Sen. Rand Paul now supports immigration amnesty (Kentucky, illegal aliens)

Kentucky senator Rand Paul is just the latest Tea Party leader to capitulate on an immigration amnesty for illegal aliens. From this:

Paul plans to inject himself into the middle of the GOP’s emotional immigration debate in the wake of Romney losing swing states with heavy Latino populations like Florida, Colorado and Nevada. Paul is working on a novel plan that he says would “assimilate” many of the 12 million illegal immigrants currently in the country. Those individuals, he said, could apply for legal status, but immigration would then be clamped down in the interim. He also says his plan would toughen security at the border.

"I want to show what conservatives would or can accept," he said in describing his plan. "If we assimilate those who are here, however they got here - don’t make it an easy path for citizenship. There would be an eventual path, but we don’t make anybody tomorrow a citizen who came here illegally. But if they’re willing to work, willing to pay taxes, I think we need to normalize those who are here.”

Paul said the “trade-off” would be “not to accept any new legal immigrants while we’re assimilating the ones who are here.” Asked if he is concerned about the ripple effect that could cause around the world, Paul said the details over which countries would be affected are still in the works.

Paul makes clear that he's doing this for political purposes: to try to expand the GOP's reach. What he's going to do instead is help the Democratic Party greatly expand their reach. Even if the Democrats accepted Paul's plan, they'd immediately begin to weaken it, with the help of groups like the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Council of La Raza, and on and on.

For instance, if Paul were able to make illegal aliens wait 10 years to get on the "path to citizenship", the ACLU and other groups would sue to reduce it to five or two years. The Democrats would introduce bills to do the same or take other actions to weaken Paul's "novel" plan. Any resistance to what the Democrats and the far-left do would be used to portray the entire GOP as "anti-immigrant" and so on. A recent example comes from how the media treated Mitt Romney: even though he was only slightly tougher than Obama on immigration, the media and the Democrats portrayed him as the second coming of Genghis Khan.

That's exactly what they'd do with Rand Paul: even if he put his heart and soul into pushing a weak immigration plan, the Democrats would portray him as the third coming of Genghis Khan if he resisted anything they tried to do. Rand Paul's clamp down would never happen; his "trade-off" would be like when Lucy pulls away the football at the last moment.

As for the idea of not accepting new immigrants, that too would fail for the reasons outline above. Note also, of course, that there are some people who've been waiting years to come here legally: it's not in any way an instantaneous process. If Paul wants to legalize most illegal aliens, it would have a negative impact on people who've been waiting patiently to immigrate here legally for years (and in some cases over a decade).

The mega "conservative" Rand Paul isn't that: he's just another corrupt politician willing to sell out the U.S. for political gain.

For more on these topics, see comprehensive immigration reform, guest workers, libertarians, Tea Parties, and the long lists of groups and people who'd work to weaken Paul's delusional plans. Note also that Ron Paul is as bad on immigration as those people and groups. Both he and his son sound like them: Ron Paul repeats their talking points, and Rand Paul uses euphemisms like "normalize".

11/20/12 UPDATE: In an interview (link), Rand Paul says this:

"We're getting an ever dwindling percent of the Hispanic vote. We need to let people know, Hispanics in particular, we're not putting you on a bus and shipping you home... I'm still right there with a lot of the hardcore immigration people who want border security. I will insist that border security is first. But, I'm also not going to rule out that we can't figure out an eventual way if you've been living here for 10 or 20 years that you can't become like the rest of us.

See the note on secure the border: Paul is using it in the "first secure the border, then amnesty" sense. He also wasn't asked and didn't reveal what he'd do about those who've been here less than 10 years: would he put them on a bus and ship them home? If so, wouldn't he undercut his own Hispandering? Those would be good questions to ask him, mostly because he would look bad when it's revealed that he hasn't really thought about the impacts of his attempt to improve his political chances at the U.S.'s expense.