In my July 9 comment, I closed by showing that Mitt Romney's website is promising the sun, the moon and the stars on skilled immigration - Green cards upon graduation for math, science and engineering US advanced degree holders; raising quota caps for skilled immigrants, attracting more highly skilled immigrants (instead of regarding them with suspicion and hostility as our current administration is all too often doing), all of this shows a real understanding of the importance of immigration to America - at least immigration by the skilled, highly educated elite.

What would the likehood be of Romney's actually being able to put through such an enlightened program if the Koch brothers, Sheldon Adelson and Karl Rove's billionaire bundlers, aided by Florida governor Rick Scott and the rest of the Republican vote suppression brigade, manage to put Mitt in the White House?

First, Romney would have to bring his own party along with his program of more visas for skilled immigrants. Where to begin? With Senator Charles Grassley and Congressman Lamar Smith, of course. End of skilled visa increase.

But isn't this something that Romney really believes in, enough to take on the anti-immigrant bigots and reactionaries in his own party, just as Bush did (briefly) in 2007? Yes, of course, Romney is a fighter for his principles - when he has any. But no one in either party has yet discovered a single one of Romney's principles on any issue (other than supporting overseas tax havens,"peoplehood" for large corporations and tax breaks for billionaires).

So let's move on from the fantasy world of skilled immigration Romneyland to what he would really do about immigration as president. His website continues with his idea on DREAM. This is identical to Senator Marco Rubio's proposal, which can be boiled down to: "Let ' em join the military. Then we'll give 'em green cards and US citizenship".  

Well, this may be better than nothing, but is this still Mitt's idea, or is his website simply out of date? (Of course, if Romney is elected, everything he has ever said in his entire career, not only in this campaign, will be "reset" - behind tightly closed doors, of course -  from day one.)

When Romney announced that he would reverse President Obama's DREAM initiative on his first day in office (and in tune with an important point that Carl Schusterman raised in yesterday's ID, what reason is there to think that Romney would honor any "deferred action" previously given to a DREAMER under Obama's announced program - which his DHS has also warned peolple not to apply for?), Romney refused to say what he would replace the DREAM initiative with. Was Mitt's website's "Immigration Plan" already "inoperative", to use a well-known term from the Watergate era?

Since there is no substance to anything that "MItt's Plan" would do for immigrants, let's move on to his "Plan's"  enforcement side. Here, we find only the usual "No Amnesty" slogans. Kris Kobach, Lamar Smith, and Justice Scalia would rule the roost. More about this next time.