In the spring of 2002, a young Florida state representative named Marco Rubio sized up one of his mentors, Jeb Bush.
”Immigration Wars: Forging an American Solution” by Jeb Bush and Clint Bolick (Threshold. 274 pp. $27).
“He’s practically Cuban, just taller,” Rubio quipped to a journalist. “He speaks Spanish better than most of us.”
Few could dispute Rubio’s inclusion of Bush in a kind of honorary Hispanics club. Here was a highly consequential Republican governor, a conservative juggernaut who slashed government payrolls and tangled with teachers unions, who also happened to fit in seamlessly with Hispanics. Bush, who is married to a Mexican American woman, would go on to champion the Dream Act. He’d tout driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants and in-state college tuition breaks for their children.
Now, a little more than a decade later, the mentor and the protege are crowded together in the cramped top tier of contenders for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. Their possible rivalry over a job they each seem intent on chasing is one of the most deliciously awkward political narratives in America today.
Both men embody an aspiration of Republicans: a chance at luring the growing Hispanic electorate that so overwhelmingly rejected the party in the last presidential election. What’s so fascinating is how they’ve suddenly reversed roles. Bush once appeared more moderate than Rubio, and most other top Republicans, on immigration. Now he’s abruptly backflipped to his protege’s right on the key issue of creating a path to citizenship, triggering a furor along the way.
And all because of a book.
“Immigration Wars,” which Bush co-authored with Clint Bolick, an activist conservative lawyer, was surely intended to play to one of Bush’s strengths. Instead, it has prompted a critical reexamination of the former Florida governor and suggestions that this skilled politician and deep thinker might be a bit rusty six years after leaving office.
The hubbub is over a small but important part of this sober, substantive and detailed explication of America’s immigration miasma. In the book, Bush — as any cable-news viewer should know by now — reverses his previous stance and declares that he opposes a path to citizenship for immigrants who entered the country illegally.
That jarring statement distracts from the sweep of the book, which in 225 pages of text (generously double-spaced) presents a sophisticated take on an issue that often gets reduced to polemical bullet points. Far from being an anti-immigrant screed, “Immigration Wars” often reads like an ode to immigration, with Bush arguing forcefully and convincingly for policies that would encourage more — not fewer — migrants to enter the country.
It’s a curious time for Bush to harden his position on immigration by opposing a path to citizenship, considering the fact that Republicans are desperate to woo Hispanics. Even the Cuban American Rubio, once an avowed opponent of such a path, has been coming around to the idea lately, joining a bipartisan effort in the Senate to change the nation’s immigration laws. Bush has tried to backpedal: In interviews this past week he made qualified statements in favor of a path to citizenship and has explained that he wrote the book last year. But these limp attempts are undercut by the tone he takes in print.
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