Univision Television (Hispanic focused) hosted a GOP debate last night in which the questions and answers were translated into English. Univision hosted a similar debate for the Democrats several months back and Sen. John McCain was the only Republican who signed up to take place in the GOP debate originally. The debate was rescheduled and all but Tancredo showed up this time. Here are some of the highlights. You can read the entire transcript online.
MODERATOR: Governor Huckabee, what to do with the 12 million of undocumented that already live in the United States?
HUCKABEE: Well, I agree with the mayor that the first step is a secure border, because otherwise nothing really matters.
But I do think the pathway has to include people going to the back, not the front of the line. There can’t be an amnesty policy, because that’s an insult to all the people who waited, sometimes, ridiculously, for years, just to be able to make the transition here.
I think a reasonable window of time in which a person would go back to the native country, start the process, but the real challenge is that our government, which has failed miserably in all of this — it’s got to get its act together.
HUCKABEE: If you can get an American Express card in two weeks, it shouldn’t take seven years to get a work permit to come to this country in order to work on a farm.
So if our government is incapable of making that process in that length of time, then we should do it in a way to outsource it.
And here’s why: When people come to this country, they shouldn’t fear. They shouldn’t live in hiding. They ought to have their heads up, because the one thing about being an American is, we believe every person ought to have his or her head up and proud, and nobody should have to be in hiding because they’re illegal when our government ought to make it so that people can reasonably come here in a legal fashion.
Governor Huckabee, how can we curb that anti-Hispanic sentiment?
HUCKABEE: Well, I was governor of the state that is the second- fastest growing state for Hispanics in the country, and we faced that. Quite frankly, when we fix the situation and make the border secure and people are here legally, a lot of the sentiment goes away.
And I think we forget sometimes that it’s not just that it’s the people feeling that the illegals are coming in such great numbers that we can’t deal with it. But it’s a terrible thing when a person who is here legally, but who may speak with an accent, is racially profiled by members of the public, and people assume that they may be illegal.
It is in everybody’s best interest — it is in most of all the best interest of the legal immigrants — that we fix this problem, so nobody questions the legitimacy of their being here, which often happens, unfairly, unnecessarily and, frankly, in a completely un- American manner.
MODERATOR: Thank you. Representative Paul?
PAUL: On a negative tone — well, one thing is, if we want to prevent more negative tone, we won’t be working on a tamper-proof ID.
PAUL: Because how can you have a tamper… How can you have a tamper-proof ID for illegals or immigrants, without doing it to everybody else?
That’s going to lead to a national ID card, which I absolutely oppose.
But we have to realize where the resentment comes from. I believe it’s related to our economy. When the economy is weakening and there’s resentment because of our welfare system; jobs are going overseas; our good jobs — pay is going down.
There’s a lot of resentments because the welfare system is based on mandates from the federal government to put pressure on states like Florida and Texas to provide services which the local taxpayers resent.
Some of our hospitals are closing. So it’s an economic issue, too.
If we deal with the welfare state and a healthy economy and a sound — money and all this wasteful spending overseas, we would have a healthy economy; I think this problem would be greatly reduced.
MODERATOR: Governor Huckabee, you know the numbers: 47 million people don’t have health insurance, including 15 million Hispanic. What can be done to provide coverage for those people?
HUCKABEE: Of those 47 million, one-third don’t have it because they are self-insured. Another one-third don’t have it because they think they’re healthy and invincible. There is one-third that don’t have it because they can’t afford it. And then there are a lot of people who have insurance, but they’re underinsured.
But let me tell you, the biggest problem we have in this country is not a health care crisis, it is a health crisis. We spend $2 trillion a year on health care, and 80 percent of it goes to chronic disease, which means that what we really have to begin dealing with is turning the system right side up, because it is upside down focused on waiting until people are catastrophically ill, and then we try to rush in with the most expensive modalities possible.
HUCKABEE: What we need to be doing is putting the real focus on preventing the illness in the first place. It’s the difference between either putting an ambulance at the bottom of the hill or building a fence at the top.
We can afford universal coverage, but not until and not even close until we first have health, rather than just focus on health coverage.
Let me say the last thing we need to do is to believe that Michael Moore’s idea is good and we can all go to Cuba and get health care. I don’t mind shipping him down there, but the rest of us I’d like to get our care here.
