On Tuesday, Democratic Colorado Governor, John Hickenlooper, signaled support for blanket amnesty of DACA recipients, and indeed all illegal immigrants who have, and will find their way to the US.
During a television interview, coming on the heels of President Trump’s televised bipartisan immigration meeting, Hickenlooper gave his take on the sort of immigration reform he would like to see.
“Maybe, I mean ideally, this should be the time that Congress steps up and does comprehensive reform, right?” Hickenlooper had said during the interview. “You know, when I first got in to politics, I ran for mayor in 2003, I had never run for student council, this was an issue in 2003. … People were saying, ‘well, how are we going to address this immigration issue?’ Let’s finally do it.”
However, being a politician, Hickenlooper is not consistent or principled. In 2014, he came under fire for allegedly “insensitive” comments suggesting that illegals simply have no interest in becoming legal US citizens.
“What’s amazing to me is, a lot of young Latinos, the vast majority don’t care about a pathway to citizenship,” he had said. “They want to be able to get on an airplane and get down to Mexico City and visit their grandparents. And they want to get a job and be able to get paid over the table. Why don’t we just take the pathway to citizenship and say, ‘we’re not going to worry about it.’ Let’s have a robust guest worker system where everybody gets five years and we secure the border and we actually hold business accountable if they’re going to pay people under the table.”
Later, under heavy pressure from pro-immigration Latino groups, he changed his tune and recanted, lamenting, “What I said in the interview, which didn’t come out, is I have always believed in a pathway to citizenship.”
Similar comments were made again in 2016 when he spoke up to some community leaders. Where he said to them, “I think, when I talk to the young kids—now, this, these are not politically active young kids, but the, just the undocumented workers who I run, get to meet all the time at Metro State or when I’m out at a work project or someplace I always try to seek kids out—they don’t care about the pathway to citizenship.”
He further said, “They want to come out of the shadows, be able to have a job, be able to get on an airplane and fly, they want to live a life. And be able to use their education at a level at which they’ve been trained. Uh, and they’re willing to gamble that in five years or ten years there’ll be a pathway to citizenship.”
Hickenlooper, as per speculation is expected to be a player in the 2020 presidential campaign. In his interview with the T.V host Chuck Todd he shared that he was “still just thinking about it,” when he was asked about his plans to run for the presidential elections of 2020.
