Former Bush Commerce secretary: Republicans ‘scaring the heck out of’ Hispanics

• Tweet
• 
• 

• Tweet

President Bush’s former secretary of Commerce on Sunday pointed out that Mitt Romney and the Republican Party made a mistake by pushing anti-immigrant policies like “self deportation” in the 2012 elections because it was “scaring the heck out of” Hispanic voters.

“I would lay the blame [for Romney's defeat] squarely on the far right wing of the Republican Party,” former Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez said during a panel discussion on CNN. “That’s where you get into things like immigration. If we want to be the party of growth and prosperity, we have to be the party of immigration.”

“So we should be leading comprehensive immigration reform. We should be leading the DREAM Act, not the military DREAM Act, students as well,” he explained. “We should be getting rid of things like English as the official language of government. We have to be welcoming immigrants. This is like we are competing for investment capital, we are also competing for human capital. And our party is scaring the heck out of them.”

But conservative activist Gary Bauer quickly objected, insisting that the policies of inclusion that Gutierrez had suggested would not attract more voters to the party.

“Seventy-five percent of the American people believe that English, sir, is the language of United States,” Bauer opined. “I don’t understand why you would jettison 75 percent, and the idea that’s going to get you votes.”

Watch this video from CNN’s State of the Union, broadcast Nov. 11, 2012.