Businessman Donald Trump wants to expel undocumented US residents, while former Florida governor Jeb Bush is for legalizing them. Immigration is dividing Republican White House hopefuls and embarrassing a party eager to appear strong — yet welcoming to Hispanic voters.
Since 2012, the issue has dogged the US Republican Party, which is staunchly opposed to US President Barack Obama’s executive orders shielding millions of immigrants from deportation.
The party’s conservative wing torpedoed an ambitious reform plan in US Congress the following year and the divide between moderate and conservative currents of the party has simmered on the back burner.
Until Tuesday, when the issue of immigration reared up in the fourth US Republican primary debate.
On one side, billionaire Trump hammered home his plan to build a wall along the US border with Mexico — a pledge repeated like a slogan on the campaign trail.
“We need borders. We will have a wall,” he said.
Not everyone on stage was on board.
“Think about the families, think about the children,” said Ohio Governor John Kasich, who with Bush, represent the opposing camp within the party.
“We all know you can’t pick them up and ship them across, back across the border. It’s a silly argument,” Kasich said.
“It would send a signal that we’re not the kind of country that I know America is,” Bush added, who backs allowing undocumented residents “to earn legal status” over time.
His positioning reflects his values and personal history — he is married to a woman from Mexico and speaks Spanish — but it has as much to do with electoral politics.
“They’re doing high-fives in the Clinton campaign right now when they hear this insistence on deporting millions,” he said.
“We have to win the presidency. And the way you win the presidency is to have practical plans,” he said.
US Senator Ted Cruz painted a different picture of the excitement within former US secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign.
“The Democrats are laughing, because if Republicans join Democrats as the party of amnesty, we will lose,” Cruz said, a hero of the conservative Tea Party movement.
Cruz’s argument plays well in the primary race, in which core conservatives have an outsized role in the voting process.
He believes US Republicans lost the 2012 election because their candidate, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, was too moderate and that only an uncompromising conservative opposed to legalizing the undocumented can win next year.
Party leaders reached the opposite conclusion after the Republican defeat three years ago, when Romney’s assurance that the 11 million people living in the shadows could “self-deport” was widely ridiculed.
“We need to campaign among Hispanic, black, Asian and gay Americans and demonstrate we care about them, too,” the party concluded in a self-critical postmortem.
Obama won 80 percent of black, Hispanic and Asian votes, groups that combined are likely to represent over half the population by 2050.
Clinton seeks to take Obama’s lead and on Wednesday, she declared Trump’s forced deportation plan “absurd, inhumane and un-American.”
Resolving the Republican tensions is a challenge in terms of both policy and rhetoric.
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