Jeb Bush 2013: It’s “ridiculous” that DREAMers don’t have citizenship, impossible to completely control the border

posted at 6:01 pm on February 4, 2015 by Allahpundit

It’s always fun as primary season heats up to theorize about which campaign leaked some damaging oppo research to the media about another. So many suspects in this one! Chris Christie stands to benefit most: If he can make Jeb less palatable to righties than he is, the donor class may decide that Christie’s their best bet for a RINO who can unite the party. Scott Walker benefits too in that this gives him an “at least I’m better than Jeb” defense to tea partiers when his own immigration weakness becomes an issue. Marco Rubio’s eager to ingratiate himself with rich establishmentarians who might worry that his Gang of Eight heresy will be poison to the right in the general; this leak could be his way of reminding them that Bush is just as compromised on the issue. Or maybe this is an early shot across the bow from Ted Cruz’s camp, since they’re the ones most likely to gain in the primaries by punishing rivals for being too accommodating with illegals.

Who ordered the code red on Captain Amnesty?

“I’ve never felt like the sins of the parents should be ascribed to the children, you know,” Bush said in 2013. “If your children always have to pay the price for adults decisions they make — how fair is that? For people who have no country to go back to — which are many of the DREAMers — it’s ridiculous to think that there shouldn’t be some accelerated path to citizenship.”…

Other comments included that Bush declared that “it’s not possible in a free country to completely control the border without us losing our freedoms and liberties.”

But he didn’t stop there:

He even suggested the mayor of Detroit — the economically depressed Midwestern city where he’s giving his first policy address of the 2016 campaign on Wednesday — use immigration to “repopulate” the city.

“It just seems to me that maybe if you open up our doors in a fair way and unleashed the spirit of peoples’ hard work, Detroit could become in really short order, one of the great American cities again,” Bush said then. “Now it would look different, it wouldn’t be Polish…But it would be just as powerful, just as exciting, just as dynamic. And that’s what immigration does and to be fearful of this, it just seems bizarre to me.”

Read more: Hot Air

---snip---

[quote]Jeb Bush 2013: It’s “ridiculous” that DREAMers don’t have citizenship, impossible to completely control the border[/quoe]

I bet most of us would settle for 99 % control or even 98 %.