Washington (AFP) - The 11 million undocumented immigrants in
the United States don't vote, but they have children, siblings or cousins who
do, and Hillary Clinton is courting their support.
The Democratic presidential candidate has singled out
immigration as a key campaign issue in her bid for the White House in 2016.
She is looking to set herself apart from her Republican
rivals on the matter, and has even said she wants to go further than President
Barack Obama to secure legal status, and citizenship, for millions of
undocumented immigrants, most of whom are Hispanic.
The move is a strategic one: securing the Hispanic vote
could be what Clinton -- or any candidate -- needs to become president in the
next election.
In 2012, the Hispanics made up 10 percent of the vote,
compared to only two percent in 1976.
In recent elections, they have shown an increasing
preference for the Democratic Party. Obama won the 2012 race with 82 percent of
the minority vote, including 71 percent of the Hispanic vote.
Sitting with a group of undocumented students this week in
Nevada, Clinton made her stance clear, calling on Congress to adopt
comprehensive immigration reform and create a path to citizenship for the
youths and millions of others like them.
She promised to do more than Obama, who used executive
action last November to bypass Congress and approve measures to protect about four
million undocumented foreigners from deportation. Clinton said she was ready to
use executive action to shield many more.
Republicans immediately zeroed in on this to attack Clinton
as a hyper-partisan Democrat.
"She is running even further to the left than Barack
Obama," Whit Ayres, Republican pollster and adviser to conservative
presidential hopeful Marco Rubio, told AFP.
"Executive actions on immigration are exactly the wrong
way to solve a broken immigration system. If anything we need more bipartisan
approaches to addressing a broken system, not declarations of unilateral
action," said Ayres.
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Clinton's stance will matter even more in states with a
large Hispanic population, such as Nevada and Florida.
But Republican rivals hope the move will come back to bite
her.
"This is just one more issue that she's going to have
to answer for in the general election," Glen Bolger, Republican pollster
and co-founder of Public Opinion Strategies, told AFP.
"If Republicans started to do major policymaking by
executive action, the Democrats would be howling for impeachment," Bolger
said.
However, Republican presidential candidates are aware they cannot
ignore the immigration question, a key issue for Hispanic voters.
Ayres predicts that Republicans will need much more than 40
percent of the Hispanic vote in next year's election to win, a substantial hike
from the 27 percent that Republican candidate Mitt Romney clinched in 2012.
Republicans focus on a precondition for reform, that the
long border with Mexico should be better secured. Texas Senator Ted Cruz, the
first to join the 2016 White House race, once proposed to triple the number of
police along the border.
But none has offered any kind of substantive plan on
immigration reform.
Rubio, the Florida Senator whose parents immigrated from
Cuba, has previously supported comprehensive immigration reform but has since
backpedaled.
He acknowledges that 11 million people cannot simply be
deported, but now insists on securing the border first, indefinitely delaying
any action on legal status.
Jeb Bush, who is expected to announce his White House bid,
remains somewhat ambiguous.
He prefers to talk about legal immigration, and has proposed
reducing family-based immigration, removing the sibling category preference, to
increase the number of permanent visas for skilled immigrants.
But Bush, whose wife was born in Mexico, has adopted a more
compassionate tone to discuss the lives of immigrants who take risks to cross
the border.
"We're going to turn people into Republicans if we're
much more aspirational in our message, and our tone has to be more inclusive as
well," he said last month.
But Hispanic hopes, at least for the moment, seem to remain
in the Democrats' camp.
Asked by Pew in 2014 "which party do you think has more
concern for Hispanics/Latinos?", half of the Hispanic respondents said
Democrats.
Only 10 percent thought Republicans cared more, and 35 percent
said there was no difference between the parties.
Our position is that people need to come to this country
legally, the same way our parents and grandparents did. Forcing their way into our country that we
and others before us worked so hard to build and re-built is unacceptable and dangerous
for our security and prosperity.
Courting the support of hilarious Hillary and others who are willing to
sell their soul for the money is no less than conspiracy and treason against
these united states.
If you want to some to this country and claim it as your
home, you need to obey the existing laws of this nation. However, these illegal immigrants only come
here to make money so they can send it back to their families in other
countries. Either way, the legal
residents and citizens of this country will receive the short end of the stick,
while the hilarious Hillary will eat the carrot and then claim that she never
ate it.
Source: AFP.com