Throughout this campaign, and previous ones, Santorum has been a fairly consistent champion of poor, uneducated white people who think their jobs have been stolen by immigrants. But at Thursday’s undercard Republican debate, Santorum offered a genuinely innovative way to rationalize the forced removal of millions from the U.S.
“I’m gonna give them a gift,” Santorum said about America’s approximately 12 million undocumented immigrants. “I’m gonna give them the gift of being able to help the country they were born in. We’re gonna export America: the education they were able to receive; they learned the English language; they learned about capitalism; they learned about Democracy. You want to stop the flow of immigrants? Let’s send six million Mexicans, Hondurans, Guatemalans, El Salvadorans back into their country, so they can start a renaissance in their country so they won’t be coming over here.”
Given the present conditions in Central America, Santorum’s plan is more likely to result in indiscriminate slaughter than a renaissance. But hey, at least one Republican is talking about immigration as a foreign policy problem rather than a domestic one. Maybe that’s progress?