THE UGLY TRUTH ABOUT Marco Rubio And His Gang-of-Eight Amnesty Bill.
Rubio’s anti-amnesty position was one of the central promises of his campaign. In fact, Rubio slammed Charlie Crist for being pro-amnesty and very specifically said he opposed giving illegal aliens citizenship. Back then, Marco Rubio sounded like Jeff Sessions on immigration,
I am strongly against amnesty. The most important thing we need to do is enforce our existing laws. We have existing immigration laws that are not being adequately enforced. Nothing will make it harder to enforce the existing laws, if you reward people who broke them. It demoralizes people who are going through the legal process . . .
Getting beyond the Gang-of-Eight bill, as late as June of this year, Marco Rubio was openly saying that he wanted to make illegal aliens citizens. However, today he tries to muddy the waters about the subject by merely saying he thinks illegal aliens should eventually be able to get green cards. Of course, people who have green cards are allowed to apply for citizenship; so it’s the same difference over the long haul.
Related: How Marco Rubio Gave In to Democrats on the Immigration Reform Bill. (Breitbart headline: Report: Marco Rubio Was Democrat Ally and Dupe in Amnesty Deal, Say Dem Aides.)
When it came to undocumented immigrants, he was “all in” on the path to citizenship, as one staffer put it. In dozens of meetings between the eight members over six months, Rubio never “took anything approaching a hardline on the path to citizenship,” says the aide. “It was always, for him, about ‘how do I sell this?’…It was much more about the marketing perspective, and he was very open in saying that.”
Rubio was insistent that it not appear that undocumented immigrants were receiving special treatment. So the pathway to citizenship—which the bill ultimately laid out as a 13-year process from receiving legal status to obtaining a green card to applying for citizenship—was tailored so that it was also open to people who immigrated legally and applied for visas through other channels. Whether the undocumented got their own visas or visas also available to other immigrants would yield the same outcome, but this allowed Rubio to claim that no special treatment was being granted.