As Sen. Marco Rubio was making his case for immigration reform on “Fox News Sunday,” he directly criticized the idea of “self-deportation,” an option proposed by Mitt Romney during the 2012 presidential campaign.
Rubio explained that it was important to realize that there were 11 million illegal immigrants in the United States.
“We can try to round up people and deport them, which we know is not a doable thing for 11 million people,” he explained. “We can make life miserable to them so that they’ll self-deport. Again, not a plan that I think necessarily works.”
Rubio added that it was far more expensive to leave the illegal immigration problem alone, and that immigration reform was the way to move forward.
“[W]e can try to figure out a way to deal with this issue, in a way that insures that this never happens again and that this isn’t unfair to people that are doing it the right way,” Rubio concluded. “And that’s what I’m working. I think that’s a very conservative position to hold, and I think if we explain this to people and exactly what it does, we can gain a lot of support for this proposal.”
