will blame him for his part in the immigration mess.
None of the freshman GOP senators running for president — Rubio, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz — can point to great legislative achievements. But Rubio made by far the strongest effort — a year-long attempt to write and pass all-encompassing immigration reform. His Gang of Eight bill cleared the Democratic-controlled Senate with a bipartisan majority — all the Democrats plus 14 Republicans — only to die a slow death in the Republican House.
Now, Rubio freely admits his approach to immigration reform simply could not work. There were all sorts of things many Republicans found objectionable in the Gang of Eight bill, but just one proved to be an absolutely insurmountable obstacle.
The obstacle was this: The Gang of Eight would have given millions of illegal immigrants legal status before the measure’s tough enforcement provisions were in place and running. Congress would have handed out the status along with a promise that enforcement was on the way.
Much of the public, including many Republicans, didn’t believe it. They suspected — not without reason — that Washington would legalize millions of illegal immigrants and then conveniently fail to fully implement the border security and internal enforcement measures in the bill.
Rubio understood that skepticism, but he did not fully grasp the depth of it until later, after the bill collapsed in the House. Last August, when he had time to analyze what went wrong, he told me, “The fundamental impediment to making progress on immigration is that people in this country, a large number of Americans and their elected representatives in Congress, do not believe that, no matter what you put in the law, they don’t believe the federal government will enforce it.”
Rubio said the Gang of Eight failure taught him that security and enforcement measures — border security, E-verify, visa control — would have to be not just voted into law, not just funded, but actually completed and functioning before legalization could be considered.
“Once it’s in place, and people see that it is working and is actually being applied, then I think people would be willing to have a serious and responsible conversation about how to address the millions of people who are here illegally,” Rubio said. “But they’re not willing to do that until they know that the illegal immigration problem is under control.”
The bottom line is that Rubio, after suffering defeat, came around to where many of his fellow Republicans had always been.
It was a costly lesson; for a while it seemed Rubio had blown his presidential chances altogether. And he remains damaged. But now, with flaws in other GOP candidates coming to the fore as the campaign begins, Rubio has a second chance.
Rubio said almost nothing about immigration reform in his Monday evening speech announcing his candidacy beyond placing a desire to “modernize our immigration laws” among a list of other policy goals.
There will be more to come. Immigration remains a dangerous topic inside the Republican Party. And this time, Marco Rubio will have to get it right.
