Sunday, January 13, 2008
Huck Lifts Immigration Plan from Center for Immigration Studies
Republican Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee was taking heat for being "soft" on immigration while the governor of Arkansas. So he issued a new enforcement-oriented immigration plan. The Washington Post reports that, as it turns out, seven of the nine points in the Mike Huckabee's new immigration plan were copied, in some cases almost verbatim, from a plan that Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a staunch restrictionist organization, outlined about three years ago in the National Review. For a comparison of the two plans, click here.
KJ
https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/2008/01/huck-lifts-immi.html
This displays the ad hoc nature of Huckabee's campaign and gives an indication as to how he would run the country. He was getting killed with the base on immigration, he needed a way to establish some nativist bona fides post haste, so what does he do, he copies Krikorian's plan almost verbatim. It's a band-aid solution that does nothing to reconcile his new position with his previous, more conciliatory actions on immigration. TLB at Lone Wacko wasn't fooled, but Jim Gilchrist was. Maybe he's a fan of Chuck Norris.
I say this typifies Huckabee's campaign because it's a similar approach to the one he took on taxes. As I understand it, he had no real position on taxes but knew the system has problems, he has no real policy expertise in the area, then he reads a book on the Fair Tax and decides that is the way to go and adopts the plan in its entirety, even though virtually every economist across the political spectrum thinks the plan is nuts.
Huckabee may be politically smart, genuine, and charismatic to boot, but he has no clue what he is doing on a policy level. We just had 7 years of a clueless president--can we really afford another 4?
Posted by: yave begnet | Jan 13, 2008 9:16:11 PM