Geraldo Rivera - GOP Doomed by Latino Vote
/And during this election cycle Mr. Nice Guy Mitt Romney led the anti-immigrant mob. During the primary campaign, he crippled the candidacies of Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry by portraying them as weak on the undocumented. All Speaker Gingrich wanted to do was to allow for a statute of limitations after which a long-term undocumented immigrant could find a path to legitimacy. All Governor Perry wanted to do was provide in-state tuition for young students brought here innocently by their parents.
Mr. Romney excoriated both rivals as weak; appeasers who would grant amnesty to law-breakers. Conveniently ignoring facts like the dramatic decline in illegal immigration, and the federal statistics showing the relative lawfulness of the undocumented, he thundered about the need to create conditions so draconian that 12 million of them would self-deport.
In the process, the governor helped cast a pall over the entire Latino population, legal and illegal alike. It wasn’t enough that he had Florida senator Marco Rubio at his side, or that his son Craig had learned Spanish while a missionary in Chile. Those gestures were seen as window dressing by a community more interested in deeds.
