Which may be true, but it raises two questions: Does Romney want to reform legal immigration in ways that encourage more legal immigrants or less, more assimilation or less? And, why does he consider this, apparently, of equal importance to border security, let alone to cracking down on the illegals?
We need fewer legal, as well as fewer illegal, immigrants.
I don’t think that Romney considers legal immigration of equal or greater importance than illegal immigration and border security, but I do think he’s mindful that once you go forward with kicking the illegals out and making them “get in line” to apply legally (as he mentioned in the 2nd debate), you may have a problem—in the short term—filling a lot of low-paying jobs that they’d be leaving (i.e. the ones that many Americans might consider undesirable). That’s where improvements in legal immigration might be helpful so as to not cause potential economic problems.
If you dont understand how badly the legal immigration system needs fixing, you don’t understand the immigration system as a whole. We forbid the wrong people, admit the wrong people, have wrong legal procedures, too many visa categories, too many family/chain migration, have the ‘anchor baby’ problem, etc. Our borken legal immigration system, created by a Kennedy bill in 1964, is the source of our illegal immigration problem.
Amnesties and lax borders only exacerbate the problem.
To throw out a simplistic statement about needing less immigration (Why?) without even noticing that it would require changes to our legal immigration system is oxymoronic.
Romney is 100% right.