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  1. #1
    Senior Member Judy's Avatar
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    Ted Cruz hasn’t ruled out legal status for undocumented immigrants

    Ted Cruz hasn’t ruled out legal status for undocumented immigrants
    03/27/15 03:13 PM—Updated 03/27/15 04:20 PM
    By Benjy Sarlin

    Republican presidential hopeful Ted Cruz’s office on Friday indicated the Texas senator remains open to a path to legal status for undocumented workers, putting him at odds with conservatives who deride such a position as unacceptable “amnesty.”

    Cruz opposed the Senate bipartisan immigration bill and its proposed path to citizenship that passed in 2013, but he also indicated to The Texas Tribune that year that he supported giving some undocumented immigrants permission to stay in the country with more limited legal status. He noted that an amendment he had filed to strip the Senate legislation of its citizenship component deliberately “did not change the underlying work permit from the [bill]” that would allow undocumented immigrants to remain in the country without fear of deportation.

    Cruz has almost never discussed his support for legalization since then, instead focusing his public statements on passing border security legislation and making changes to the legal immigration system first. In early 2014, he decried a short-lived proposal by House GOP leaders that granted legal status – but not necessarily citizenship – to certain immigrants as “amnesty for those here illegally.”

    More, recently Cruz has helped lead the charge in Congress against what he calls Obama’s “illegal executive amnesty” which would grant temporary work permits to undocumented immigrants. He’s even threatening a government shutdown to block the measure.

    Asked by msnbc about where Cruz stands now on legalization, campaign spokeswoman Catherine Frazier said that the senator has been “consistent” and confirmed that the views he expressed in the Tribune had not changed. She described his amendment to the Senate “gang of eight” bill as an effort ”to improve a very bad bill” that he ultimately opposed.

    While Frazier said Cruz fought the bill’s path to citizenship because it “flies in the face of the rule of law,” she declined to apply the same label when asked about legal status in the right circumstances.

    “I think his main priority is dealing with the border security component and making sure that we know who is coming into the country and making sure that we have control over who is coming into the country and then we can deal with what to do with the people who are already here,” she said.

    Her comments come a day after rival GOP contender Scott Walker renounced his past support for a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants after previously expressing support for the idea.

    Cruz’s position on legal status for undocumented immigrants would put him (on paper at least) just a little closer to Jeb Bush, the Republican candidate most overtly pro-immigration reform, who has floated legal status short of citizenship as a possible legislative compromise. It also bears similarities to another potential 2016 contender, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, one of the co-sponsors of the bipartisan Senate bill. Rubio has since renounced his old legislation in favor of a piecemeal approach that starts with border security and enforcement legislation before moving on to any legalization component.

    The idea anyone could get to the right of Cruz on immigration, who has repeatedly threatened to shut down the government to defund Obama’s “illegal executive amnesty” might come as a surprise. But by the terms of the immigration debate set out so far, his bona fides could absolutely come into question. Many conservatives, including the leading anti-immigration groups, consider any policy that falls short of deportation “amnesty.” It’s this fundamental divide, far more than any argument over legalization vs. citizenship, that has paralyzed GOP attempts at immigration reform.

    “The baseline is anything that lets illegal aliens stay illegally,” Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors reducing immigration levels, told msnbc. “Anything else is word games.”

    Krikorian told msnbc Cruz’s position easily fits the bill.

    “It’s the same thing: ‘I’m against amnesty, but amnesty doesn’t include giving people work permits,’” Krikorian said. “Really? Then Obama didn’t give amnesty to all those people.”

    Pro-reform Republicans object to this definition, however, arguing that “amnesty” means offering legal status to immigrants without conferring any penalties. This lack of an clear definition of amnesty, beyond “thing conservatives don’t like,” can create a lot of confusion in trying to tease out candidate’s positions.

    Cruz’s views are likely to come under greater scrutiny now that he’s an official presidential candidate. Anti-immigration group NumbersUSA published a blog post on Thursday calling attention to this little-discussed part of Cruz’s legislative history, writing that he “opposes citizenship but supports work permits for illegal aliens.” It has since been removed. Roy Beck, executive director for NumbersUSA, told msnbc that the post published prematurely and was meant for a larger evaluation of the whole presidential field. He said Cruz had typically sided with the group on most issues, but was eager to learn more about his position on legalization.

    “Work permits are the one thing we feel is most harmful,” Beck said. “We will be rating [Cruz] on that. I would say at this point he’s got a pretty good record, but there is some uncertainty.”

    The American Immigration Council published a pro-reform piece this week noting that, beyond opposing citizenship and Obama’s executive actions on immigration, his positions are still unclear.

    Almost every likely Republican 2016 candidate has at least flirted with immigration reform in the past and will face pressure to follow Walker’s lead and renounce past support for a path to citizenship before the race is over. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul both backed a path to citizenship in 2013, for example, though Paul didn’t like to call it that and both opposed the bipartisan Senate bill. Mike Huckabee recently defended his support for granting citizenship to young undocumented immigrants, commonly known as DREAMers.

    http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/ted-cruz-...nted-imigrants
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  2. #2
    Senior Member Judy's Avatar
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    Copy of Texas Tribune 2013 article referenced in above article.

    On Immigration, Cruz Aims for Middle Ground

    by Julián Aguilar and Jay Root Sept. 13, 2013

    When it comes to immigration reform, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz has made it abundantly clear what he opposes: giving citizenship to people who broke the law to come here.

    What has not been as evident is what he supports: legal status for millions of people here already, while making it easier for immigrants to come here through the front door.

    “I have said many times that I want to see common-sense immigration reform pass,” he said. “I think most Americans want to see the problem fixed.”

    But for Cruz, a Tea Party favorite who represents a state with rapidly changing demographics, finding common ground will not be easy. Many of the bedrock Tea Party supporters who helped elect him are immigration hard-liners who object to even the slightest nod toward amnesty, a loaded word that generally means providing an avenue for legal residency to people who entered the United States illegally. Such conservatives tend to favor mass deportation, or “self-deportation,” for the millions of undocumented immigrants.

    On the other hand, Hispanics in Texas are projected to eclipse the white population sometime in the next decade, and Cruz cannot afford to alienate large numbers of Latino voters with a strident anti-immigrant tone and a hard-line legislative approach. Major business interests also are supporting a path to citizenship.

    What Cruz has tried to articulate in both word and deed is a middle ground. It got no support from Democrats in Washington, but it goes further than many on the far right want to go by offering leniency to undocumented immigrants here already: A path to legal status, but not to citizenship. A green card with no right to naturalization.

    Immigration-reform legislation from the Senate’s so-called Gang of Eight passed that chamber in June and includes a 13-year path to citizenship. Cruz pushed unsuccessfully for amendments that would have, among other things, eliminated the citizenship component.

    Asked about what to do with the people here illegally, however, he stressed that he had never tried to undo the goal of allowing them to stay.

    “The amendment that I introduced removed the path to citizenship, but it did not change the underlying work permit from the Gang of Eight,” he said during a recent visit to El Paso. Cruz also noted that he had not called for deportation or, as Mitt Romney famously advocated, self-deportation.

    Cruz said recent polling indicated that people outside Washington support some reform, including legal status without citizenship. He said he was against naturalization because it rewarded lawbreakers and was unfair to legal immigrants. It also perpetuates illegal crossings, he added.

    Besides barring citizenship while instituting some level of legalization for those here already, Cruz has proposed increasing the number of green cards awarded annually, to 1.35 million from 675,000. He also wants to eliminate the per-country limit that he said left applicants from countries like Mexico, China and India hamstrung when they tried to gain legal entry to this country.

    Cruz said the Obama administration and partisan Democrats would not yield on the citizenship requirement, which they know would kill the entire effort because of a lack of support in the House. The result, he said, will be a future campaign tool by which Democrats can blame Republicans for failing to overhaul immigration.

    “If your objective is actually to pass a bill insisting on a path to citizenship, it is in both intent and effect a poison pill,” he said, adding that he thinks many of the immigration groups working on the issue are “being taken advantage of.”

    Democrats say that Cruz is not in line with what most Americans favor.

    “The majority of Americans support a path to earned citizenship for people who have long been part of our communities — pass a background check, pay a fee and pledge allegiance to our flag,” said U.S. Rep. Pete Gallego, D-Alpine. “With so many people and groups in favor of immigration reform, common sense would dictate that those blocking reform are the ones out of the mainstream.”

    Cruz has said the stalemate is denying help to farmers and ranchers who “have a real need for labor resources.”

    On that score, he finds himself out of step with hard-liners who do not believe immigrant laborers are needed.

    Ira Mehlman, a national spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which advocates increased border security and limited immigration, opposes expanding the pool of legal workers the way Cruz proposes. And citizenship or not, he added, legal status still means immigrants take resources from citizens already here.

    "We’re also opposed to the expansion of guest-worker programs,” he said. “There is no evidence of a worker shortage."

    Instead the group wants tougher internal enforcement so illegal immigrants adhere to what he calls "voluntary compliance," or self-deportation. Likewise, the Texas Tea Party activist JoAnn Fleming said she opposed allowing illegal immigrants to get “in line ahead of people who have tried to do it the right way.”

    Cruz routinely cites his own history as inspiration for his views on immigration. His father, Rafael Cruz, a North Texas pastor and Tea Party favorite in his own right, fled Cuba and worked as a dishwasher before attending the University of Texas at Austin on a student visa, and he is now “living the American dream,” Ted Cruz says.

    But critics of Cruz argue that Cubans are awarded what some today would call amnesty. Federal law allows Cubans to adjust their legal status a year after arriving.

    Cruz said American refugee law had always been sympathetic to those in his father’s situation, even before Fidel Castro took hold of the island.

    “U.S. immigration law, for many decades, has included asylum and refugee status for those who have credible fears of persecution and oppression,” he said. He added that Fidel Castro “established a repressive Communist regime that has tortured and murdered countless dissidents.”

    Cuba poses a different scenario from other countries, he said, because U.S. immigration law has recognized for decades that there is a qualitative difference between fleeing political persecution and fleeing poverty.

    Mexico, he said, is a great country, although its drug violence and poverty are horrific, and Mexicans with a credible fear of persecution should apply for asylum. But the problem is not as widespread there, he said.

    “It is not the case that throughout the country of Mexico, everyone there has a credible fear of persecution,” he said. “Our laws allow that to be made on a case-by-case basis.”

    http://www.texastribune.org/2013/09/...middle-ground/
    Last edited by Judy; 12-21-2015 at 05:34 PM.
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  3. #3
    Senior Member Judy's Avatar
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    People can draw their own conclusion as to whether or not Cruz has never supported legalization for illegal aliens. But his words and statements throughout the years defy that which in my opinion means he lied to the American People about this issue during the debate Tuesday night.
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    MW
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    Ted Cruz 'Unequivocally' Opposes Legalizing Undocumented Immigrants

    Hours after a fiery exchange during Tuesday's Republican presidential debate with Marco Rubio on immigration, Ted Cruz's campaign said definitively that the Texas senator opposes any path to legalization for people in the U.S. illegally.

    "I want to make this super clear, so put me on the record on this. Senator Cruz unequivocally—unequivocally—does not support legalization," Chad Sweet, Cruz's campaign chairman, told reporters Tuesday in Las Vegas after the Republican presidential debate. "His plan is attrition through enforcement... He's a champion of legal immigration, but he's also unabashedly a champion of border security."

    It is the first time the Texas senator has closed the door on legal status for undocumented immigrants, a position that could help him with immigration-wary conservatives in a Republican primary, but which poses dangers in a general election. Cruz has strongly opposed a path to citizenship for years, but had not definitively opposed a lesser form of legal status down the road, and dodged recently when asked.

    Tuesday's debate featured a testy back-and-forth in which Cruz attacked Rubio's co-authorship and vote in 2013 for bipartisan immigration reform with a path to citizenship. "There was a battle over amnesty and some chose, like Senator Rubio to stand with Barack Obama and Chuck Schumer and support a massive amnesty plan," said the Texan, who voted against the legislation. Rubio retorted, "Ted, you support legalizing people who are in this country illegally," a reference to an amendment Cruz offered to the 2013 bill that stripped out the citizenship component but kept the legal status and work permits for undocumented people.

    The debate fireworks have continued throughout the week, with the two 44-year-old Cuban American senators sparring over the issue on the campaign trail, while a debate between their supporters over what Cruz really meant with his amendment raged in the media.

    "I introduced an amendment that made anyone here illegally permanently ineligible for citizenship. That amendment called their bluff because it revealed that the proponents of the 'gang of eight' were being hypocrites," Cruz told reporters in Las Vegas.

    In 2013, Cruz said that, under his amendment, undocumented immigrants "would still be eligible for legal status ... so that they are out of the shadows, which the proponents of this bill repeatedly point to as their principal objective, to provide a legal status for those who are here illegally to be out of the shadows. This amendment would allow that to happen, but what it would do is remove the pathway to citizenship so that there are real consequences that respect the rule of law."

    Rubio spokesman Joe Pounder hit back in an e-mail to reporters on Thursday, saying that "the only one who might have gotten bluffed by Senator Cruz in 2013 was Senator Cruz in 2015," and added that the Texas senator is "[p]roving yet again that he will say anything for political gain." On the campaign trail, Rubio demanded that Cruz declare his position on how to deal with the estimated 11 million people in the country illegally.

    Wednesday on Fox News, Cruz was grilled and argued that "the fact that I introduced an amendment to remove part of the gang of eight bill doesn't mean I support the rest of the gang of eight bill." According to lawmakers and aides who had a front row seat to the 2013 debate, Cruz's move featured a bit of parliamentary trickery. His amendment eliminated the bill's citizenship component without adding any legal status. At the time, Cruz's remarks defending the amendment left open the impression that he was in favor of legalization; the Rubio campaign is now pouncing on those remarks to say their positions are similar. Republican opponents of the immigration bill, including leading restrictionist Senator Jeff Sessions, voted for the Cruz amendment as it was deemed by Republicans and Democrats as a "poison pill" to kill it.

    Sessions' spokesman Stephen Miller called it an "extremely untenable interpretation" to say that supporting Cruz's amendment amounts to supporting legal status.

    Representative Steve King, an outspoken immigration hawk who has endorsed Cruz, said Thursday on MSNBC that on the amendment, "the border security people voted with Ted Cruz, and the pro-amnesty people voted with Marco Rubio." He continued, "At no point did Ted Cruz indicate that he was going to vote for this bill."

    Members of the 2013 "gang of eight," on the other hand, praise Rubio on immigration.

    "I think that Senator Rubio has a very good understanding of the issue," Senator John McCain, the 2008 Republican presidential nominee, told Bloomberg Politics. "And I don't pay that much attention to Senator Cruz, to tell you the truth."

    Senator Jeff Flake said he's optimistic that Rubio, if elected president, would pursue immigration reform based on the principles of the gang of eight bill. "I do think that we will have meaningful immigration reform if he's president. As a party we have to have it. As a country we have to have it," the Arizona Republican said.

    Flake said Rubio's salesmanship and work on the 2013 bill was crucial to steering the bill through the Senate—it passed 68 to 32 in June 2013. "He was more important than the rest of us combined," Flake said, "in terms of getting the bill passed." The legislation subsequently died in the House, and four months later Rubio abandoned the idea of a comprehensive immigration overhaul, calling for a sequential approach.
    —With assistance from Kevin Cirilli in Las Vegas

    http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-12-17/ted-cruz-unequivocally-opposes-legalizing-undocumented-immigrants

    "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing" ** Edmund Burke**

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  5. #5
    Senior Member Judy's Avatar
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    This is a change in his prior positions which have been more than aptly documented on this forum, which means he lied in the debate Tuesday night and is still lying about it when he says he never supported legalization when he supported it right up and to the moment Rubio made the moderator ask him outright about it. There's nothing wrong with politicians changing their minds, they do that all the time, so why lie about it? Because he knows his real positions all these years would get him the boot in the race for President, which is something politicians do all the time, lie to the public to advance their own career aspirations. And then when it's time for them to act, they attempt another dishonest, cagey, wiggle roomer waffling weasel "poison pill" ploy.

    Aren't we truly fed up to the gills with this behavior? Well, I am.

    I want a 10 to 20 Year Moratorium on All Immigration, and I want police rounding up illegal aliens, rushing them off to a deportation hearing and getting them the hell out of here. I guess that makes me a "hard-liner" on this issue and I think rightly so, because this problem has to be stopped and cured, not just addressed or slowed, but stopped and cured quickly and permanently so what's happened to our country is fixed and repairs and it never happens again.

    And it that means waking them or pulling their hair to get them out of here, I'm all for that. Police do that or worse to Americans all the time.
    Last edited by Judy; 12-21-2015 at 07:07 PM.
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    MW
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    I for one am very happy that he has made his position clear. Now perhaps Trump will explain what he means when he says all the "very good" illegals can come back in after deportation.

    "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing" ** Edmund Burke**

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