Jeb Bush has a surprisingly vague stance on immigration

Between Donald Trump, scourge of Mexican immigrant rapists, and accused killer Francisco Sanchez, immigration is becoming the hottest issue on the 2016 campaign trail.

Behind every new controversy on the issue, some fundamental questions lie, both practical and political. Is there a way to deal with the 11 million undocumented immigrants here in the United States? Is there much more to be done on border security than we're already doing? And can Republicans talk tough enough to satisfy their base in the primaries, while not alienating Hispanic voters, at least some of whom they'll need to win in November?

Questions like those are behind an interesting disagreement Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush are now having, and if they end up being the two parties' nominees, it will be one we'll see continuing into next fall.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

In an interview this week with CNN, Clinton said of Bush, "He doesn't believe in a path to citizenship. If he did at one time, he no longer does." The Bush campaign released an angry statement in reply, calling Clinton a flip-flopper and saying, "As he outlined in his book on this issue, Gov. Bush believes in a conservative legislative solution to fix our broken immigration system that includes earned legal status for those currently in the country after they pay fines and taxes, learn English, and commit no substantial crimes while securing our border." There are an awful lot of qualifiers in there, which shows how complicated the words "path to citizenship" can be for a Republican — even one who's trying to be the most open-minded and welcoming candidate in the field on immigration.

Here are the basic facts about Bush.

As late as 2012, he said in public that he would support a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. But when his book Immigration Wars came out in 2013, it declared that what he supported was only some kind of legal status — but most definitely not citizenship.

"Permanent residency in this context, however, should not lead to citizenship," he and his co-author wrote. "It is absolutely vital to the integrity of our immigration system that actions have consequences — in this case, that those who violated the laws can remain but cannot obtain the cherished fruits of citizenship."

This actually puts Bush to the right of some of his opponents in the primary. For instance, Marco Rubio may not use the term "path to citizenship," but when he describes his favored approach, he lays out an extended process for undocumented immigrants that ends in, yes, "citizenship." Even Scott Walker has at times endorsed a path to citizenship, murky though his actual position might be.

Of course, some paths are easier than others, but all the candidates, even the Democrats, propose something lengthy and involved that would take years; that's also what Democrats in Congress have advocated as part of comprehensive reform. When Republicans mention it — at this point anyway — they always say that the undocumented won't even be able to get on that path until we've "secured the border," which might or might not be a way of hinting that the path will remain forever over the horizon. (You can always say that the border isn't quite yet secure.)

As for the exchange between Clinton and Bush, she's right that he used to support a path to citizenship but he no longer does. There's nothing wrong with changing your mind, and I'm sure Bush's rationale is one many people would agree with. But it's also true that in the last couple of years, Republican voters have shifted away from support for a path to citizenship as the issue has gotten more and more attention. In a recent Pew Research Center poll, only 25 percent of them said undocumented immigrants should be able to apply for citizenship. However, another 28 percent supported permanent residency, or something like what Bush advocates; put them together and you've got a majority who think those immigrants ought to be able to stay in the country legally one way or another (among Democrats, that figure was 80 percent).

So Jeb may be hoping he found the sweet spot for the primaries, where punitiveness meets compassion. For now, he can say loudly that he wants to secure the border, and if anyone should happen to ask, he'll allow that legal status for undocumented immigrants might be in the cards. And when the general election rolls around (if he's the nominee), he'll just reverse his emphasis: Yes, we need to secure the border, but we'll get that out of the way soon, and then those immigrants will be welcomed into America's loving embrace. That may not be quite what Republican voters want to hear, but by then they won't have anywhere else to go.