Remember how the Mitt Romney-espoused “self-deportation” rhetoric was supposed to end up in the dustbin of history following President Obama’s huge margins among Latino voters back in November? Apparently no one told Kris Kobach.
The Kansas secretary of state and intellectual author of harsh laws in states like Arizona and Alabama was back at it again earlier today, this time at the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearings on the Gang of Eight’s immigration bill. In response to questions from Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Kobach said that “self-deportation is not some radical idea. It is simply the idea that people may comply with the law by their own choice.”
The poised Kobach has seemed undeterred by his party’s shift away from the attrition-through-enforcement framework, telling the Kansas City Star in February, “It’s not my voice—it’s the voice of the American people.” (Just a couple of days earlier, for example, Newt Gingrich had appeared on CNN’s The Situation Room and said of self-deportation, “That is the most anti-human phrase you can imagine…I think it was very unfortunate and frankly helped cost us the election.”)
But Durbin, a longtime immigrant advocate and one of the original cosponsors of the DREAM Act, was all too happy to remind Kobach of the GOP’s lingering Latino (and Asian American) problem. “The voters had the last word on self-deportation on November 6th,” he said. “So we’re beyond that now. You can stick with that theory as long as you’d like.”
If his testimony is any indication, Kobach won’t be changing his tune anytime soon.
