Marco Rubio’s immigration could represent the GOP’s plan to save the party from itself. (Photo by Gage Skidmore.)
By Ashley Lopez
Florida Center for Investigative Reporting
Until these past few weeks, Florida’s junior senator had a pretty thin resume in the U.S. Senate.
The Republican Marco Rubio had only been in the Senate about two years and hadn’t introduced any serious legislation. He’d spent most of his time siding with the ultra-conservative tea party wing of the Republican Party and worked hard on making his anti-Obama, anti-compromise credentials well known. In short, he’d been just another tea party Republican.
So it’s interesting that Rubio is now leading the charge on sweeping immigration reform that looks a lot like some of the plans President Obama has advocated.
And yet, even more interesting, this move has not lost him the support of the GOP. In fact, it’s positioned him as the new face of the Republican Party.
Time magazine, in advance of Obama’s State of the Union address, put Rubio on the cover, labeling him the “Republican Savior.”
Mike Grunwald writes in Time:
Rubio comes from a family of immigrants and married into another family of immigrants and lives in a neighborhood of immigrants, West Miami, the bilingual bedroom community where he came of age and began his dazzling ascent from city commissioner to state house speaker to U.S. Senator. Now, just two years after he arrived in Washington, the charismatic conservative often hailed as the Tea Party’s answer to Barack Obama has emerged as the most influential voice in the national debate over immigration reform. He’s also the key player in his party’s efforts to make up to Hispanic voters after a disastrous 2012 campaign featuring Republican candidates who proposed electric fences and alligators along the southern border, as well as Mitt Romney’s suggestion of “self-deportation” for the nation’s 11 million undocumented immigrants. GOP leaders know they have a demographic problem. They hope Rubio can help provide the solution, which is why they’ve chosen him to deliver the response to Obama’s State of the Union address on Feb. 12—in English and Spanish.
After last year’s disastrous election, most Republicans acknowledged it was time for the party to change how it communicates with Latino voters. More specifically, the GOP needed to re-evaluate the way it talks about immigration and immigrants. The strategy has been to make a tea party Republican such as Rubio look like an immigration moderate who can appeal to the country’s Latino population.
In the past, Rubio has derided a path to citizenship, but his stance is evolving. He now says he wants to give a break to some immigrants. He wants to offer a path to citizenship for young people brought to the United States by their parents, for example. While his plan is not as liberal as President Obama’s, it is considerably more moderate than Mitt Romney’s self-deportation platform.
Rubio’s colleagues in the Senate — including members of the so-called Gang of Eight, which are drafting the immigration bill together — have said Rubio is the “lynchpin” of the effort.
If Congress does not act quickly to reform U.S. immigration laws, Obama has warned, he would propose his own bill.