Romney dodges immigration questions

Mitt Romney refuses to say whether he’d repeal the Obama administration’s decision to stop deporting certain undocumented immigrants.

In an interview with Bob Schieffer aired Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” the presumptive Republican presidential nominee five different times declined to answer whether he would conduct the same policy President Barack Obama on Friday announced his Department of Homeland Security will now pursue.

Instead of answering the question posed, Romney called for a permanent solution.

“With regards to these kids who were brought in by their parents through no fault of their own, there needs to be a long-term solution so they know what their status is,” Romney said. “This is something Congress has been working on, and I thought we were about to see some proposals brought forward by Sen. Marco Rubio and by Democrat senators, but the president jumped in and said I'm going to take this action, he called it a stop-gap measure. I don't know why he feels stop-gap measures are the right way to go.”

After Schieffer asked, directly, four additional times if Romney would repeal the policy without receiving an answer, Romney called the move political.

“I think the timing is pretty clear, if he really wanted to make a solution that dealt with these kids or with illegal immigration in America, than this is something he would have taken up in his first three and a half years, not in his last few months,” he said.

Romney has yet to offer an opinion on the merits of Obama’s immigration policy change. On Friday, he told reporters in New Hampshire that he supports Rubio’s proposal, which has yet to be introduced in the Senate.

On “Fox News Sunday,” Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol said Obama’s moved successfully undercut both Rubio and Romney.

“This was the anti-Marco Rubio initiative by the administration,” Kristol said. “They were scared. Sen. Rubio was about to introduce his version of the Dream Act, which would have been closer to what President Obama announced than the actual Democratic Dream Act. I wish Rubio had introduced it over the last month or two. He got stalled, not every Republican was on board, the Romney campaign’s been cautious about it.”

And Kristol said Romney, who during the GOP primary staked out a more conservative position on immigration than his opponents, in particular Texas Gov. Rick Perry, is now in a tight spot.

“This is a big problem for Romney,” Kristol said. “He needs to take the lead on this, and in my view embrace Marco Rubio’s Dream Act if that’s what he wants and say, ‘Let’s pass this in Congress over the next few months, this is what I’m for.”