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Eli Kantor is a labor, employment and immigration law attorney. He has been practicing labor, employment and immigration law for more than 36 years. He has been featured in articles about labor, employment and immigration law in the L.A. Times, Business Week.com and Daily Variety. He is a regular columnist for the Daily Journal. Telephone (310)274-8216; eli@elikantorlaw.com. For more information, visit beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com and and beverlyhillsemploymentlaw.com

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Thursday, July 09, 2015

Lindsey Graham Says Republicans Are ‘in a Hole’ With Hispanics

New York Times
By Alan Rappeport
July 8, 2015

Senator Lindsey Graham said on Wednesday that Republicans have been doing themselves no favors when it comes to courting the crucial Hispanic vote and warned that Donald J. Trump should not be the party’s spokesman on the issue.

“My party is in a hole with Hispanics — the first rule of politics when you’re in a hole is stop digging,” Mr. Graham said after a foreign policy speech in Washington. “And somebody needs to take the shovel out of Donald Trump’s hand.”

Mr. Graham, the presidential candidate from South Carolina, disputed Mr. Trump’s assertion that Mexican immigrants who cross into the United States are rapists and criminals, adding that he did not need a lecture from the billionaire businessman on border security.

“Most of them are good hard-working people cleaning our toilets, picking the crops that we all enjoy, changing the beds and working three or four jobs in the shadows to try to keep their family afloat,” Mr. Graham said.

The senator said that his own party had clearly made mistakes on the immigration issue over the years, as evidenced by the steep fall in support among Hispanic voters recently. However, he pushed back against comments from Hillary Rodham Clinton, who said on Tuesday that Republicans operate on a spectrum of hostility toward immigrants.

“I want to remind anybody who cares about immigration reform, that Obamacare, Dodd-Frank and the stimulus went ahead of you,” Mr. Graham said, recalling that President Obama and Democrats had majorities in Congress when he took office. “He didn’t do a damn thing and Hillary Clinton never lifted a finger.”

While Mr. Graham touched on domestic policy, the bulk of his remarks were dedicated to foreign affairs.

He expressed skepticism about the prospect of a nuclear deal with Iran, saying that a bad agreement could lead to chaos in the Middle East. And he compared the rise of the Islamic State with Nazi Germany, calling for the deployment of 10,000 American troops to Syria to quell the growth of the militant group.

At one point a member of the liberal activist group Code Pink confronted Mr. Graham on his worldview, accusing him of being a warmonger and saying that Republicans were responsible the growing threat of terrorism around the world.


Mr. Graham closed his eyes and wiped his eyebrow until she relinquished the microphone. After joking that she was apparently undecided on his candidacy, he turned serious and said: “I think people like you make the world incredibly dangerous. I think people like you are radical Islam’s best hope.”

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