Jeb’s ‘act of love’ may help his son, but can also hurt his 2016 chances

04/08/2014
Neil Munro
White House Correspondent



Illegal immigrants can help the economy, especially if the United States reorganizes itself to make use of them, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush said in the same April 6 interview where he also said that crossing the border to find jobs was “an act of love.”

Illegal immigrants “could make a great contribution for their own their families, but also for us,” Bush said. “They can make a contribution to our country if we actually organized ourselves in a better way,” he told cheering supporters at an event marking the 25th anniversary of his father’s presidency.

He offered those “act of love” comments in Texas, at the George H. Bush Presidential Library and Museum in College Station.

Bush’s son, George P. Bush is running for land commissioner in Texas, where Hispanics are a growing slice of the electorate. George P. is also Hispanic: His mother, and Jeb’s wife, was born in Mexico.

The father’s “act of love” comments may help the younger Bush build long-term bonds to Hispanics for 2014 and afterward. Also, the comments about illegal immigrants being useful to the economy are likely to be applauded by many business owners in Texas, where the lightly-regulated, fast-growing economy has a low unemployment rate.

But the open-borders view is toxic to many GOP primary voters, swing-voters and middle-class workers, says a series of immigration reformers opposed to amnesty.

“He’s making a case for unlimited immigration…[and a] virtually borderless society which drives American workers into direct head-to-head competition with the poorest of the poor around the world,” said Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform.

Last March, Gallup reported that 138 million poor foreigners want to settle in the United States.

“The Republicans are presented in the media as the party of corporate America, the party of the rich, the party of Wall Street, and they seem determined to prove that true,” D.A. King, president of Dustin Inman Society, a Georgia-based anti-amnesty group.

Polls show that a strong majority of Americans oppose anygreater inflow of foreign workers, even though only about10 percent of Americans know that roughly 1 million immigrants — plus 650,000 short-term guest-workers – arrive each year to compete for jobs against 4 million high-school graduates.
Other GOP leaders, including Sens. Jeff Sessions and Ted Cruz, are working to build support among Americans hurt by the lousy economy.

“I can’t imagine how Jeb could offset the loss of economically worried working-class Republican-leaning voters by getting more Hispanic votes… especially with this flamboyant support of open borders,” said Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies.

His “‘act of love’ statement is going to follow for him around for the rest of his career,” Krikorian added. “The very fact that he said this ‘act of love’ suggests he’s not running for president,” but wants to speak his mind or provoke a reaction to justify a decision not to run, Krikorian said.

The Bush family has long sought to win support among Latinos. In 2003, George W. Bush worked with real-estate companies to help immigrants get mortgages and new homes. In 2006 and 2007, he split his own party while trying to push an amnesty bill through the Senate.

Jeb Bush courted Latino voters successfully, and served two terms as governor of Florida, where he resisted GOP efforts to curb illegal immigration. He speaks Spanish fluently, and his wife was born in Mexico. She lived for a while in the United States before she met Bush at age 17. Her father worked illegally in the United States, according to a 2001 report by the Associated Press.

Jeb also lauds the nation’s growing ethnic and cultural differences. “I live in Miami where half the people in my vibrant beautiful place were born outside the United States,” he said last June.

“When I finally make it home, normally on a Friday afternoon, I spend the night with my … wife who was born outside the United States,” he said. “On Sunday fun-days … I get to be with George Helena Walker Bush, my little munchkin 22-month-old grand-daughter [whose] mom was born in Canada [of] Iraqi national parents,” he added. “That [diversity] is the unique American experience that I have had the blessing — truly a blessing — to be able to experience in a way that adds a tremendous amount of vitality to my life,” he said.

But Bush’s praise for illegal aliens is likely damaging to any presidential run by Jeb Bush, commentators said.

“That’s leading with your chin,” Charles Krauthammer said on Fox News April 7. “If we are ever going to have a solution to the immigration problem — and I believe in legalization — it will only happen when a Republican stands up and says, ‘Yes, we will legalize, but we’re not going to get swindled like [President Ronald] Reagan was in 1986 with a promise of closing the borders,’” he said.
“I’m trying to imagine how this plays in Iowa, for example, Iowa Republican caucus goers,” liberal Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson said on MSNBC April 7. “And the answer is, it does not play well at all…. [although] maybe he creates some space for, say, [Florida Sen.] Marco Rubio,” he said.
“I think we’ve learned over the last two cycles that immigration is about as deadly of an issue as you can touch,” said MSNBC anchor Chuck Todd. “It’s close to being a third rail issue in Republican primary politics.”

But Jeb has repeatedly grasped that rail,without apparent damage. A Washington Post-ABC poll last month showed that Bush ran neck-and-neck with other possible GOP candidates.

“Immigrants create far more businesses than native-born Americans over the last 20 years,” Bush said last June, at an Atlanta, Ga., convention of the Faith and Freedom Coalition Conference. “Immigrants are more fertile, and they love families, and they have more intact families, and they bring a younger population. Immigrants create an engine of economic prosperity.”

Last June, he endorsed the Senate’s immigration rewrite, telling an audience at the Bipartisan Policy Center that “if we do nothing, we’ll have family unification be the dominant [form of immigration] and they’re not necessarily as aspirational as those [who would come] if we created a strategic approach to this.”
http://dailycaller.com/2014/04/08/je...016-chances/3/