Brett Flashnick/AP - Republican presidential candidate Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., answers questions at a town hall series event hosted by Rep. Tim Scott, R-S.C., at Trident Technical College, S.C.
During Perry’s first year in office, he signed a law allowing any student who has lived in Texas for three years and graduates from a Texas high school to pay in-state tuition at state colleges, regardless of their citizenship status.
The bill passed with overwhelming bipartisan support but now is criticized by some Republicans as a precursor to the federal DREAM Act, a Democratic proposal to create a path to citizenship for some illegal immigrants brought into the country as children.
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney took a swipe at President Obama on Tuesday, saying the U.S. can't be a leader by "hoping our enemies will hate us less" at the 112th Veterans of Foreign Wars National Convention in San Antonio, Tex. (Aug. 30)
Last year, Perry criticized Arizona’s tough new immigration enforcement law, saying that it “would not be the right direction for Texas.”
Sullivan said Perry’s stances made sense for Texas, pointing out that many Texans have economic, cultural and family ties across the border. “Texans have a very close and perhaps unique perspective on border issues,” he said.
Some conservatives have begun attacking Perry on immigration. “He’s just a little bit too much like George Bush,” Ann Coulter recently said on Fox News.
On immigration, Romney’s position is to secure the border before considering comprehensive reform. At the town hall in Keene, he said that means to “turn off the magnet.”
“Employers in the U.S. who knowingly hire people who are here illegally — that’s the magnet,” he said. “So we have to crack down on employers that hire illegals, make it easy for them to determine who’s here legally and who’s not, and then crack down on those who hire illegals.”
Bachmann, too, wants to crack down on those who are in the United States illegally. On a recent five-day campaign swing, she was asked about immigration at virtually every stop. At one, a town hall meeting in North Charleston, S.C., she elicited the most passionate response of the evening when she took a question on immigration.
Bachmann promised to build a fence along “every mile, every yard, every foot, every inch” of the nation’s southern border, to “have the back” of enforcement agents, and to put an end to the provision of federal benefits to illegal immigrants.
But she really got her audience going with a series of lamentations about the border that places her to the right of her opponents.
“On the southern border, we are dealing with a narco-terrorist state today in Mexico,” Bachmann said. “Because 70 percent of narcotics are coming to the United States are coming from Mexico. Mexico is in a very different place right now. We are seeing criminals, felons, drugs, we’re seeing contagious diseases coming into our country. What is wrong with our government that it isn’t stopping this from coming into the nation?”
The applause was loud, yet the man who asked the question, Rich Wiedenhoft, left unsatisfied.
“The very town I live in is a sanctuary city, and I’m very ashamed of that,” Wiedenhoft, 63, an Air Force retiree, said later in an interview. “I served in the military for 20 years defending the flag. And I resent people coming in here and taking advantage of us. I consider them invaders.”
So which candidate might appeal more than Bachmann?
“That,” he said, “is what I keep going to these meetings to find out.”
Staff researcher Alice Crites and polling director Jon Cohen contributed to this report. Gardner reported from South Carolina.
Campaign 2012 tools
The Post Most: PoliticsMost-viewed stories, videos and galleries int he past two hours
Featured Blogs & Columns
Loading...
Comments