Romney: Gingrich Flip-Flopped on 'Self-Deportation'

In a blog entry at Mother Jones, Adam Serwer weighs in on the smoldering debate between GOP presidential candidates Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich over whether Gingrich supports "self-deportation." He fact-checks the issue and finds that Gingrich indeed has flip-flopped on the strategy of making immigrants so miserable that they return home on their own.

Speaking to [...] Univision earlier on Wednesday, Gingrich said that "self-deportation" was an "Obama-level fantasy." He didn't mention that he'd endorsed the idea fairly recently. Patricia Mazzei of the Miami Herald hunted down the quote, which comes from an appearance Gingrich made on the Laura Ingraham show in 2010. "We have to enforce this law," Gingrich tells Ingraham. "We have to do that first. No work, self-deportation. Come back. We can figure out our immigration system after we enforce this border. But I just think you're not going to get the support of the people unless we really see that border enforced."

Gingrich has been running an ad in Florida calling Romney an "anti-immigrant" candidate, but the campaign withdrew the ads after Florida's Cuban American Republican Sen. Marco Rubio said the ad was "inaccurate, inflammatory, and doesn't belong in this campaign." Romney told Ramos Wednesday that it was "very sad for a candidate to resort to that kind of epithet."

Romney also suggested that Gingrich's criticism of "self-deportation" was just pandering. "It's very tempting to come to an audience like this and tell people what they want to hear," said Romney, who's been on both sides of immigration issues a few times himself.

Read Adam Serwer's entire blog entry at Mother Jones. 

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