Bianco gets piled on for saying something reasonable on immigration

Republican gubernatorial candidate and Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco recently upset some Republicans for having a nuanced view of how to resolve the problem of illegal immigration.

I’m not used to defending him, but I guess I’ll do it again.

During an interview on CNN’s “The Story Is,” host Elex Michaelson asked Bianco about illegal immigration. After going on about how “we absolutely cannot have something like amnesty,” Bianco ended up basically saying something like amnesty might make sense as part of a broader effort to deal with those already here.

“We must absolutely deport the people who are here illegally and victimize, victimizing our communities,” he said.

Pressed by Michaelson about a legal pathway for people who have been here a long time and haven’t been engaged in criminal activity, Bianco responded, “We have to come up with something. I don’t know if it’s an amnesty. I think they have to suffer a consequence. You’re not going to get a free ride. You have to pay a fine you have to … not be breaking laws, but there has to be something we come up with. It makes absolutely no sense. The ones that are criminals, there’s no question they have to go.”

It’s fuzzy and general, but distinguishing between people in the country illegally who came here to work and those who came here to commit crimes or went on to commit crimes is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

Since there are upwards of 14 million or so unauthorized immigrants in the country and the public has already turned against heavy-handed ICE enforcement, some other way of dealing with the problem is obviously in order.

The common sense answer is to prioritize the removal of people in the country illegally with criminal records, preferably by seriousness of their offense, and come up with some legal status of some sort for people who have been here for a long time and have been contributing members of society.

But many on the right are still adamant on a hardline position of deporting everyone and they’re freaking out about Bianco’s outburst of reasonableness.

Far-right outlets like those at Breitbart and the Daily Wire pointed to other instances of Bianco being seemingly reasonable on this issue, much to the outrage of their audiences.

“California is one of the largest immigrant populations in the country and illegal immigrant populations in the country,” Bianco previously said. “But we have to address it. We have to make it right. Whether they came across illegally into the country — legally or not — is irrelevant, because we allowed it to happen. So now we just have to fix it. Secure our borders. Don’t let it happen again. And now we have to give a path to citizenship to the ones that are here.”

The pressure on Bianco apparently built up enough that he felt he needed to issue a statement on Friday.

“I am completely against amnesty,” he said in the video posted to social media. He went on to restate his position and then tried to reframe his past statements in support of a path to citizenship as meaning “it should not be impossible or take decades for those wanting to become U.S. citizens to go through a broken process.”

It is highly doubtful his attempts to spin out of his reasonable statements will ingratiate himself to the increasingly anti-immigrant base of the Republican Party. It’s certainly not going to placate those who look to far-right conspiracists like Laura Loomer, who has been denouncing Bianco for not using sheriff’s deputies to engage in immigration enforcement.

It seems like any hint of reasonableness on immigration is verboten in the absolute circus that is the current GOP.

Very odd.

Sal Rodriguez can be reached at salrodriguez@scng.com