Kaine predicts Clinton will have 'mandate' for immigration reform

Not only does Tim Kaine expect Hillary Clinton to win the election in November, he expects her to do it so convincingly that she will arrive in the White House armed with a mandate to get an immigration reform package through Congress.

The Virginia senator said he’s heard from his Capitol Hill colleagues, including Republicans, that the election is essentially a referendum by proxy on the issue of immigration reform. And Kaine said even the Republican senators he’s talked to are eager to put the issue in their rear-view mirror.


“A lot of my Senate colleague are telling me, ‘If you guys win, do this right away. Bring immigration reform right back.’ Because, A, many Republicans really want to do immigration reform. They’re worried about will their voters punish them, but they really want to do immigration reform,” Kaine told voters at a rally in Nevada. “But the second thing is, they will say ‘This is a race where the issue is very central. You guys are for immigration reform, Donald Trump’s for deportation nation. So if you win, there’s a mandate. And the mandate is ‘We don’t like deportation nation, we want to do immigration reform.’ And they’ve said ‘Act on that as fast as you can. Don’t let that fade. Just come right in and do it.’”

“The other thing that gives us a little bit of an opening on this is, my prediction is that we’re going to win and that one of the stories is going to be we won because the Republican Party so alienated new Americans that if they want to have any future, they better try to kind of, like, kind of get right and attract new Americans again,” he added.

Trump has made curbing illegal immigration a central issue of his candidacy from its very beginning, pledging to build a wall along America’s southern border and force Mexico to pay for it. He has also proposed the creation of a deportation force that would remove undocumented immigrants from the U.S. and send them back to their home country, although he has backed away from that plan somewhat since winning the GOP nomination in favor of a proposal to first remove undocumented immigrants with criminal records.

As a result of his hard-line stance, Trump has struggled badly with Hispanic voters while Clinton, who has made immigration reform a plank in her presidential platform, has polled well with them. Kaine said Republicans’ immigration rhetoric has hurt them not just with Hispanic voters, but with “new Americans” of all ethnicities.

“So it’s interesting, when the Republicans fight against illegal immigration and they’re thinking about Latinos, an awful lot of immigrants who aren’t Latinos hear it and they think, ‘I don’t think it’s the illegal that they don’t like. I think it’s the immigrants from anywhere that they don’t like,’” Kaine said. “So the Republican anti-immigration reforming is pushing all new American groups over our way in Virginia and all over the country. So I think there’s going to be a moment where that’s going to be clear. There will be a mandate in the election.”