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Elections and Politics with a Conservative bent.

December 30, 2011

I oppose Rick “E-Verify doesn’t amount to a hill of beans” Perry because of his open-borders position on illegal immigration. Ditto Newt “community review boards” Gingrich.


But where does Rick Santorum stand on illegal immigration? NumbersUSA tells us:

His actions on immigration while in Congress earned him an overall Immigration-Reduction Grade of B-minus.


As a composite grade of his career and over many issues, the rather mediocre grade includes some really horrible activity in the 1990s that got averaged with mostly stellar behavior in the last year before he left the Senate. In 2006, Santorum repeatedly voted to amend for the better Sen. John McCain’s amnesty and then voted to kill it.


Just as he got better on immigration at the end of his congressional career, he has improved considerably on amnesty issues in the latter part of this Presidential campaign. We were particularly impressed that Santorum — who in many ways is running as the “Catholic candidate” — recently publicly repudiated the aggressive pro-amnesty leadership of the U.S. Catholic bishops.


PROBLEMS ON E-VERIFY


While then-Speaker of the House Gingrich was helping kill mandatory workplace verification in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1996, Sen. Santorum was trying to prevent even setting up a voluntary program.


This is significant history.


If Sen. Simpson (R-Wyoming) and Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) had succeeded with their bills to create a mandatory E-Verify system in 1996, I am certain that illegal immigration would not be an issue in this presidential campaign. If they had succeeded, the flow of illegal aliens these last 15 years would have been a fraction of what actually happened because the word would have gotten out around the world that no matter how much money you paid to be smuggled and no matter how hard you worked once you got here you would never get a payroll job even at minimum wage. And millions of the illegal aliens already here in 1996 would have given up and gone back home once they could no longer aspire to payroll jobs in this country.


If the Simpson/Smith bill had passed as written, we wouldn’t come close to having 7 million illegal aliens holding U.S. jobs today. And millions of Americans who currently are unemployed would have jobs.


But Sen. Santorum did not side with Sen. Simpson. Instead, he allied himself with Sen. Spencer Abraham (R-Michigan) who was the Republican Party’s chief open-borders advocate. Simpson’s mandatory workplace verification had already been watered down to a voluntary system when Abraham submitted an amendment to gut the voluntary program. Both Parties split their votes. Fortunately, Abraham’s amendment came up five votes short.Santorum voted with Abraham and the cheap-labor lobbyists who did everything they could to protect the ability of outlaw businesses to hire illegal foreign labor.


The roll call vote in the 104th Congress – 2nd Session came at 5:01 p.m., May 1, 1996. The vote was on a motion to table Abraham’s amendment No. 3752 to S. 1664 (Sen. Simpson’s Immigration Control and Financial Responsibility Act of 1996).


This is old history. In our NumbersUSA rating system for Presidential candidates, all would be forgiven if Sen. Santorum would make a public pledge to throw his all-out support for a mandatory E-Verify law. But in his answers to all the immigration questions this past year, we cannot find any record of Santorum showing support for E-Verify.


And while other candidates provide pages on their website that give positions on immigration, Sen. Santorum doesn’t address immigration on his website.

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