Hillary Clinton shook up the presidential race in both parties with her declaration that she would not only protect President Obama’s unilateral executive actions on immigration but that she would go further to offer new status to currently illegal immigrants, and in the end grant “full and equal citizenship” to those who came to the U.S. illegally. It was a move so swift, so consequential — and so far to the left — that Democratic immigration activist groups were stunned.
Some on the right saw an opportunity for Republicans to go on the offensive against Clinton. “Now the GOP campaigns are all filing away footage of [Clinton’s] event, in hopes of being able to use it against Hillary next year,” wrote conservative blogger John Hinderaker Wednesday.
Maybe not. Rather than quickly condemn Clinton’s new position, the two leading Republican presidential candidates most associated with immigration reform — Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio — said nothing at all about it on Thursday.
Bush aides said the candidate himself might address the matter in coming days, while Rubio aides pointed to his previous statements on the issue of immigration reform. For its part, the Republican National Committee criticized the fact that Clinton changed her position but did not criticize her new position itself. The bottom line was that some leading GOP voices were basically silent about Clinton’s big move.
The other top Republican in the polls, Scott Walker, has also become identified with the immigration issue, albeit in an entirely different way than Bush and Rubio. Walker rocked the immigration debate inside the GOP recently by suggesting the U.S. should set immigration policy with an eye to the needs of American workers. “The next president and the next Congress need to make decisions about a legal immigration system that’s based on, first and foremost, on protecting American workers and American wages,” Walker said.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Walker was eager to respond to Clinton’s immigration gambit. “Hillary Clinton’s full embrace of amnesty is unfair to hardworking Americans and all immigrants who followed the law to achieve the rights and privileges afforded to U.S. citizens,” Walker said in a statement Wednesday. “And by supporting the president’s lawless executive action, Hillary Clinton once again believes she’s above the law. Working families want to secure the border, enforce the law, and fix the broken legal immigration system.”
How will Republicans ultimately respond to Clinton? They’re in a difficult situation. Both Bush and Rubio have, at different times, declared themselves open to a path to citizenship for the millions of immigrants in the U.S. illegally. Now, both men speak in terms of granting some sort of “legal status” to those immigrants. Clinton noted that in her Nevada remarks when she said that “not a single Republican candidate, announced or potential, is clearly and consistently supporting a path to citizenship. Not one. When they talk about legal status, that is code for second-class status.”
Clinton’s move has made a big problem even bigger for Bush, Rubio, and the entire Republican Party.
After the GOP’s decisive defeat in the 2012 presidential elections, in which Barack Obama won 71 percent of the Hispanic vote, a number of Republicans expressed their strong belief that the party had to pass comprehensive immigration reform to ever have a chance of winning a significant number of Hispanic voters.
The idea was that reform was a threshold issue — that is, Republicans would have to pass it before Hispanic voters would consider supporting the GOP’s stand on other issues. Hence the Gang of Eight effort, led by Rubio. But reform, passed by the Democratic Senate with Rubio’s efforts, died in the Republican-controlled House.
So Clinton has made her move. Her new position effectively trumps all other immigration reform offers on the table. Her message to Hispanic voters is: No Republican — not Jeb, not Marco, not anybody — will offer you as much as I will.
The Republican response is unclear. Can Bush and Rubio say they share Clinton’s goal of citizenship for millions of currently illegal immigrants but disagree with her way of getting there? That’s not terribly strong. Do they stick with the “legal status” that Clinton characterizes as “second-class status”?
The fact is, if the heart of immigration reform is an effort to win the support of Hispanic voters, Clinton’s offer has trumped all other immigration reform proposals on the table. There’s not much pro-reform Republicans can say: “We’ll give you a little less than Hillary — but please look at our issues, like taxes and entitlement reform.”
Republicans will have to come up with something, because Clinton plans to press the issue in the coming campaign. “This will be a defining issue in the election,” her campaign manager, Robby Mook, said Wednesday on CNBC. And it’s a defining issue Clinton clearly believes she can win.
