Bill Richardson in Marshalltown

At the Iowa Veterans Home in Marshalltown Thursday night, presidential candidate and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson gave a short stump speech and fielded an hour of questions.  Predictably given the backdrop of Marshalltown, one of the first questions was on the subject of immigration, and his answer left me wondering. 

Richardson, who had not mentioned immigration in his stump speech, framed his response with the joke, “and I think I’m gonna lose some votes telling you this…” and went into a long five-point plan of “things I would do.”

After the five points were over, he turned a bit more hypothetical, telling the crowd that there are “Three things we could do” with the millions of undocumented workers already here:

Option one, he said, is “to do nothing.”  This, he lamented, was the course George W. Bush seems to be taking.

Option two is to “deport all 12 million.”  The flaw in identifying and deporting 12 million people, however, is “Who’s gonna do that? Local Marshalltown Police?”

Option three, which is what Richardson said he supports, is the Kennedy-McCain bill.  The bill “is hurting Sen. McCain” in the presidential race, he said, “and I commend him for his courage.  This is the right thing to do.”

The audience, which was surprisingly warm and generous with applause (Richardson was on time, and the event went off without problems), seemed satisfied.  But last I had heard, this was not Richardson’s position.

The New Mexico Gov. has already been on both sides of the McCain-Kennedy bill.  When it was first announced, Richardson issued a statement praising the bill.  Then, days later, he changed his tune, he said, after reading more about the bill’s specifics.

He addressed his switch on his May 27 appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press.  The following comes from the transcript of host Tim Russert’s exchange with Richardson:

MR. RUSSERT:  Let me turn to immigration.  Last week this is what all the newspapers said.  “The Senate’s compromise immigration bill is forcing the presidential candidates to confront a divisive issue.  New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson praised the bill.  `This legislation makes a good start” towards “re-securing our Southern border.’” A few days later this headline appeared.  “Hispanic presidential hopeful confronts immigration debate.  On Wednesday Richardson said that after ready the immigration bill in detail, he decided to oppose it, saying the measure placed too great a burden on immigrants, tearing apart families that wanted to settle in the U.S., creating a permanent tier of second-class immigrant workers and financing a border fence.  This is fundamentally flawed in its current form and I would oppose it.  We need bipartisanship, we also need legislation that’s compassionate. I’m not sure this is it.’” How can you be for it and 72 hours later against it?

GOV. RICHARDSON:  Well, no, this is what happened.  I was announcing for president, and the day before, I saw a summary of a bill that had been proposed in the Senate.  And the summary, I believed, contained essential elements of a comprehensive immigration reform bill.  One, that there be tougher border security, doubling of border patrol agents.  That’s good.  And two, a legalization program for the 12 million that are here.  Three, it also contained penalties for employers that knowingly hired illegal workers.  I thought that was all good.  The bill is then presented, and I read it the next day, and it contained some problems.  Now, I praise the Congress and the president for, in a bipartisan way, putting something forward that is a good start.  But the problem, Tim-look, I deal with this issue every day.  I’m a border governor.  Two years ago, I declared a border emergency in New Mexico because the flow of people and drugs were harming New Mexico.  So I have strong qualifications on this issue.  I’ve been dealing it-with it for years. The problem with the immigration bill, the way I read it now, Tim, is one, it separates families.  It gives-it gives too much credence to job skills rather than families.  The essence of all our immigration laws have been to preserve families, and this separates families.  Secondly, a guest worker program.  The guest worker program, first posting, should be to protect American workers to have the, the top job, to, to have the jobs and not the guest workers.  There are no labor protections for those guest workers.  And then third, what I also saw in the bill that was not reported in the summaries is that it’s good to have more border guards, and we have to double them, and there’s been a problem because the federal government has not trained enough to make that happen.  But the fence, the fence, the wall between Mexico and the United States, there’s more funding for it.  This wall is wrong.  This wall is a terrible symbol between two countries that are friends.  And you’re going to have a 10-foot wall, and what’s going to happen is there’s going to be 11-foot ladders going over that wall construct…

MR. RUSSERT:  The wall hasn’t worked?

GOV. RICHARDSON:  No, it hasn’t worked.

Perhaps Richardson did not intend to re-endorse the McCain-Kennedy bill when he said what he said, but if he did, he may need to prepare for the aftermath.