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Monday, December 6, 2010

Listen to Jeb on Immigration

It truly is a shame when a Republican speaking sense is a clear sign he isn't running for president. But Jeb Bush joked this week that his opposition of irrational immigration reforms were a sign he was not running for office.

His prospect-ending position? That Hispanic people not be required to carry proof of citizenship to the grocery store.

Via the Denver Post:
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While (Bush) is sympathetic to the plight of Arizona officials forced to deal with all the problems linked to a porous frontier, he believes there are solutions other than a law criminalizing illegal immigrants, he said.

"It's the wrong approach," he said. "The net result is not much has been done."


Read more:In visit to Denver, Jeb Bush says he doesn't agree with Arizona's immigration law - The Denver Posthttp://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_16782092#ixzz17MpxdM1U
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That's the problem with Jeb Bush in the eyes of the ideological right. He looks at results. The Arizona law is a racist in its generation and impractical in its execution. Certain elements in the law allowing citizens to sue if cops aren't being racist enough make it morally, and probably legally, detestable.

Of course, when Bill McCollum said "We don't need that law in Florida" it won only suspicion and scorn from the tea party-dominated Republican primary electorate. Full-throated support of the law won Scott attention on the right, and ultimately got him into the governor's mansion. All indications are that a new law will be passed by the Legislature this year that looks more like the Arizona law than anything else.

But it would be nice if the Republicans in the Legislature paid some heat to Jeb Bush. He worries such a law would be so broad his own children couldn't walk around without being deemed suspicious. In a state where so much of the Hispanic population hails from Cuba, and who are therefore legal by right of standing on dry land, shows why this law makes even less sense in Florida than it does out West.

We will see if one of the leading conservative thinkers in Republican policy still has enough pull in a state where he served as governor for eight years to stop this so-called reform.

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