Rand Paul to GOP: Get 'Beyond Deportation' to Win Hispanic Voters

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) thinks Republicans can win Hispanic voters only if the party gets “beyond deportation to the rest of the issues.” 

“The bottom line is, the Hispanic community, the Latino community is not going to hear us until we get beyond that issue,” Paul said on Tuesday, according to Politico.

Before a potential 2016 presidential run, Paul is trying to broaden his organization and fundraising to include more establishment donors. Many of them believe that Hispanic voters will give Republicans a chance only if Republicans soften on issues like comprehensive immigration reform and amnesty. They don’t take into account that amnestied voters would be a way for Democrats to import more voters, as Rosemary Jenks of Numbers USA has often said. Moreover, Hispanics did not move over to the GOP after the last massive amnesty legislation in 1986. 

Speaking at a symposium sponsored by the Media Research Center and the American Principles Project, Paul reportedly said that if Hispanics were assured that “Mrs. Garcia’s nephew is not going to be sent home to Mexico,” they would take a look at the policy solutions Republicans have to offer.

According to Politico, Paul also said that Republicans needed to acknowledge that illegal immigration is “not always the individual’s fault.”  

“Sometimes it’s a child who has no control over this. But sometimes it’s also someone who came here and tried to use our system,” he said. “We as conservatives talk a lot about big government and how big government never seems to work. We’re always talking about Obamacare now, how big government is a disaster…well guess what, big government’s not very good with the visa system, either.”

Paul voted against the Senate’s Gang of Eight amnesty bill, which the Congressional Budget Office determined would lower the wages of American workers, but he told WNDtv last July that he favored the normalization of illegal immigrants so that they could get work visas. 

“Let’s normalize them, let’s make them taxpayers,” Paul said. “They’re not going home.”

In that interview, he also asked those who opposed amnesty what they would do with the country’s illegal immigrants.

“Are they for sending these people home?” he asked. “Do they want us to put them in concentration camps, on buses, and send them back home? I don’t think anyone’s proposing that.”

At a recent event celebrating the five-year anniversary of the Tea Party, Paul told conservatives to avoid inflammatory language and called on Ted Nugent to apologize for referring to President Obama as a “subhuman mongrel.”