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Bachmann, Perry both take heat over immigration stances

Posted Sep 14, 2011 by William March

Updated Sep 14, 2011 at 05:18 PM

Both Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry are taking heat over their comments in Monday night’s debate on immigration—hardliners calling Perry soft on illegal immigration, and liberal groups calling Bachmann’s comments on the history of immigration law veiled racism.

Bachmann said in the debate that, “The immigration system in the United States worked very, very well up until the mid-1960s when liberal members of Congress changed the immigration laws.”

That’s an apparent reference to the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, pushed by Ted Kennedy and others. It made family unification the primary criteria for legal immigration.

Prior to that, immigration was governed mainly by the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952. According to an analysis State Department’s Office of the Historian, the 1952 law eliminated specific racial immigration bans of previous years, aimed mainly at Chinese, but maintained national origin quotas which had the effect of limiting legal immigration almost exclusively to northern and western Europeans.

President Harry Truman vetoed the law as “un-American” because of its Cold War-influenced strictures on Eastern European immigration, but Congress overrode the veto.

“Bachmann’s comments may sound innocuous to some, but to those schooled in immigration history she’s actually blowing a shrill dog whistle.  She’s basically saying, ‘let’s go back to an immigration policy that favors white people and excludes people of color from around the world,’ ” said Frank Sharry of America’s Voice, a liberal-oriented immigration reform organization.

The Bachmann campaign hasn’t responded to a request for comment.

Perry, meanwhile, is taking heat for his stances against a border fence and for legislation that allows children from illegal immigrant families to qualify for in-state tuition in Texas universities, if they graduated from Texas high schools and are pursuing citizenship.

“We are about to see what we will call the ‘Perry Plunge’ in the polls,” said William Gheen of Americans for Legal Immigration, in comments being distributed by the Mitt Romney campaign.

In the debate, Perry stood by his stances, saying the border fence is impractical, and that it would be inhumane to limit the career prospects of children who may have been brought here involuntarily by their families and had good records in public schools, merely “because of the sound of their last names.”