An aide to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa sends over this early excerpt of a speech he is planning to give to the National Association of Latino Elected Officials in Washington, D.C. tomorrow:
For the first time in modern memory, a major political party is poised to nominate a presidential candidate who has abandoned immigration reform and instead advocates self-deportation.
We have a candidate who on Martin Luther King Day, a day celebrating racial reconciliation, had the architect of Arizona and Alabama’s draconian anti-immigration laws campaign for him.
This is beyond the pale.
And we are obligated to say so.
We must defend the tradition of sensible immigration reform…
A tradition that until recently was a bipartisan one that ran from Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton to George W. Bush.