Wapo editorial: A Dream Act that Republicans should take up (but probably won't)
Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.), who is Cuban American and a possible running mate for Mitt Romney, has broached the outlines of what would be a Republican version of the Dream Act. It would extend legal status — but no clear path to citizenship, as Democrats have sought — to young illegal immigrants brought to America by their parents.
Mr. Rubio clearly hopes his proposal might begin mending fences with Hispanic voters alienated by the hard line against undocumented immigrants that has featured in the Republican presidential primary. His idea qualifies as a genuine attempt at compromise; no Senate Republicans signed on as co-sponsors the last time Democrats introduced their Dream Act, in 2010.
So far, other Republicans are keeping their distance from Mr. Rubio’s proposal, and the most Mr. Romney has managed is a tepid we’ll-think-about-it. Political calculation may push him further. Republican strategists worry that GOP bills designed to hound illegal immigrants in Arizona, Alabama and elsewhere are tilting Hispanics to President Obama in several Western swing states. Mr. Romney himself said as much the other day, fretting that the president’s support among Hispanic voters “spells doom for us.”
If so, Mr. Romney has himself partly to blame, having hailed Arizona’s draconian law as a model for the nation, urged similar measures in the hope that undocumented immigrants will “self-deport” and opposed the Dream Act.
If he now moderates those views, he won’t be the first candidate to try sidling toward the center after courting his party’s extremes in the primaries. But it would be nice if his shape-shifting were paired with some truth-telling: that illegal immigrants have vitalized the economy by doing jobs Americans don’t want; that it’s unfair, and antithetical to American values, to penalize immigrant children for the sins of their parents; and that eventually the nation will have to forge a solution for all 11 million illegal immigrants that does not rest on the fantasy of mass deportation — enforced or voluntary.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-dream-act-that-republicans-should-take-up/2012/04/30/gIQAA4ebsT_story.html
