May 19, 2010 06:28 PM UTC

Romanoff Flunks Immigration Comprehension Test

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• by: Colorado Pols

THURSDAY UPDATE: The Colorado Independent’s Luke Johnson follows up:

In the 2008 Democratic primary for president, both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton talked about reforming NAFTA, mostly for the way it was contributing to the loss of manufacturing jobs in swing states like Ohio. In the years since the agreement went into effect, analysts and economists have reported that millions of Mexicans responded to the tariff-free influx of U.S. goods into their country and the loss of jobs in manufacturing and farming that resulted by “exporting” themselves north to reclaim their lost work.

Yet former state House Speaker Andrew Romanoff reportedly drew a blank when asked about the connection. According to his interlocutor, Grand Junction Sentinel columnist Bill Grant, Romanoff said he didn’t know that there was a relationship between NAFTA and illegal immigration…

More than a mere PR flap, the exchange throws a spotlight back onto Romanoff’s sometimes controversial record on immigration.

In his primary race against Bennet, Romanoff supports comprehensive immigration reform. He called the passage of the Arizona immigration law “a terrifying turn of events.” He released a letter of support from a group of more than 150 Latino leaders calling themselves Unidos Con Romanoff.

As House speaker in 2006, however, he sponsored legislation (PDF) to deny benefits to undocumented immigrants, except for benefits required to be dispensed by federal law. Although the state could not be required to ask for immigration status on education, emergency medical care or prenatal care, for example, it did begin to ask when releasing Medicaid and food stamps. The legislature crafted the bill during a special July session on immigration that Republican Gov. Bill Owens called for before the November elections. Democratic legislative leaders supported the legislation as well.

After the bill passed, Romanoff said, “We got more done on this issue in five days than Congress has managed in two decades.” He added, “I hope the package we put together will serve as a national model, not just in terms of the substance but also the spirit. We proved that Democrats and Republicans can work together to solve problems.”

Wednesday’s original post after the jump.

As observers have watched the luckless U.S. Senate campaign of former Colorado House Speaker Andrew Romanoff, plenty of trouble spots have emerged–key points along the way where Romanoff had the opportunity to prove himself as a credible candidate for such a high office, and failed to do so. These have included chronic fundraising underperformance, disastrous public contemplation of switching to a different race entirely (then failing to do so), truly irresponsible and damaging staff hires, and an inability to extract himself from simple, day-to-day campaign tangles without taking major damage. And as one poll indicated yesterday, Romanoff may be looking at an embarrassing “minor candidate” style defeat in August, regardless of what happens at the state convention this weekend.

Through all of this, the one thing that diehard supporters of Romanoff could say, maybe wistfully but with heartfelt sincerity, is that their candidate had the superior intellect–and better comprehension of the issues than Sen. Michael Bennet. Romanoff’s reputation for competency, if perhaps a little wonkish for some people’s tastes, was his saving grace; and a key reason to support his underdog candidacy against all odds.

If this was one of the remaining notions you were clinging to in hope that all the other factors sealing Romanoff’s fate could somehow be overcome, the Grand Junction Sentinel’s Bill Grant has some bad news for you.

I had no intention of blindsiding U.S. Senate candidate Andrew Romanoff last Friday when I asked him to discuss the relationship between the North American Free Trade Agreement and the influx of undocumented workers from Mexico since its ratification. But if my question caught Romanoff off guard, his answer left me equally flummoxed. When, after a moment’s contemplation, Romanoff replied that he did not know there was any such relationship, I wondered if he had missed the 2008 Democratic primary.

Romanoff may choose, as others have, to minimize the importance of NAFTA to immigration, but he should be familiar with a position that has characterized progressive thought since NAFTA was passed.

Debate over NAFTA raged in industrial states like Ohio, which lost jobs to Mexico.  But as Ted Lewis editorialized in the San Diego Union Tribune in February 2008, “NAFTA’s relevance to this year’s election … is due as much to its role in accelerating undocumented migration from Mexico as to the visceral reaction swing voters in Midwestern states such as Ohio have to job losses it causes here at home.”

Grant then describes pretty well the effect that passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has had on illegal immigration–basically the opposite of what was predicted, greatly increasing illegal immigration instead of reducing the motivation for it. How to solve the problems we can now see in hindsight with NAFTA and immigration from Mexico is not something there will be universal agreement on, but to not even comprehend that there is a relationship between the two issues? It’s pretty hard to argue with Bill Grant’s conclusion:

Romanoff’s dismissal of the connection between NAFTA and undocumented immigrants suggests he is not yet ready to enter that debate.

‘Entering the debate.’ That’s the one thing he’s supposed to be qualified to do, right? That’s why Democratic convention delegates are being asked to afford Romanoff all these handicaps, in a race he continues to trail badly in by every other objective measure–right?

We don’t really need to spell out what this means. You already know.