Tea Party: Rick Perry Is Too Weak On Immigration
On paper Rick Perry looks like the Republican Party’s best bet for 2012.
He’s the Governor of Texas, a state that has managed to grow its economy and add jobs through the great recession – it’s been called the Texas miracle. He has solid conservative credentials and has worked to pad them over the past few years. And he has the wide-smilin’, back-slappin’ manner that’s required of Texas retail politics.
He’s been running for president without officially saying he’s running and last week he managed to combine religion and politics in a well publicized event called The Response, where 30 thousand people packed into Reliant stadium, in Houston, to hear him preach – this is part of what he said from that pulpit:
Father, our heart breaks for America. We see discord at home. We see fear in the marketplace. We see anger in the halls of government.
And this weekend, exactly one week after saying that, he will announce (finally) that he is a candidate for the presidency of the United States.
News Taco has written extensively about Governor Perry, mostly having to do with the state’s dismal record on education and about Perry’s record on voter ID and sanctuary cities; he worked to enact one and abolish the other. He is already a front-runner among the announced GOP presidential candidates and is, from many Texan’s perspective, a conservative’s conservative.
And yet there’s a sizable slice of right wing politics that thinks he’s not conservative enough and there are parts of the so called Texas miracle that he’s going to have to explain to his party’s base. Forbes reports:
What he may have to explain on the stump is how illegal immigrants have contributed to that success, adding as much as $17.7 billion a year to the state gross product and enjoying such benefits as in-state tuition at public universities.
A 2006 state report said that the state’s illegal immigrants – 1.4 million then, 1.65 million now – added $17.7 billion to the gross state product, and that the state came out ahead on taxes it collected versus services it provided.
Oops. Okay, but he did try to pass a bill this year that banned sanctuary cities in Texas. That bill floundered in a special legislative session because the state house of representatives couldn’t find a quorum and the senate got tired and went home. He can say that wasn’t his fault.
But there’s more:
Illegal immigrants can get in-state tuition at Texas universities. Neither employers nor state agencies are required to run job applicants through a federal database to determine their legal status. Illegal immigrants have access to services for drug treatment, mental health and children with special health care needs.
These are very strange times we live in when Rick Perry, despite being the Governor of one of the reddest states in the union, is regarded as an immigration moderate on the national level. He once called the idea of a border fence an “idiocy” and said that denying citizenship to U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants was “divisive.” You can expect those words to come back and bite him on the backside.
“We have not seen much at all on immigration, nothing at all,” said Suzanne Guggenheim, a Texas-based member of the Tea Party Patriots National Leadership Council. “There is some disappointment” with his leadership on the issue.
No wonder it’s taken him so long to enter the race. He’s been pacing the sidelines, staying away from the heat of an announced campaign where the gloves come off and his Texas miracle and stance on immigration will be scrutinized.
We’ve yet to see if Rick Perry can wide-smile and back-slap his way out of this one.
Follow Victor Landa on Twitter: @vlanda
[Photo by Gage Skidmore]
