Nearly five years after he self-deported from the White House, Mitt Romney, the Michigan-born former governor of Massachusetts, is running for the U.S. Senate seat from Utah (interesting how no one’s telling him to go for a long walk in the woods or to retire and take up knitting, but that’s another story). This story is about Romney running, and he’s apparently trying to cast himself as the alternative to Trumpism, saying in his campaign video that “Utah has a lot to teach the politicians in Washington … Utah welcomes legal immigrants from around the world. Washington sends immigrants a message of exclusion.”
Yeah, about that, Mitt. Notice he says “Utah welcomes legal immigrants.” So what about the estimated 10,000 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients who call the state home? Is he saying Utah isn’t their home? Does he think they deserve a chance to make Utah their home on paper? It’s hard to gauge Romney’s current stance on DACA and the DREAM Act because his Senate campaign website is currently devoid of information, so all we have is the record. We don’t know if Romney would vote for the bipartisan DREAM Act today, but we do know that in 2011, he promised to veto it as president:
“If I were elected and Congress were to pass the DREAM Act, would I veto it?” Romney said, repeating the question a voter asked him at a campaign stop in Le Mars. “The answer is yes.”
Romney went on to say he is “delighted with the idea that people who come to this country and wish to serve in the military can be given a path to become permanent residents of this country… I respect and acknowledge that path.”
But, he added: “For those who come here illegally, the idea of giving them in-state tuition credits or other special benefits I find to be contrary to the idea of a nation of law. If I’m the president of the United States, I want to end illegal immigration so that we can protect legal immigration.”
What special benefits, Mitt? Because undocumented immigrants are ineligible for public assistance. Or maybe he was just furthering anti-immigrant misinformation, because this so-called alternative to Trumpism was actually trying to usher in Trumpism years before Trump ever did. Back in 2012, Romney ran on “self-deportation,” the brain-child of notorious anti-immigrant ring leaders Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach and Mark Krikorian, head of hate group Center for Immigration Studies. The basic idea was that rather than going the Trump route—mass arrests and round-ups via his agents—you just enact policies so miserable, undocumented immigrant families just get up and leave on their own.