Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) today called presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney the “most extreme” and “inhumane” on immigration policy.
“We have a choice of Mitt Romney who literally has the most extreme policy on immigration of any presidential candidate in history and Barack Obama who is strongly supportive and has pushed for comprehensive immigration reform against the candidate who totally opposes it,” Wasserman Schultz said today on CNN.
It was pointed out to her that the Obama administration’s record-high deportations and failure to get the DREAM Act or comprehensive immigration reform passed haven’t exactly sat well with many Hispanic leaders.
“Mitt Romney’s solution is to make sure that we just deport them all,” Wasserman Schultz countered. “…What he has said is that his policy would be that we should just create an environment in which the 12 million undocumented immigrants that are here would just self-deport. It’s an unrealistic expectation. It’s an inhumane expectation.”
Romney’s immigration platform includes raising visa caps for highly skilled workers, completing the border fence, opposing amnesty, and turning of “magnets” including benefits for illegal immigrants.
Romney said in a January debate that self-deportation would happen when “people decide that they could do better by going home because they can’t find work here because they don’t have legal documentation to allow them to work here.”
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich mocked the plan as “an Obama-level fantasy.”
The “most extreme” campaign refrain comes straight from President Obama’s campaign playbook, previously trumpeted by Wasserman Schultz and on the campaign trail.
“Mitt Romney’s policy is to embrace fully the Arizona-style immigration law that would actually let police round up people who are doing nothing more than driving down the street and asking them for their papers and then deporting — putting them into immigration, reporting them to immigration based on simply existing,” Wasserman Schultz said. “…Mitt Romney wants to fight to kick undocumented immigrants out of this country.”
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