As the Republican candidates for President slog through the final days of campaigning in a state with a large Hispanic population, two Florida Republicans with strong ties to the Hispanic community are warning their party about rhetoric that threatens to alienate the fastest growing minority voting bloc in the country:

Senior Republicans including the brother of the former president George Bush have warned the party to avoid using “harsh, intolerable and inexcusable” language about illegal immigration or risk alienating Latino voters.

The Florida senator, Marco Rubio, and the state’s former governor Jeb Bush made their appeal before Tuesday’s primary, being contested by Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney.

The Republican frontrunners clashed over illegal immigration in a debate earlier this week. The issue is emotive in Florida, which has the third largest Latino population in America.

Latinos make up 13% of Florida’s 11.2 million registered voters, according to data from the Florida Division of Elections, compiled by the Pew Hispanic Center.

“We must admit there are those among us that have used rhetoric that is harsh and intolerable and inexcusable,” Rubio said in a speech at the Hispanic Leadership Network in Miami on Friday.

“And we must admit, myself included, that sometimes we’ve been too slow to condemn that language for what it is.”

(…)

Bush also urged Republicans to temper their comments. “Hispanic people hear these debates and I think you turn them off. It’s not a good thing,” he said.

Bush also addressed the issue in a Washington Post Op-Ed published earlier this week in which he urges Republicans to rethink the way they think, and talk, about immigration:

Republicans should reengage on this issue and reframe it. Start by recognizing that new Americans strengthen our economy. We need more people to come to this country, ready to work and to contribute their creativity to our economy. U.S. immigration policies should reflect that principle. Just as Republicans believe in free trade of goods, we should support the freer flow of human talent.

We need to connect immigration to other pro-growth policies, so that new Americans can apply their talents here and succeed. The United States needs an economy that is vibrant and dynamic, open to the contributions of new entrants. We have to reduce regulations across our economy, whenever they impede economic dynamism and flexibility in the labor market. We need secure energy supplies, radical tax reform and a reduced footprint of power of the state.

Immigration reform requires economic reforms. We must be able to assure new Americans the opportunity to succeed and contribute their talents.

And when they come, as surely they will, we must welcome them, no matter whether they speak Spanish or Creole or Portuguese. When we hear foreign languages in the streets of America, that is a validation of the Republican vision to create a place where people want to come and make their lives. Hispanics here speak or are learning English — not French, Chinese or Hindi. There is a lesson in that, and Republicans should be the ones to champion it.

The one thing that has been striking about the two Republican debates in Florida this week is the manner in which the tone of the discussion about immigration has changed from previous debates. The lines about “border security” and immigrants taking American jobs, while not gone completely, were being counterbalanced by discussions about compassion and the value of immigrants. Both Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney voiced support for a modified version of the DREAM Act that would give legal residency to illegal immigrants who serve in the military. Statehood for Puerto Rico was discussed as an option. And, both Romney and Gingrich made it clear that they were not in favor of deporting Grandmothers. It’s almost as if Rick Perry, another Governor from a state with a large Hispanic population who advocated programs like in-state tuition for the children of  illegal immigrants, were still in the race instead of having been shunned by his party’s base for advocating a policy that he called compassionate.

Of course, this is largely because the candidates are in Florida this week and eager to attract the support of the Cuban community in Miami and the large Puerto Rican community that resides around Orlando and in other areas of the state. Earlier this month, when they were in Iowa where anti-immigrant sentiment runs bizarrely high for a state that is more than 1,000 miles from the U.S.-Mexico border, the rhetoric was very different. The same goes for South Carolina. Next month, the candidates will be competing in states like Nevada and Arizona and it’s quite likely that the toned down rhetoric will be replaced with the same anti-immigrant rhetoric we saw a few weeks ago in Iowa. z

Bush and Rubio are right, of course. Thanks largely to a bizarre no-compromises position on immigration reform, the GOP is in the process of alienating even further an ethnic group that is going to become a huge part of the voting electorate in states that stretch from California, across the Southwest, into Texas, and all the way to Florida. There are also large and growing Hispanic populations in swing states like Virginia, Colorado, and North Carolina. For the GOP to ignore the problems it has with this voting bloc strikes me, and apparently Bush and Rubio, as a form of electoral suicide that would take a long time repair.  The Latino vote in California seems to be lost already and with it, most likely, the State of California itself for the foreseeable future. Other surveys have shown that Hispanics nationwide, while not necessarily thrilled with the Obama Administration’s increased deportations and failure to follow through on comprehensive immigration reform, are more turned off by the GOP’s stance on immigration issues than they are disappointed in the Democratic Party’s to follow through on its promise.

Observing this problem in March, I said this:

The GOP stands on the verge of losing the fastest growing ethnic group in the country for at least a generation, all because the conservative base continues to cling to a restrictionist, anti-immigrant policy on immigration and refuses to even discuss the possibility of compromise on issues like amnesty for people already in the country illegally. To these conservatives, the answer to the immigration problem is an easy one but the truth it that it isn’t easy, and they’re leading the GOP down the road to electoral disaster.

People like Bush and Rubio clearly recognize this. Whether their fellow Republicans do, or whether they care, isn’t at all clear.

 Not long ago, Apple boasted that its products were made in America. Today, few are. Almost all of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other products Apple sold last year were manufactured overseas.

Why can’t that work come home? Mr. Obama asked.

Mr. Jobs’s reply was unambiguous. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” he said, according to another dinner guest.

The president’s question touched upon a central conviction at Apple. It isn’t just that workers are cheaper abroad. Rather, Apple’s executives believe the vast scale of overseas factories as well as the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced their American counterparts that “Made in the U.S.A.” is no longer a viable option for most Apple products.

(…)

Apple executives say that going overseas, at this point, is their only option. One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.

A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.

“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.”

Similar stories could be told about almost any electronics company — and outsourcing has also become common in hundreds of industries, including accounting, legal services, banking, auto manufacturing and pharmaceuticals.

The article goes on to explain how the advantage that Apple found in China wasn’t just cheap semi-skilled labor, but the economies of scale and speed with which requests could be complied with that really sealed the deal. The story about the iPhone’s screen tells the tale most effectively:

For years, cellphone makers had avoided using glass because it required precision in cutting and grinding that was extremely difficult to achieve. Apple had already selected an American company, Corning Inc., to manufacture large panes of strengthened glass. But figuring out how to cut those panes into millions of iPhone screens required finding an empty cutting plant, hundreds of pieces of glass to use in experiments and an army of midlevel engineers. It would cost a fortune simply to prepare.

Then a bid for the work arrived from a Chinese factory.

When an Apple team visited, the Chinese plant’s owners were already constructing a new wing. “This is in case you give us the contract,” the manager said, according to a former Apple executive. The Chinese government had agreed to underwrite costs for numerous industries, and those subsidies had trickled down to the glass-cutting factory. It had a warehouse filled with glass samples available to Apple, free of charge. The owners made engineers available at almost no cost. They had built on-site dormitories so employees would be available 24 hours a day.

The Chinese plant got the job.

“The entire supply chain is in China now,” said another former high-ranking Apple executive. “You need a thousand rubber gaskets? That’s the factory next door. You need a million screws? That factory is a block away. You need that screw made a little bit different? It will take three hours.”

(…)

Another critical advantage for Apple was that China provided engineers at a scale the United States could not match. Apple’s executives had estimated that about 8,700 industrial engineers were needed to oversee and guide the 200,000 assembly-line workers eventually involved in manufacturing iPhones. The company’s analysts had forecast it would take as long as nine months to find that many qualified engineers in the United States.

In China, it took 15 days.

Companies like Apple “say the challenge in setting up U.S. plants is finding a technical work force,” said Martin Schmidt, associate provost at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In particular, companies say they need engineers with more than high school, but not necessarily a bachelor’s degree. Americans at that skill level are hard to find, executives contend. “They’re good jobs, but the country doesn’t have enough to feed the demand,” Mr. Schmidt said.

The article is already the subject of much commentary on both the political side, as tracked by Memeorandum, and among technology writers tracked at Techmeme. Tyler Cowen suggests that it’s reason for us to spend less time worrying about the wage gap with China and other nations, and more time worrying about the economies of scale issues that the article raises.  Henry Blodget makes a starker point that makes one wonder exactly how the United States could ever get the “iPhone jobs” back:

 [Y]es, money is part of why all of our gadgets are built in China. But what started a couple of decades ago as a reach for efficiency has now resulted in the entire electronics-manufacturing ecosystem being lifted up and transferred to China.

Apple doesn’t build iPhones in the United States, in other words, because there is no longer an ecosystem here to support that manufacturing. There’s no supply chain, there aren’t enough super-low-cost workers, and there are not enough mid-level engineers.  And many Americans looking for work are still hoping for a return to jobs, salaries, and lifestyles that have simply disappeared.

This is a complex problem, and there’s no easy solution. But it’s a problem this country is going to have to fix. Or the massive middle class that once drove America’s prosperity will just cease to exist.

Of course, the problem with American politics is that easy solutions are all we ever hear from politicians because that’s all that voters want to hear. Any politician who dares to present ideas that cannot be summarized into nice easy sound bites usually ends up getting ignored, and all that putting out a detailed plan of any kind tends to accomplish is that it leaves the candidate in question open to more and more criticism. More importantly, though, the American people don’t want to hear things like Blodget says from their political leaders. Just ask John McCain when he bluntly stated during the Michigan Primary in 2008 that many of the manufacturing jobs that went overseas weren’t going to come back. He was right, but he was roundly denounced not only be Democrats by members of his own party. Pessimism, or to put it better honesty, doesn’t play well in politics. Americans want to hear that things are going to get better, quickly, that we will always be the leader of the world, and that we are the greatest nation ever to exist in the history of the world. Admitting that we’ve got a serious problem and that there’s pain to come in the future? Yea, try to make that sell in a race for the White House

Yves Smith doesn’t share in the praise for the article and notes that the authors missed a very important fact in their story about those iPhone glass screens:

So basically, the Chinese funded a completely non-economical glass R&D facility IN ANTICIPATION of getting the Apple order. There is no way anyone would build a factory like that unless the money was close to free. It already had glass samples in stock! The “some subsidies trickled down” sounds way too innocent. It sounds more like someone recognized the importance of Apple as a marquee customer, and whether the push came from the officialdom or businessmen with the right connections in high places, it doesn’t really matter. This project smells of having serious government backing. How can private businesses anywhere compete with that?

They can’t, of course, but I also don’t think that anyone is seriously suggesting that the United States can or should adopt anything resembling Chinese industrial policy. For one thing, it goes against the entire ethos of our economic and legal systems not to mention our culture. For another, it doesn’t strike me as an efficient use of resources. China has been pumping billions into projects like this, and many of them have laid dormant. That’s seems to me like the classic signs of a bubble, when and how it pops is another question. Smith also points out that Apple may not be the best example of  how and why an American manufacturer prefers to rely on overseas labor. Changing the screen design mere weeks before product roll out, be points out, is as much an example of Jobs’s erratic genius as anything else and isn’t necessarily a sign of good project management. The only reason it worked out well for Apple, it seems, is because the Chinese firm was able to push its workers to work longer hours than any American ever would. In other words, Chinese near-slave labor saved Steve Jobs’s ass.

Notwithstanding these valid criticisms, the article raises compelling points that should deeply concern all of us. As Blodget notes, it’s principally the lack of the infrastructure needed for the kind of manufacturing that Apple, or any cellphone or electronics manufacturer for that matter, would need that makes it unlikely that those kinds of jobs will return any time soon. Moreover, thanks to offshoring, advances in technology, and increases in worker productivity, there are entire classes of employment that either no longer exist anymore or don’t require nearly as many bodies as they used to. Many of these are the semi-skilled positions that were once a ticket to a middle class lifestyle. The same thing goes for the positions that used to be waiting for college graduates, and are now harder to come by. Where, exactly, are these jobs going to come from?

There is one factor the article cites that we could do something about. We don’t graduate nearly enough engineers in this country, partly because American college students seem inclined to pick “easy” majors rather than one of the STEM subject areas. We also don’t do much to encourage foreign students who come to the United States to study in these areas to stay here after they graduate. On that last point, many have suggested that we should offer H1-B visa’s to any foreign college student who agrees to stay and work in the United States after graduating. It’s a reasonable idea, as is any the encourages immigration by high-skilled workers and professionals, but right now immigration policy is ham-strung by a Republican Party unwilling to compromise at all until some ridiculous ideal of “border security” is achieved, even if its a policy that helps the economy. It’s a dumb position to take on many levels, and it’s hurting the economy.

Apple is now the leading corporation in America by any number of measures. However, even accounting for its overseas factories, it employees barely 1/10th of the number of employees that General Motors employed in the 1950s, and just a fraction of the number of employees that General Electric employed in the 1980s. Quite simply, they don’t need that many workers anymore. And yet,  the population of potential employees is far higher now than it was in the 50s or the 80s. Unless everyone is going to be a software designer, we’re going to have to find somewhere to employ all those people that provides more than just a minimal wage. During  his campaign for the Presidency, Jon Huntsman talked about a manufacturing renaissance that he believed was on the verge of occurring in America. One hopes he’s right about that because, otherwise, we’re going to have some big problems to deal with.

Update: Don Boudreaux shares a Letter To The Editor he sent to the Times in response to the article linked above:

As your reporters admit, Apple uses lots of overseas workers precisely because those workers are willing to work in worst conditions and for lower pay than are American workers – strong evidence that the options open to even low-skilled Americans are far superior to those of most workers in developing countries.  Our prosperity enables even the poorest of us to avoid such toil.

Of course, some people (apparently including, according to your report, Pres. Obama) wonder why Apple doesn’t simply hire American workers at American wages to do more of those jobs.  Alas, the unavoidable result of that policy would be a substantial rise in the price of Apple products and a fall – likely total – in the number of such products produced and sold.

Put differently, your report, like Mr. Obama, insinuates that low-wage jobs overseas (and jobs currently performed by machines) would, if transferred to America, somehow become the same – but higher paying – jobs for workers here.  This insinuation is wrong.   If Apple followed Mr. Obama’s suggestion, there would soon be no Apple and, hence, no “iPhone work” that the U.S. could possibly “lose out on.”

This is a fair point, although I would quibble with the assertion that there are so many options open to Americans right now. As anyone who’s been unemployed for more than a month or so can tell you, that’s not necessarily the case, and for large segments of the American workforce it does seem like the path to a middle class life that used to exist is disappearing. That’s not to say that Chinese wages and working conditions should be brought to the United States. That would be absurd, and I doubt most Americans would accept it. However,  it still leaves unanswered the question of where the jobs are going to come from in the future.

DALLAS – “It’s very frustrating,” Lorene Turner said.

She has spent hours on Facebook trying to find her granddaughter, Jakadrien.

“Once I get home I am up until 3 or 4 in the morning searching and looking,” Turner said. “It’s all I can think about. Finding my baby.”

Turner has been searching for Jakadrien since the fall of 2010, when she ran away from home. She was 14 years old and distraught over the loss of her grandfather and her parents’ divorce.

Turner searched for months for a clue.

“God just kept leading me,” she said. “I wake up in the middle of the night and do whatever God told me to do, and I found her.”

Turner said with the help of Dallas Police, she found her granddaughter in the most unexpected place – Colombia.

Where she had mistakenly been deported by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in April of 2011.

How, exactly, could a minor who had been reported missing in 2010 end up getting deported almost a year later? Well…..

News 8 learned that Jakadrien somehow ended up in Houston, where she was arrested by Houston police for theft. She gave Houston police a fake name. When police in Houston ran that name, it belonged to a 22-year-old illegal immigrant from Colombia, who had warrants for her arrest.

So ICE officials stepped in.

News 8 has learned ICE took the girl’s fingerprints, but somehow didn’t confirm her identity and deported her to Colombia, where the Colombian government gave her a work card and released her.

“She talked about how they had her working in this big house cleaning all day, and how tired she was,” Turner said.

Through her granddaughter’s Facebook messages, Turner says she tracked Jakadrian down.

U.S. Federal authorities got an address. U.S. Embassy officials in Colombia asked police to pick her up.

But that was a month ago, and the Colombian government now has her in a detention facility and won’t release her, despite her family’s request.

So a 14 year old runaway gives the cops a fake name. Not exactly an uncommon occurrence one would think. Somehow, that also happens to be the name of an illegal immigrant. They hand her over to ICE, but ICE never bothers to verify her identiy and instead just dumps her in Colombia. Bizzare to say the least.

And then there are the actions of Colombia itself, which is apparently refusing to release someone who is at least a legal resident of the United States and may be a citizen (the article is not clear on whether Jakadrien was born in the United States)? What’s up with that?

The Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice has released a harsh assessment of the practices of the Maricopa County, Arizona Sheriffs Department, which happens to be led by a man who has become something of a darling of the right:

PHOENIX — In a harshly worded critique of the country’s best-known sheriff, the Justice Department accused Joe Arpaio of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office of engaging in “unconstitutional policing” by unfairly targeting Latinos for detentions and arrests and retaliating against those who complain.

After an investigation that lasted more than two years, the civil rights division of the Justice Department said the sheriff’s office has “a pervasive culture of discriminatory bias against Latinos” that “reaches the highest levels of the agency.” The department interfered with the inquiry, the government said, prompting a lawsuit that eventually led Mr. Arpaio and his deputies to cooperate.

“We have peeled the onion to its core,” said Thomas E. Perez, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, noting during a conference call with reporters on Thursday morning that more than 400 people were interviewed as part of the review. Mr. Perez said the inquiry raised the question of whether Latinos were receiving “second-class policing services” in Maricopa County.

The report stems from a civil inquiry and Mr. Perez said he hoped that Mr. Arpaio would cooperate with the federal government in turning the department around. Should he refuse, a lawsuit will be filed, Mr. Perez said, adding that the Justice Department is conducting a separate criminal inquiry of the department.

Mr. Arpaio was singled out for criticism in the report, which faulted him as distributing racially charged letters and e-mails he had received and helping to nurture the department’s “culture of bias.”

The findings, which Mr. Arpaio is sure to contest, paint a picture of a department staffed by poorly trained deputies who target Latino drivers on the roadways and detain innocent Latinos in the community in their searches for illegal immigrants. The mistreatment, the government said, extends to the jails the department oversees, where Latino inmates who do not speak English were mistreated.

“The absence of clear policies and procedures to ensure effective and constitutional policing, along with the deviations from widely accepted policing and correctional practices, and the failure to implement meaningful oversight and accountability structures, have contributed to a chronic culture of disregard for basic legal and constitutional obligations,” the report said.

The report said that Latino drivers were four to nine times more likely to be stopped in the sprawling county, which includes Phoenix and its environs, than non-Latino drivers. The expert who conducted the study called it the most egregious racial profiling he has ever seen in this country, said Mr. Perez, the prosecutor.

The report said that roughly one-fifth of the traffic-related incident reports generated by the department’s human smuggling unit contained information indicating the stops may have been conducted in violation of the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable seizures.

The report also suggested that Mr. Arpaio’s well-publicized raids aimed at arresting illegal immigrants were sometimes prompted by complaints that described no criminal activity but referred to people with “dark skin” or Spanish speakers congregating in an area. “The use of these types of bias-infected indicators as a basis for conducting enforcement activity contributes to the high number of stops and detentions lacking in legal justification,” the report said.

It’s been clear for years that Arpaio is a man who has little respect for the Constitutional rights of the accused, and even less when those accused happen to have brown skin and speak with an accent. One would like to think that this would finally be the thing that gets him out of office after being overwhelmingly elected five times, but that may be asking too much of the residents of Maricopa County.

In the Spring of 2010, Arizona passed an immigration bill, that among other things, gave police in the state the duty to check on the immigration status of anyone suspected of being in the United States illegally. The bill sparked controversy nationwide, as well as a negative reaction from the Hispanic groups, and even Republican politicians like Marco Rubio. Immediately after the law went into effect, the Justice Department filed suit alleging that the law was an unconstitutional intrusion into an area that is already regulated by Congress, an thus trumped by the Supremacy Clause. The Federal Government won its arguments at the District Court and Court of Appeals level, and now the case has become yet another politically charged case that the Supreme Court will hear this year:

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to decide whether Arizona may impose tough anti-immigration measures. Among them, in a law enacted last year, is a requirement that the police there question people they stop about their immigration status.

The Obama administration challenged parts of the law in court, saying that it could not be reconciled with federal immigration laws and policies. The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, blocked enforcement of parts of the law in April.

The administration challenged four provisions. The most prominent was a requirement that state law enforcement officials determine the immigration status of anyone they stop or arrest if officials have reason to believe that the individual might be an illegal immigrant. The provision also requires that the immigration status of people who are arrested be determined before they are released.

The law also makes it a crime under state law for aliens to fail to register under a federal one. In a brief urging the Supreme Court not to hear the case, Donald B. Verrilli Jr., the United States solicitor general, said this provision created a state “crime of being unlawfully present in the United States.”

The third challenged provision makes it a crime for illegal immigrants to work or try find work. Federal law subjects businesses that hire illegal workers to criminal punishment but imposes only civil penalties on the workers themselves.

The Arizona law also allows the police to arrest people without warrants if they have probable cause to believe that suspects have done things that would make them deportable under federal law.

The Ninth Circuit blocked all four provisions.

The Constitution gives Congress the power “to establish an uniform rule of naturalization.”

Mr. Verrilli told the justices that the Arizona law upsets a delicate balance that includes “law enforcement priorities, foreign-relations considerations and humanitarian concerns.”

In urging the court to hear the case, Arizona v. United States, No. 11-182, Paul D. Clement, representing Arizona, said the state law did not conflict with but, rather, complemented federal policies. The Ninth Circuit’s decision, Mr. Clement told the justices, had “completely foreclosed Arizona’s effort to address the disproportionate impact of unlawful immigration in a state with a 370-mile border with Mexico.”

Interestingly, it was announced this morning Justice Kagan took no part in consideration of the appeal, and will not rule on the merits of the case. Presumably, this would be because she was involved in consideration of the matter, and strategy discussions for litigation, when the law was first challenged by the Department of Justice.

Given the fact that the Arizona law served as the blueprint for similar laws in Georgia, Alabama, and other jurisdictions, all of which are presently the subject of similar Federal Court challenges, this case is likely to be watched closely by all sides. Interestingly, as with the Court’s consideration of the challenges to the Affordable Care Act, this case will also likely result in a decision being released in late June just before the Presidential campaign starts hearing up.

Via the London Guardian:  Alabama red-faced as second foreign car boss held under immigration law

A judge has acted to put a Japanese employee of Honda Motor Company out of his misery by dismissing immigration charges against him, three days after he was booked under Alabama’s new immigration laws that have been billed as the most swingeing in America. Ichiro Yada is one of about 100 Japanese managers of the company on assignment in southern state.

Yada was stopped in Leeds, Alabama, at a checkpoint set up by police to catch unlicenced drivers. He was ticketed on the spot, despite the fact that he showed an international driver’s licence, a valid passport and a US work permit.

Key parts of the new immigration law, HB56, came into effect in late September, including the driving provisions. Under them, the police are required to check up on the immigration status of anyone they stop who they suspect of being in the country illegally.

In addition, all drivers are required to carry a valid driver’s licence, either from a US state or from their native country if they are from abroad. The law is designed to trap undocumented immigrants – in practice, Hispanics largely from Mexico – who are no longer allowed to apply for driving licences.

And the genius continues.

Yada, at least, was not taken to prison:

City officials said he was released on a signature bond at the checkpoint and was not taken to jail. The charge was dismissed after a copy of his Japanese license was shown to the court. (source)

the law’s mandates on law enforcement could lead to harassment and detention of foreign visitors and legal immigrants who are in the process of having their immigration status reviewed in federal proceedings and whom the federal government has permitted to stay in this country while such proceedings are pending.

Pish posh.  Where do such fantasies come from.

Such a thing would never happen.

In an obvious, and I must say well-played effort to push back against the criticism he’s getting over his immigration comments last night, the Newt Gingrich campaign is sending around this video of Mitt Romney in December 2007 where he appears to endorse the idea of a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants:

The Romney campaign is pushing back on its own with a citation to the full context of what Romney said that day on Meet The Press:

My own view is, consistent with what you saw in the Lowell Sun, that those people who had come here illegally and are in this country, the 12 million or so that are here illegally, should be able to sign up for permanent residency or citizenship, but they should not be given a special pathway, a special guarantee that all of them get to stay here for the rest of their lives merely by virtue of having come here illegally, and that, I think, is the great flaw in the final bill that came forward from the Senate.

So the context of Romney’s quote is that he isn’t in favor of a “special pathway” for illegals to obtain citizenship, but he also seems to be making clear that, at least in 2007, he didn’t favor deportation or massive crackdowns against said immigrants. So, it seems like he’s actually saying here that he kind of agrees with the position that Gingrich was taking last night.

Chris Good tries to summarize where this leaves us:

1) Newt Gingrich opposes “amnesty” for illegal immigrants, but he says there should be exceptions. Specifically, Gingrich holds that any “reasonable person” would be hard pressed to tell a taxpaying constituent of 25 years that he has to leave his family and return to the country of his birth, after coming here illegally long ago and becoming a productive member of American society.

2) Mitt Romney opposes “amnesty” for illegal immigrants, and he says Gingrich’s idea of allowing exceptions would incentivize foreign nationals to come to the U.S. illegally.

3) Newt Gingrich opposes Mitt Romney’s 2007 opinion that illegal residents should be able to sign up for permanent residency or citizenship.

4) Mitt Romney also said in 2007 that he did not believe in a “pathway” to citizenship for illegal residents or a “special guarantee” as part of that sign-up process.

Seems as clear as mud to me, but it might just be enough for Gingrich to blunt any attacks that Romney will try to make based on last night’s exchange. Expect this one to come up at the next debate ( which will be held on December 10th in Iowa) and, most likely, to be the subject of a commercial or two before then.

As James Joyner already noted in his wrap-up of last night’s Republican Foreign Policy Debate, one of the major eyebrow raising moments came toward the end of the two-hour affair when the subject of immigration came up and Newt Gingrich, the putative frontrunner, went off the conservative ranch:

Did Newt Gingrich have a “heartless” moment on Tuesday night?

In a September debate, Rick Perry, the governor of Texas, drew a furious response from conservatives in his party when he said critics of in-state tuition for illegal immigrants “did not have a heart.” The response halted Mr. Perry’s momentum amid charges from rivals that he was too soft on the issue of immigration for the party faithful.

Now, Mr. Gingrich — the newest leader in the national polls — has embraced a similar apostasy: the idea that the country should find a way to make many millions of illegal immigrants legal.

“There’s a way to ultimately end up with a country where there’s no more illegality, but you haven’t automatically given amnesty to anyone,” Mr. Gingrich said, citing a program from the Vernon K. Krieble Foundation.

That was enough for Mr. Gingrich’s rivals to pounce. Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, refused to allow Mr. Gingrich to claim that his suggestion was different than amnesty.

“If people who come here illegally are going to get to stay illegally for the rest of their life, that’s going to only encourage more people to come here illegally,” Mr. Romney said.

Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnestota agreed with Mr. Romney. “I don’t agree that you would make 11 million workers legal, because that in effect is amnesty,” she said.

Mr. Gingrich responded by pressing his case that the country — and the Republican party — would not be served by forcing the exile of immigrants who had been in the country for years, paying taxes and staying out of legal trouble.

“I don’t see how the party that says it’s the party of the family is going to adopt an immigration policy which destroys families that have been here a quarter century,” Mr. Gingrich said during the debate. “And I’m prepared to take the heat for saying let’s be humane in enforcing the law without giving them citizenship, but by finding a way to create legality so that they are not separated from their families.”

It’s worth watching the exchange in full:

Not surprisingly, the rival campaigns didn’t stop their critiques of Gingrich’s statements after the debate ended:

Before the candidates left the Washington debate stage, Michele Bachmann’s campaign blasted out an email declaring that, while speaker, Gingrich “ultimately failed to secure the border or significantly staunch the flow of illegal immigrants into the United States. In fact, he helped legalize hundreds of thousands.”

Bachmann spokeswoman Alice Stewart, in an interview following the debate, doubled down on that criticism.

“Speaker Gingrich [showed] he’s wrong on the issue of immigration and amnesty’s not the way to deal with it,” she said. “Amnesty is certainly not the way to go about doing it.”

An adviser to Mitt Romney, who has drilled Perry for weeks on immigration, said Gingrich did himself no favors, particularly in socially conservative Iowa, where the first caucuses will be held.

“Gingrich really hurt himself in Iowa on immigration,” said Romney adviser Ron Kaufman.

Romney spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom also played up Gingrich’s comments, seeking to draw a clear contrast between Gingrich and Romney.

“Mitt Romney is against amnesty, and Newt Gingrich made it very clear he supported amnesty,” he said.

The obvious parallel that people are drawing this morning is to the moment in a September debate when Rick Perry referred to people who were opposed to the in-state tuition program that Texas had extended to illegal immigrants as “heartless,” a moment that combined with all his other debate disasters likely led to his final fall from his brief run as a GOP frontrunner. Like Perry’s position, of course, there isn’t really anything wrong with what Gingrich said last night. Granting incentives to stay in school to students regardless of their immigration status is a good idea, not just for them but for the c0mmunity that they live in. Similarly, we’re never going to deport people who’ve lived here for decades, having families, and are contributing to society no matter how much the most virulent anti-immigrant Republican might want to think we are. In that respect, Perry and Gingrich actually deserve some credit for speaking the truth here rather than pandering the way that Bachmann and Romney, and no doubt other candidates in the days to come, did in response to Gingrich.

Of course, that’s what should happen. The question here, really, is what will happen. Gingrich’s words are unlikely to play well among Republicans in Iowa and South Carolina, and that’s the reason that Bachmann and Romney jumped on him so quickly last night, and the reason that the candidates went after Perry on the tuition thing in September. So, regardless of whether or not Gingrich is right here (and, may lightening strike me dead, but I agree with Gingrich on this one issue) he could still end up paying a political price for what he said.

Commentary’s Jonathan Toobin expects Gingrich to suffer the same fate as Perry:

This is the same land mine that Rick Perry stepped on back in September when he was slaughtered by Romney and the other candidates for his willingness to give in-state university tuition discounts to the children of illegals. Perry never lived down his answer that those who opposed him “didn’t have a heart.” But by actually saying the dreaded “amnesty” word — albeit in the course of a typically professorial lecture about Ronald Reagan​’s own support for such a measure that Gingrich backed when he was in Congress — the former speaker actually went much deeper than Perry did.

Perry made sense on this issue, as did Gingrich tonight. But the consequences for Gingrich should be swift and severe. If Perry’s heresy on immigration hurt him badly in Iowa, there’s no reason to believe an even more extreme position by Gingrich will not turn his current high hopes in the Hawkeye state to dust.

Allahpundit, however isn’t so sure:

What you’re seeing here, in fact, is really just a rewrite of the latter’s infamous point about heartlessness by a guy who’s much slicker at debating. Neither one is endorsing citizenship for illegals, just greater integration of those who have been here long enough that uprooting them would cause great personal disruption. Gingrich’s position is arguably more defensible than Perry’s since he’s not calling for any taxpayer subsidies; Perry’s is arguably more defensible than Gingrich’s since he’s focused on kids who were brought here by their parents, not people who crossed the border illegally of their own volition. I think Newt’s going to get away with this partly because of the difference in tone — his answer seems even milder than it is thanks to the standard set by Perry’s “heartless” remark — and partly because, as we get closer to the general, the base will tolerate a bit more centrism on immigration in the name of wooing Hispanics in the general. We nominated McCain, didn’t we?

Of course, as Conor Freidersdorf points out, the fact that we’re talking about someone paying a political price for stating what in essence is little more than common sense says much about how screwed up the GOP has become on immigration issues:

[P]artisans have a tremendous capacity for cognitive dissonance, and many Republican partisans are powerfully attached to the idea that the rule of law demands the deportation of everyone who came here illegally. Those who have spent time reporting on the issue know what the grassroots would say to Gingrich: “What part of illegal don’t you understand?” This is, after all, the same crowd that cheers when Herman Cain jokes about an electrified fence on the Mexican border, another policy proposal that they haven’t thought through.

The ugliness is mostly rooted in failing to see that illegal immigrants aren’t abstractions. They’re people. Before damning the restrictionists who don’t grasp this, a failure for which they ought to be faulted, remember that most of us are guilty of the same behavior, whether we’re brooding about the vehicle ahead of us on the freeway, or cheering the drone strike that killed a terrorist and three unidentified persons, or insulting someone in an online comments section, or doing nothing for decades as prison inmates are raped and assaulted in state run institutions.

(…)

For obvious reasons, telling “deport ‘em all” voters that they’re thoughtless or cruel is counterproductive. They can’t see it. They don’t feel as though they’re being cruel. Better to somehow convey, “It’s people we’re talking about!” and hope you get through. But doing so without offending is hard.

Gingrich would be a terrible president, but he deserves credit for trying, for saying what he knows to be true on this issue, even as Mitt Romney treats illegal immigrants as abstractions in order to compensate for his perceived squishyness on other issues. He is exploiting the abstractness.

It’s ugly to watch.

Indeed, it is. As I’ve made clear here many times over the past two weeks or so, I am by no means a fan of Newt Gingrich. I consider him a consummate opportunist who switches policy positions as often as the rest of us switch lanes on the highway, but somehow manages to clothe all of it in an intellectual veneer that makes people think “wow doesn’t he seem smart?” Like Conor, I think he’d make a crappy President and that anyone who supports limited government and supports him is fooling themselves. Nonetheless, he’s mostly right here, just as Perry was mostly right about in-state tuition for illegal immigrants. The problem that the GOP has on immigration is that they don’t see that these are people they’re talking about, not just numbers or some faceless class called “illegals.” Even when they laws they pass end up having disastrous impacts on the farming industry in states like Georgia and Alabama they still cling to the idea that they are somehow going to be able to pass some laws, put some agents on the border  (or maybe a moat filled with alligators and electrified fence if your name is Herman Cain) and everything will be fine. It won’t, of course, but it makes for easy campaign rhetoric and the anti-immigrant voters in places like Iowa and South Carolina will eat it up. That may be smart politics, but it’s lousy leadership.

I don’t want Newt Gingrich to be President, I think the GOP would be foolish to nominate him, but if he ends up falling from his perch because he told the truth about immigration, that says a lot more about the Republican Party than it does Newt Gingrich.

Police say a German executive with Mercedes-Benz is free after being arrested under Alabama’s strict new law targeting illegal immigrants.

Tuscaloosa Police Chief Steven Anderson tells The Associated Press an officer stopped a rental vehicle for not having a tag on Wednesday. Anderson says the man only had a German identification card, so he was arrested and taken to police headquarters.

The chief says the 46-year-old was charged with not having proper identification. He was released after an associate retrieved his passport, visa and German driver’s license from his hotel.

Lovely.  No doubt this will be great for foreign investment in Alabama.

And you have to love the irony, given the old stereotype:  a German is arrested for not having his papers yet not in a movie about Nazi Germany, but rather in contemporary Tuscaloosa, AL.

More from WaPo: Mercedes-Benz manager from Germany arrested under Alabama’s strict new immigration law

The law — parts of which were put on hold amid legal challenges — requires that police check citizenship status during traffic stops and take anyone who doesn’t have proper identification to a magistrate. Anderson said that’s what was done, but someone in the same situation wouldn’t have been arrested before the law took effect.

[...]

Mercedes-Benz spokeswoman Felyicia Jerald said the man is from Germany and was visiting Alabama on business. The company’s first U.S. assembly plant is located just east of Tuscaloosa.

Welcome to America and our fine state!

US officials say they have uncovered a major drug-smuggling tunnel under the border with Mexico and seized an estimated 14 tons of marijuana.

Customs officials said the tunnel linked warehouses in Tijuana, Mexico, and Otay Mesa, in California.

Pictures of the tunnel showed wooden supports and electric cables indicative of lighting and ventilation systems.

Dozens of such tunnels have been found in recent years as US police have cracked down on overland smuggling.

More than 30 have been discovered this year, Mexican authorities said, according to AFP news agency.

The tunnels are also used to smuggle illegal migrants into the US.

Nine or 10 tons of marijuana was found on the US side of the tunnel while Mexican police seized five tons on their end, said Derek Benner, a special agent with the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

If only there was a serious border fence in the Otay Mexico, CA and Tijuana region, we could clamp down on these kinds of problems.  Just build the dang fence!

After all, with a serious fence we won’t have to grapple with complex and difficult problems like drug construction and illegal immigration.

Source:  click.

Yes, it is a good thing that it is so easy to deal with these issues.

Indeed, I hear tell that if we just spend a bit more more and engage in a bit more security that we will finally stop these things.

Via ABC News:  San Diego Drug Tunnel Yields 14 Tons of Marijuana

Authorities have discovered 75 drug tunnels under the U.S./Mexico border since 2008, most in Otay Mesa, an area of industrial warehouses, and in Nogales, Arizona, where an existing drainage area underneath the border makes tunneling easy.

“The discovery of this tunnel is a tribute not only to the effectiveness of our joint investigative efforts, but also to the significant benefits we’re gaining by using new technology to target this kind of smuggling activity,” said Derek Benner, special agent in charge for Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations in San Diego. “The drug cartels mistakenly believe they can elude detection by taking their contraband underground, but, again and again, we’ve been able to find these tunnels and shut them down.”

I will now turn off the snark and sarcasm and point out how the above reaction is so very (and depressingly) typical of drug war logic:  failures like these tunnels are actually evidence of success.

Let me fix that last sentence:  ”The drug cartels correctly believe that they can elude enough detection by to continue to make huge profits even if it means taking their contraband underground or by using whatever other methods they can dreams up because, after all, the money to be made is enormous.  Indeed, again and again, we’ve been able to find these tunnels and shut them down but yet the actual amount of cocaine and such on US streets remains relatively constant over time and the price of the product has not risen enough to dissuade consumption (indeed, the street price of cocaine is not all that different now than it was in the 1980s).  All of this despite a serious increase in spending by hundreds of millions of dollars per annum to fight the war on drugs over the last decade. And after all, we keep getting record seizures of product!  Just a little bit more effort and we will win!  Trust me:  it is worth all the money.

Ok, sorry, I guess I lied about turning off the snark.  Some topics simply inspire.

Russell Pearce, the man behind Arizona’s controversial SB 1070 law which purported to empower the state with numerous powers to enforce Federal immigration laws, was defeated yesterday in a recall election:

The Senate President of Arizona and author of the state’s hard-line laws against illegal immigration lost a recall election seen as a bellwether on “extreme” politics.

Republican Russell Pearce, lost by 53 percent to 45 percent with all precincts reported, according to the Maricopa County Elections office. Pearce, 64, was defeated by Jerry Lewis, a Republican school administrator who has said he opposes Pearce’s enforcement-only approach to immigration policy.

“There is a deep dissatisfaction in Arizona for what is viewed as politics in the extreme,” said Earl de Berge of the Phoenix-based Behavior Research Center, a nonpartisan polling company. Pearce “symbolizes a very hard-nosed view on conservative policies.”

The loss will show moderates that they can win in the state, de Berge said. “It is going to be a sea change in Arizona,” he said.

(…)

The recall is seen as part of a backlash against the immigration policies that gained the state and Pearce national attention. Pearce also backed a successful ballot measure in 2004 that banned state benefits for illegal immigrants and required proof of citizenship. He authored a 2007 measure that imposed state sanctions on businesses that hire illegal workers.

Last year, lawmakers passed a bill known as SB 1070, which requires immigrants to carry paperwork and police to check the immigration status of anyone they suspect is in the country illegally, among other provisions. Most of its provisions have been put on hold after being challenged in federal court.

In the spring, Pearce tried to pass another package of immigration measures that included denying state citizenship to children of illegal immigrants and requiring hospitals to report undocumented patients. That measure died after opposition from the state’s business community.

I had no idea this one was floating out there, or that Pearce’s constituents were displeased enough with the lead he’d taken on immigration issues to not only mount a recall, but also defeat him in a recall election. I can’t say as I’m disappointed, SB 1070 was a bad idea that is likely to be struck down in the Federal Courts before long and Pearce’s other legislation is just a bad, bad idea. Perhaps this is a sign that the Arizona GOP is veering away form its anti-immigrant stances. If so, that’s a good thing.

Who knew?

See the whole thing:

After spending more than a month scoring political points on the right  by hitting Rick Perry on his deviations from the standard conservative line on immigration issues, such as Texas’s in-state tuition program. Now, however, questions are being raised about how illegal immigrants are treated under the public policy program with which Romney is most identified:

The Massachusetts healthcare law that then-Gov. Mitt Romney signed in 2006 includes a program known as the Health Safety Net, which allows undocumented immigrants to get needed medical care along with others who lack insurance.

Uninsured, poor immigrants can walk into a health clinic or hospital in the state and get publicly subsidized care at virtually no cost to them, regardless of their immigration status.

The program, widely supported in Massachusetts, drew little attention when Romney signed the trailblazing healthcare law. But now it could prove problematic for the Republican presidential hopeful, who has been attacking Texas Gov. Rick Perry for supporting educational aid for children of undocumented immigrants in Texas.

“We have to turn off the magnet of extraordinary government benefits,” Romney said at the recent Fox News-Google debate in Florida.

Perry has defended the Texas program, saying it is better to educate young people, even if they are in the country illegally, to help them become productive members of society.

Similarly, supporters of the Massachusetts program note there are ultimately higher costs for denying care to sick patients regardless of their immigration status.

The Massachusetts program, which cost more than $400 million last year, paid for 1.1 million hospital and clinic visits. It’s unclear how many undocumented patients benefited because the state does not record that data.

The Romney campaign is saying it was never the intent of the program as drafted that it provide subsidized health care for illegal immigrants, and said that if this is what has occurred, it’s because of the way his successor has implemented the program:

The Romney campaign was quick to react to the article, and to criticize Democratic Gov. Deval Patrick, who succeeded Romney.

“Federal law requires emergency medical care for illegal immigrants. And if illegal immigrants are getting access to additional healthcare in Massachusetts, it’s liberal Gov. Deval Patrick that has made it easier for them to do so. All of the regulatory activities involving the Health Safety Net Fund, including who could get care, were made long after Mitt Romney left office,” said Romney spokesperson Andrea Saul

(…)

“Mitt Romney’s record on illegal immigration is clear: as governor, he vetoed an in-state tuition bill for illegal immigrants and authorized his state troopers to detain people based on their immigration status. On the other hand, liberal Gov. Patrick has the same position on illegal immigration as Rick Perry – he favors in-state tuition and reversed an executive order to detain illegal immigrants – and neither can be trusted to deal with such an important issue,” added Saul.

The Perry campaign, obviously, sees things differently:

“When faced with the illegal immigrant benefits this morning, the Romney campaign tried to deny indisputable facts and to cover their tracks by blaming Gov. Patrick,” Perry national press secretary Mark Miner said in a statement. “The truth is Gov. Romney’s plan intended to provide free health care to illegal immigrants, and the law and rules he approved were clear about providing free health care to illegal immigrants.”

In the end, I think it’s pretty clear that Romney has the better policy argument here, and that the Perry campaign’s effort to score points here is ignoring important facts. Under Federal Law, anyone who walks into an emergency room must be treated regardless of their insurance status. This causes many people without insurance, and especially people in the country illegally, to use Emergency Rooms as clinics, which in turn raises the cost of care for everyone. One of the main motivations of the Massachusetts program was to find a way to shift these ER visits to clinics, which are more appropriate places to treat routine visits to begin with, and which also happen to be much less expensive than an ER visit. The solution they came up with was to subsidize clinic visits for the indigent, regardless of immigration status. As Ed Morrissey notes, the only other alternative would have been to deny any subsidized care at all to the indigent, and that simply wasn’t going to pass in a state like Massachusetts (and probably not in many others, either).

The problem that Romney faces in the context of the GOP primary, though, is that the long-winded policy explanation I went through just now isn’t going to work in a political environment dominated by sound bites and 30 second commercials, and it would be hard for it to come across well in the context of a Presidential debate with short response times and constant back-and-forth between the candidates. The GOP base is already wary of Romney because of the health plan to begin with — I suppose Tim Pawlenty’s one contribution to the 2012 race will be that he helped popularize the term RomneyCare, for example. Adding the illegal immigrant thing into it will just make it harder for Romney to make the eventual peace with the base that will have to be made if he is indeed going to be the nominee, as I still suspect.

More importantly, though, this is the kind of story that could blunt the effectiveness of Romney’s criticism of Perry on immigration generally. In some ways, Perry’s rather lame effort to pin the hiring of an illegal immigrant on Romney at the last debate was intended to do that as well, but it clearly hasn’t worked because there was simply no merit to the charge. With this, however, the most Romney can say is that they never intended that the law would subsidize health care for illegal immigrants, even though it’s pretty clear that this is exactly what happened. Blaming Deval Patrick for this doesn’t strike me as something that’s going to go over very well with Republican voters, not in the least because most of them don’t know who Patrick is and probably couldn’t care less. The next time Romney tries to bring up Perry’s tuition program, Perry can just point at this as an example of Romney flip-flopping on yet another issue. It’s not a fatal issue for Romney by any means, but it complicates things for him and it provides Perry with some much-needed cover on a hot button issue.  If Perry is going to stage a comeback, this could be the kind of thing that helps him do it.

Herman Cain has decided that the solution to the illegal immigration problem is to not only build a border fence across the entire U.S.-Mexican border, but to electrify it:

Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain said Saturday that part of his immigration policy would be to build an electrified fence on the country’s border with Mexico that could kill people trying to enter the country illegally.

The remarks, which came at two campaign rallies in Tennessee as part of a barnstorming bus tour across the state, drew loud cheers from crowds of several hundred people at each rally. At the second stop, in Harriman, Tenn., Mr. Cain added that he also would consider using military troops “with real guns and real bullets” on the border to stop illegal immigration.

The remarks were among the most pointed yet by Mr. Cain about illegal immigration, and they come as he is enjoying a surge in national political polls on the back of his victory in a recent Florida straw poll. They also follow on remarks made by Representative Michele Bachmann on Saturday during a speech on illegal immigration in Iowa, in which she also advocated a border fence.

It is not the first time that Mr. Cain has floated the idea of an electrified fence. He has told the story many times of a caller to his former radio show who chastised him for talking about building a border fence, saying that such an idea was impractical. Mr. Cain often says he told the caller that he had recently returned from China, and if the Chinese could build the Great Wall then America could build a border fence.

(…)

In his remarks on Saturday, Mr. Cain appeared to go a step further. Speaking to a rally sponsored by the Roane County Tea Party, Mr. Cain said that part of his plan would be to “secure the border for real” with a fence.

“It’s going to be 20 feet high. It’s going to have barbed wire on the top. It’s going to be electrified. And there’s going to be a sign on the other side saying, ‘It will kill you — Warning.’” At an earlier rally, on the campus of Tennessee Tech University in Cookeville, Tenn., he added that the sign would be written “in English and in Spanish.”

“This nation has always been a nation with wide open doors,” Mr. Cain said at the second rally. “We want to make it easy for people to come through the front door. And we’re going to shut off the back door so you don’t have to sneak into America.”

On some level, I don’t think this is any more of a serious policy proposal than Cain’s tax plan is. For one thing, it’s not even clear that the border fence itself is every going to be constructed in the way that the anti-immigration zealots in the GOP would like it to be. It’s faced delays due to contracting problems, construction issues, and resistance from land owners who don’t want the government to steal their property for the dubious purpose of building a fence that, like the Great Wall Of China, probably won’t do what it’s intended to do anyway. And electrifying it? Seriously? Surely Cain doesn’t actually believe that’s a realistic proposal, does he? After all, as Rick Moran notes, he’s essentially saying that the punishment for attempting to enter the United States illegally should be death.  Even under current law, illegal entry into the United States is, at worst, a minor crime and, in most cases, treated as a civil offense resulting in deportation rather than a criminal offense. Cain would effectively make it a capital crime.

Joe Gandelman makes a broader point, though. If Cain really is serious about an idea like this, then it’s essentially the end of any chance he had at the Republican nomination:

The Republican Party could never nominate anyone who seriously proposes this — unless it truly has a death wish. On the other hand, its possible Rush Limbaugh et. al will applaud this idea. (I need to note that this post is being written from Brooklyn, New York, a city that has more stoops than a talk show host convention).

Karl Rove, the Bush family, and other serious Republican political professionals would be in mourning if he got the nomination without repudiating his own assertion since nominating a candidate who seems to suggest — whether he is or not – that people who try to come over to the United States illegally could face de facto American governnment sanctioned electrocution if they try would further decimate the Republican’s hopes to getting the Hispanic vote.

Republican inroads to getting the Hispanic vote are far more realistic than many smug Democrats realize given the number of attractive Republican GOPers whose personal appeal could help them get Hispanic voters to seriously listen to their words. Plus, a recent poll shows Barack Obama’s support among Latinos is dropping.

YES Cain is charismatic, likeable, firm in his principles and not made of Jello (not to mention names but one Republican flip flopper and a certain Democratic President who has been struggling with smoking come to mind), and blessed with the sunniest political personal since Ronald Reagan.

But he is not mainstream with this idea.

Perhaps not, but it’s the kind of moronic, simplistic thinking on a complex issue like immigration that appeals to the Republican base these days. If it comes up at the debate on Tuesday, I’d expect that Cain will be wildly applauded, even in a state like Nevada with a growing Hispanic population. And the supposed moderate in the race, Mitt Romney, is using immigration as a wedge issue to attack the supposedly more conservative Rick Perry. Anyone who thinks that extremism on immigration is going to hurt a candidate in a Republican primary is fooling themselves. Unfortunately, the idiocy that Cain displays with these remarks is emblematic of the very voters he is trying to appeal to.

Update: Cain said on Meet The Press this morning that he was joking when he suggested electrifying the border fence. Draw from that whatever conclusions you choose.