Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) told Sean Hannity on Monday night that he hasn’t changed his position on immigration, arguing that “we still need to do immigration reform.”
“I talked today about needing to modernize our immigration system. And I think the American people are prepared to do that, but not until they know that future illegal immigration is under control,” Rubio said after his announcement that he’s running for president. “And right now, they have a president that refuses to enforce the immigration laws — in fact, through executive order, has ordered his agencies not to enforce those immigration laws. So I think immigration reform as long as Barack Obama’s president is virtually impossible.”
“I think we need a president that first begins to enforce our laws, puts in place methods that improve the way we enforce the law. And if we do that, then I think people will be very reasonable after that about what to do with the 12 million that are here.”
Rubio said his plan to deal with some 12 million illegal immigrants would come “after we’ve proven that illegal immigration’s not going to happen in the future” and would require “you have to come forward, undergo a background check, pay a fine, start paying taxes.”
“And what you would get is a work visa that allows you to be in this country to work and to travel. And that’s all you should be allowed to have for at least a decade or longer. And after that, they would be allowed to apply for permanent residency, but just like anybody else would, not a special process,” he said.
“I know that there are people out there that say, no, they should only have the work permit for the rest of their lives. I don’t think that’s necessarily a good idea, but if that’s the only way we can move forward on it, I would explore it.”
Rubio also pushed back on the argument that, like President Obama, he doesn’t have enough experience to be commander in chief.
“President Obama’s been a failure not because he was only in the Senate for four years. He’s been a failure because his ideas are bad. I don’t care if he had been in the Senate for 50 years. If he had done what he’s done now, he would have failed, too. His ideas don’t work,” he said. “Second of all, there’s major differences. I served nine years in the Florida legislature in the majority, two of them as speaker of the house in the third largest state in the country. I wasn’t a legislative back-bencher. I’ll have served a full term in the Senate before I’m president.”
“I’ve taken seriously my role on both the Intelligence Committee and the foreign policy — and the Foreign Relations Committee. So I think there’s some dramatic differences. But the biggest is his ideas don’t work, and ours do.”
On the hot-button states issues of Religious Freedom Restoration Acts, Rubio said there are “two issues at play.”
“One is discriminating against a person because of that person’s background, their preference, their ethnicity. That’s wrong. We all believe that’s wrong and immoral. So, no, I don’t believe that a caterer can tell a gay person or a lesbian person we’re not going to offer you services,” Rubio said. “There’s a difference between discriminating against the person and saying I don’t want to offer services to an event. The same sex wedding is an event. It is not a person. It is an event that is going on. And I don’t think you can force someone to participate or provide professional services to an event that goes contrary to the teachings of their faith, in fact, forces them to violate their own religious conscience.”
The senator said the country must “acknowledge and address” the fact that “there are millions of young African-Americans in this country who do feel like they’re treated differently both by law enforcement and sometimes by individuals.”
“Quite frankly, Sean, I’ve seen it. I’ve witnessed it myself. And not necessarily with police, but maybe a friend of yours and you go to a store or something and you hear the stories when they come back and they were followed around and so forth. And that’s problematic. And we need to admit that,” he said. “By the same token, not every instance that involves unfortunately an African-American victim and a white police officer or a person is necessarily indicative of a race problem. So we need to be careful about that.”
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