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Romney Plotting With Kobach on Mass-Deportation Scheme, Reveals Anti-Latino Animus In New Ad

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Mitt Romney can’t say he hasn’t been warned.

Pundits and Republican politicos have been warning the GOP presidential candidates, particularly Mitt Romney, about their anti-immigrant rhetoric. They’ve been advised, repeatedly, that their harsh language is turning off Latinos, the fastest growing voting demographic, — and turning those voters against them. Instead of heeding that advice, Mitt Romney is piling on.

In a new ad, he attacks Rick Santorum for his vote to confirm Sonia Sotomayor and for opposing E-Verify. By invoking Sotomayor, Romney isn’t even trying to be subtle. He’s entered that dangerous territory normally reserved for extremists like Tom Tancredo and Mark Krikorian. It looks like Romney has gone from being anti-immigrant to blatantly anti-Latino. Watch the ad for yourself:

For weeks, we’ve known that Romney has been relying on the counsel of Kris Kobach, the author of Arizona’s SB 1070 and Alabama’s HB 56. Kobach’s stated goal is mass deportation, couched as “attrition through enforcement.” From the Guardian, we learn from Kobach that Romney would institute Kobach’s nefarious agenda:

Mitt Romney has discussed the possibility of imposing a nationwide crackdown on undocumented aliens, a move that his leading immigration adviser believes could force more than a million people to quit the country every year.

Kris Kobach, the source of some of Romney’s most controversial ideas on immigration, has told the Guardian that he has been in direct discussions with the presidential candidate about possible changes to federal policy should Romney win the Republican nomination and go on to take the White House.

The changes would see “attrition through enforcement” – the state-level clampdown pioneered by Kobach in ArizonaAlabama and several other states – extended across the entire US in an attempt to winkle undocumented workers out of the country.

Kobach estimates that within the first four years of a new Republican presidency, as many as half of the current pool of undocumented aliens – some 5.5 million – could be made to flee by introducing much more aggressive enforcement of immigration documents.

The idea is to make the legal environment so hostile to undocumented families, and work so hard to come by, that they will choose to depart of their own volition – “self-deportation”, as Kobach calls it.

So, Romney is secretly plotting with Kobach to impose a mass deportation scheme. And, he’s running tv ads that take swipes at the first Latina named to the Supreme Court. It’s almost incomprehensible to see that Romney just keeps getting worse on issues affecting Latino voters. But he does.

Romney is intent on doing to the GOP nationwide what his supporter Pete Wilson did to the Republican party in California — alienate Latino voters for the foreseeable future.

Again, Romney can’t say he hasn’t been warned.