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- iHaveNet.com: Politics
by Frank Sharry
While Newt Gingrich's proposal is extremely limited and far from an adequate policy answer to our broken immigration system, he has played an invaluable role in isolating the key question: What do we do with the 11 million undocumented immigrants currently settled in the United States?
Specifically, Gingrich offers a "red card" proposal of legal status, but not citizenship, to a small group of undocumented immigrants. While more realistic than "deport 'em all" proposals, the Gingrich plan falls well short of the comprehensive immigration reform legislation of 2006 that included a path to earned citizenship for most undocumented immigrants and received the backing of 23 Republican senators and President George W. Bush. Even an earlier incarnation of Mitt Romney expressed support for a policy that goes well beyond what Gingrich is now proposing.
Despite the limited scope of the Gingrich proposal and despite Romney's past support for a more generous citizenship proposal, the 2011 version of Romney now labels the Gingrich proposal, indeed anything short of the mass expulsion of 11 million people, as "amnesty." The fact is, the Republican field has moved far to the right on the issue and in the process is distancing itself from the pro-immigration and pro-Hispanic legacies of Republican presidents like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. It also shows some flat-out terrible political judgment.
The
So there you have it -- on immigration, Newt Gingrich may not have the right policy answer, but he certainly has helped us all ask the right question. The question now is whether anyone in the
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On Immigration, Newt Gingrich Has Right Questions, Wrong Answers | Politics
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