Perry: Romney Didn’t Have Same Experience With Illegal Immigration In His State

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Texas Gov. Rick Perry, now a Mitt Romney supporter, explained why Romney was wrong to criticize him on signing Texas’s in-state tuition bill for young undocumented immigrants in an interview during a Hoover Institution event. At a primary debate in October 2011, Romney said Perry’s move amounted to “a magnet” drawing illegal immigrants into the country. 

“The point is that none of those individuals, none of those individuals, had the responsibility of making decisions on how to deal with that issue in their home state,” Perry told Peter Robinson of the GOP primary field. Perry said that allowing undocumented young people to attend school at in-state rates was the practical, economically smart thing to do.

“We have these tens of thousands of young people graduating from high schools and are you going to make a decision that puts them on track to go onto a welfare state or are you gonna find a way to — and these are people who showed up by no fault of their own, did all the work, they passed all the coursework, they did work well enough to be accepted to the university systems that we have in the state — and are you basically gonna say, ‘we’re not gonna let you go to our… universities.’ Because if you’re gonna make them pay out of state, you’re basically saying you’re not gonna be able to go to our universities because you can’t afford it… The people of the state of Texas said, ‘we would rather have these individuals pay in-state tuition than we would have them go on the welfare rolls. This is a straight up economic issue.”

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