Immigration News & Opinion
Sat - May 19, 2012

San Francisco Chronicle, January 27. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio is at the top of every pundit's short list to be the Republican vice presidential nominee, in the belief that having a Latino in the second spot on the ticket will attract Latino voters who have been fleeing the GOP in recent years. But today at the Hispanic Leadership Network conference in Miami, the Berkeley organization Presente Action is launching a national anti-Rubio campaign during his big moment in the national spotlight, days before Tuesday's critical Florida primary. Their assertion, backed by recent surveys, is that Rubio's positions on several key issues, immigration in particular, are far from the mainstream of the Latino electorate. So Presente, a 3-year-old, 250,000-member online hub that aims to be "the Latino MoveOn.org" is aiming its campaign at the senator who is a Tea Party darling. The campaign's name: "No somos Rubios." ("We are not Rubios.") Rubio opposes a pathway to citizenship as part of comprehensive immigration reform and does not support the Dream Act - legislation that calls for undocumented students who were brought to the United States as minors and who have lived here for at least five years to be given a path to legal residency if they graduate from U.S. high schools and meet a variety of legal criteria. Many polls show that Latinos support both a pathway to citizenship and the Dream Act.