Mitt Romney in Talks Over Nationwide Version of Tough State Immigration Laws
Read the whole thing here.
Mitt Romney has discussed the possibility of imposing a nationwide crackdown on undocumented aliens, a move that his leading immigration adviser believes could force more than a million people to quit the country every year.
Kris Kobach, the source of some of Romney’s most controversial ideas on immigration, has told the Guardian that he has been in direct discussions with the presidential candidate about possible changes to federal policy should Romney win the Republican nomination and go on to take the White House.
The changes would see “attrition through enforcement” - the state-level clampdown pioneered by Kobach in Arizona, Alabama and several other states - extended across the entire US in an attempt to winkle undocumented workers out of the country.
Kobach estimates that within the first four years of a new Republican presidency, as many as half of the current pool of undocumented aliens - some 5.5 million - could be made to flee by introducing much more aggressive enforcement of immigration documents.
The idea is to make the legal environment so hostile to undocumented families, and work so hard to come by, that they will choose to depart of their own volition - “self-deportation”, as Kobach calls it.
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Kobach said that the provision would not deny education to any undocumented children. But he did admit that some children would have to be taken out of school as a consequence of “self-deportation”, even in cases where the children were born in the US and thus had US citizenship. “We want families to stay together, so obviously where a family has school-aged children their departure would also be inevitable,” he said.
Here’s the guy who invented ‘self-deportation’, Daniel D. Portado.