Rubio Flips on Amnesty — and Flops

Republican presidential candidate Sen. Marco Rubio has flipped, flopped and flipped back again on the thorny issue of immigration over the past six years.

As the Florida senator emerges as the heir apparent to former Gov. Jeb Bush’s fraying mantle as Republican Establishment’s candidate, he has been racing to position himself farther to the right on immigration to appease the GOP base. The strategy has invited claims of insincerity from some of his rivals for the GOP nomination and other immigration hardliners.

Not everyone is buying it.

“That’s the same advice that (all) candidates like Rubio receive … John McCain used the exact same strategy,” said William Gheen, president of the Americans for Legal Immigration political action committee. “We don’t trust anybody who supports amnesty for illegal immigrants.”

Rubio’s rhetoric has clearly changed, as has the substance of his policies.

In a speech to the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials in June 2012, for instance, he said this:

“The people who are against illegal immigration and make that the core of their argument view it only as a law-and-order issue. But we know it’s much more than that. Yes, it is a law-and-order issue, but it’s also a human issue. These are real people. These are human beings who have children, and hopes, and dreams.”

Rubio went on to say that immigrants do whatever anyone with hungry children would do.

“And too often in our conversation about immigration that perspective is lost,” he said. “Who among us would not do whatever it took to feed our children and provide for them a better future?”

The following year, Rubio signed on to the so-called Gang of Eight, a bipartisan group of senators who crafted a bill to grant a path to citizenship for millions of illegal immigrants. It passed the Senate, but died in the House.

Rubio now says that it was a mistake to address illegal immigrants living in the United States before securing the U.S.-Mexican border. 

Rubio now says that it was a mistake to address illegal immigrants living in the United States before securing the U.S.-Mexican border. And he does not talk much about hungry immigrant children these days.

“We are gonna have to deport some people,” he told Fox News during a campaign stop Thursday in Hilton Head, S.C. “Otherwise, if you’re not going to enforce your laws, what’s the point of having those laws? Criminals will be deported. People that haven’t been here very long are going to be deported. People overstaying visas are going to be deported.”

That followed a Wednesday interview on National Public Radio in which he described his position in favor of legal status for some illegal immigrants as “a very long path” to citizenship.

“If you add up the years, it is a lot of years before someone who is here illegally now could become a citizen,” he said.

In April 2013, though, he said on CBS “Face the Nation” that it was untenable to make illegal immigrants so uncomfortable that they would voluntarily leave.

“First of all, I think it’s important to point out this is not a theory,” he said then. “They are actually here. We are not talking about bringing millions of people here illegally. They are here now, and they are going to be here for rest of their lives.”

Rubio’s public statements in 2012 an 2013 were, themselves, something of a flip-flop.

Rubio’s public statements in 2012 an 2013 were, themselves, something of a flip-flop. Before his dalliance with the Gang of Eight, when he was running for election to his Senate seat, he took a harder line.

“If you grant amnesty, in any form, whether it’s back of the line or so forth, you will destroy any chance we will ever have of having a legal immigration system that works,” he said during a 2010 Republican Senate primary debate hosted by Fox News.

That, of course, was the last time he was making a plea for GOP votes.

During the campaign, he went back and forth on Arizona’s controversial law cracking down on illegal immigration. In April 2010, he likened the law — then under debate in the Arizona Legislature — to a “police state.” The following month, he said in Human Events magazine that a slightly revised bill that said law enforcement could not “solely consider race” when asking for immigration documents “hit the right notes.”