Beto O'Rourke unveils plan for citizenship for Dreamers, 'millions more'

Beto O'Rourke, the former Democratic congressman who is now considering a presidential run in 2020, speaks at a protest rally in El Paso, Texas, Feb. 11, 2019. The battle to succeed Donald Trump in the White House will be, in part, a battle to succeed him as the protagonist of our national serial drama, which makes the primary, in part, an audition. (Jessica Lutz/The New York Times) less Beto O'Rourke, the former Democratic congressman who is now considering a presidential run in 2020, speaks at a protest rally in El Paso, Texas, Feb. 11, 2019. The battle to succeed Donald Trump in the White ... more Photo: JESSICA LUTZ, STR / NYT Photo: JESSICA LUTZ, STR / NYT Image 1 of / 29 Caption Close Beto O'Rourke unveils plan for citizenship for Dreamers, 'millions more' 1 / 29 Back to Gallery

WASHINGTON – After three terms in Congress and an unsuccessful bid for the U.S. Senate, El Paso Democrat Beto O'Rourke has made clear his view that immigrants should be welcomed as "human beings" and that "walls end lives."

Now, signaling that he may soon announce a 2020 White House run, O'Rourke is putting a finer point on his immigration agenda, releasing a 10-point plan that calls for citizenship for both "Dreamers" and their parents, as well as for "millions more" who now live in the U.S. illegally.

O'Rourke, long criticized for a lack of specifics in an otherwise sunny vision of cross-border relations, appears to be doubling down on the formulation he offered in a television interview last week in response to President Donald Trump's pro-wall rally in El Paso.

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Not only does the 46-year-old El Paso native oppose new wall construction, he would like to see an end to the physical barriers that already divide his home town from neighboring Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.

"Yes, absolutely. I'd take the wall down," O'Rourke said in an MSNBC interview.

Amid reports that his team is talking to national Democratic campaign strategists about a presidential run, O'Rourke's willingness to remove existing barriers could put him on the liberal edge of a burgeoning field of potential Trump challengers who oppose a border wall.

"That is fairly to the left of where most of the people in the Democratic field are," said University of Houston political scientist Brandon Rottinghaus, noting that O'Rourke, as a border candidate, has been uniquely framed by the immigration debate.

O'Rourke's list of policy proposals, however, does not include tearing down border barriers, an omission that is likely to raise new questions about his border policy positions.

Even as he remains on the sidelines of the 2020 race, O'Rourke has kept up a national profile over the past week, beginning with a large counter-rally during Trump's visit to El Paso, major interviews on MSNBC and Oprah Winfrey's network, and then a weekend trip to the Midwest battleground state of Wisconsin.

Trump's decision to use El Paso as the background for his hardline on immigration also provided a national forum for O'Rourke, who argues that the city was and remains one of the safest in the U.S. His contention on the city's crime rate is backed up by FBI statistics, but his statement about the wall also has put him in the line of fire of Trump and a host of GOP critics.

"Beto O'Rourke, someone who should be well aware of how much Texans need protection, promised to 'absolutely' take the wall down in El Paso," said Texas U.S Sen. John Cornyn, in a campaign statement that seemed to treat O'Rourke as a potential 2020 Senate challenger. "That's backwards, and that's dangerous."

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For some Republicans, O'Rourke's remark laid bare what they see as the central weakness in the Democrats' opposition to Trump's wall. "At least Beto is honest about his open border policy," tweeted U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw, a Republican from Houston. "Most Dems claim to support a secure border while simultaneously undermining it at every turn."

With his views on border security front and center, O'Rourke responded with seven-page statement laying out a 10-point immigration policy to combat what he called "the 'Latino threat' narrative."

Footnoted like a college paper, it cites academic studies chronicling the "unintended consequences" of federal immigration policy, one argument being that hardening the border encourages illegal immigrants to stay in the U.S. rather return home. "Here's why," O'Rourke wrote, "as we made it harder for people to cross into the United States, we made it less likely that once here they would attempt to go back to their home country. Fearing an increasingly militarized border, circular patterns of migration became linear."

But O'Rourke's plan does not specifically call for tearing down border walls or barriers. Instead, it calls for beefing up infrastructure, technology and personnel at ports of entry, where the majority of drug and human trafficking takes place. He also calls for better tracking of visa overstays, which studies show account for more than half of illegal entries into the U.S.

His plan also calls for extending citizenship to more than one million Dreamers, or those who came or were brought into the U.S. illegally as children. He would also extend citizenship to their parents, whom he calls "the original Dreamers."

The plan, however, does not lay out what O'Rourke would do about the more than 10 million people living in the U.S. illegally, other than to say that he would bring "millions more out of the shadows and on a path to citizenship by ensuring that they register with the government to gain status to legally work, pay taxes and contribute even more to our country's success."

While efforts to legalize the status of Dreamers have broad support among Democrats and some Republicans in Congress, extending legal protections to others living in the country illegally has proven a tough sell politically.

"He is now showing even more how out of touch he is and how little he cares for American citizens and those who have followed the law to seek to become citizens," said Texas Republican Party Chairman James Dickey. "Creating a whole new class of citizens whose status is a direct reward for breaking the law is just his latest dangerous extremist position."

Conservative pundits have long maintained that O'Rourke rarely if ever talks about enforcing current immigration laws, how to stop illegal immigration, or say exactly who he would deport and who he would not. His new policy statement is unlikely to silence those critics.

"There's still a lot of confusion about where exactly he stands on this," Rottinghaus said. "He's been too ambiguous about what he would do, and his positions tend to be on multiple sides of the issue."

Rottinghaus cited O'Rourke's remark during his 2018 Senate campaign saying he would be "open" to doing away with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), then immediately walking it back and saying he was talking about abolishing "tactics that instill fear."

At other times he has criticized the Trump administration policy of separating families but said that abolishing ICE "does nothing to solve any of those issues."

O'Rourke's new policy paper does not call for abolishing ICE, but it does call for and "end to the global war on drugs" which he says has accelerated the erosion of civil society in Latin America and helped produce the resulting flow of immigrants and refugees.

His paper is also a plea for ending what he calls the scapegoating of immigrants, a sentiment that is popular with the Democratic base that views Trump's national emergency declaration as a ploy to circumvent Congress on wall money.

"The fear stoked by politicians," O'Rourke wrote, "produced the intended paranoia and political constituency demanding ever tougher immigration measures."

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