Huckabee campaign bus doesn't brake for undocumented immigrants

Apparently, presidential campaigning is a little like drinking alcohol. Too much, too quickly, brings out the worst in people.

Take the condition of Mike Huckabee. He’s skyrocketing in the Republican primary polls largely on the strength of pleasing demeanor, carefully constructed platforms and attitudes culled from years of public service. Yet when it comes to the issue of immigration, Huckabee is willing to toss aside his own sound reasoning in a frantic quest to deflect attacks launched by his rivals.

Verbal pummeling of the nebulous “illegal immigrant” is a favorite way for candidates to catch a few quick pats on the back or return mortar fire on opponents. And candidates can rest assured they will not be held accountable for what they say on the matter even if they actually get elected. Neat trick.

Substantial change on immigration in this country, recall, would require heavy cooperation from the U.S. Congress. As 2007 proved all too well, Congress is not terribly committed to doing anything about the issue. It declined to pass a complicated set of reforms that would have held immigrants and their American employers accountable to new standards while also reconfiguring our visa system so the workers we do need could actually enter the country legally. But I digress. That’s a discussion about the difficult realities of policy-making, not the facile grandstanding that befits a presidential race.

Grandstanding is what candidates fearful of appearing “soft on immigration” are all about. Huckabee is a fine example.

Before he entered the presidential race, Huckabee was perfectly capable of a nuanced view of the issue. As governor, for example, he supported a 2005 bill that would have allowed the children of undocumented immigrants to pay in-state tuition and apply for state-sponsored scholarships at Arkansas colleges.

In other words, he had the good sense to see that if a kid got good grades, showed college-level aptitude, had been in the state for years and graduated from an Arkansas high school — well, it would be a bit silly to not accept them as tuition-paying students at a state college or university, just because their parents had hauled them out of their native country years ago without all of the proper paperwork.

It is ludicrous to deny any student an education — especially if they are willing to pay for it.

Not so, screamed Huckabee’s opponents, most vocally Mitt Romney. Romney charged Huckabee with calling for “special benefits for illegals” and claimed that he “supports de facto amnesty.”

So how did Huckabee reply? He welcomed the endorsement of Jim Gilchrist, a self-anointed leader of the oddball Minuteman Project, the group that thinks everyday citizens have a role literally patrolling the nation’s borders. But even that wasn’t enough. In the past, Huckabee had also supported the idea of a “pathway” to citizenship for the people already in the county who could pass other clearances like criminal record checks and show an employment history. Now he claims he can’t be held to this because he never really defined what he meant by “pathway.” Huckabee, an ordained Southern Baptist minister, is now preaching the message of “send them all back.”

And he has shed his nuanced views of policy, instead favoring catchy but simplistic rhetoric about solving the problem of undocumented laborers. If American Express can process a credit card application in two weeks, Huckabee has said, why can’t the U.S. government issue work permits to immigrants quickly? Because, dear candidate, credit card companies rely on very sophisticated databases using the very records that undocumented immigrants lack — valid Social Security numbers, verifiable credit histories and documents issued by the U.S. government.

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