Fox News Sunday, "Choosing the President" interviews: on Immigration

Mike Huckabee: Pathway to citizenship must start at back of line, out of US

A: I don’t think there’s an inconsistency. When I said a pathway, I didn’t say what the pathway was. I now believe that the only thing the American people are going to accept--and, frankly, the only thing that really makes sense--is a pathway that sends people back to the starting point.

Q: That would take years.

A: No, I don’t agree. Look, if we can get a credit card application done within hours, it shouldn’t take years to get a work permit to come here and pick lettuce. So part of my plan is that we seal the borders. You don’t have amnesty and sanctuary cities. You do have a pathway to get back here legally that would take days, maybe weeks, not years.

Mike Huckabee: Send illegals home so all in US can hold their heads high

1. The American people say, “Do something. Do it now. We don’t want to have this country ignoring the illegal problem.” I get it.
2. I want people who are in this country to hold their heads up high. You know, right now there are a lot of people who really are here because they’re trying to feed their families. I don’t begrudge them that. But let’s give them a means by which they can get here through the door legally, and when they’re here they don’t have to hide, they don’t have to keep their heads down and hope nobody catches them, they have their heads held high. Everyone living within the borders of the United States ought to do so with dignity and with a sense of pride, not a sense of fear.

Rudy Giuliani: Let illegals’ kids go to school, or they’ll be on streets

A: That is a total misunderstanding. My interest as mayor was to focus on the criminals that were here. I wanted the INS to throw them out. At the same time, there were 400,000 illegal immigrants in NYC, roughly, when I was the mayor. The immigration service could throw out no more than about 2,000 a year. The question was, should the children of the other 398,000 illegal immigrants go to school? Did it make sense, in a city that had so much crime, to have 40,000 kids sitting at home? Should they be able to report crimes? Of course they should. The criminals who criminalized them were going to criminalize others. Should they get treatment in hospitals? If they don’t get treatment in hospitals, you have communicable diseases. I had real responsibilities that I had to deal with. This was a very effective way to deal with those responsibilities.

John McCain: Comprehensive reform must include border security first

A: I support many of the concepts in it. It didn’t pass. The legislation didn’t pass. So we’ve been sitting down and doing intensive negotiations with the president, with other conservative Republicans and Senator Kennedy to come up with something that will. It certainly is going to be a comprehensive proposal. And it certainly will be border enforcement as the first and foremost priority.

Q: Border enforcement before the other parts of the package?

A: Not before, but certainly there has to be the assurance that all necessary measures are being taken in order to secure our border. Americans deserve that. Americans deserve border security, and we can’t ignore that aspect of it. Our borders are broken. I think we all know that.

Fred Thompson: Can’t round up 12M illegals, so focus on preventing next 12M

A: No, no.

Q: You said last year about illegals, “You’re going to have to, in some way, work out a deal where they can have some aspirations of citizenship but not make it so easy that it’s unfair to the people waiting in line and abiding by the law.” And you said, “Look, it’s just not realistic that we’re going to round up 12 million people and ship them all out of the country.”

A: Well, that’s true, as a general statement. We woke up one day after years of neglect and apparently discovered that we have somewhere between 12 million and 20 million illegal aliens in this country. So it became an impossible situation to deal with. I mean, there’s really no good solution. So what do you do? You have to start over. Well, I’m concerned about the next 12 million or 20 million. So that’s why enforcement, and enforcement at the border, has to be primary.