The next US presidential election is still more than two years away; however, with no sign of the crisis on the border going away any time soon, potential candidates in the Republican party are already trying to come up with different ways to win over voters on one of the country’s most controversial issues.
Immigration has been a particularly thorny issue for the Republican party to deal with. Thousands of undocumented immigrants, many of whom are unaccompanied minors from Central America, have been crossing the border into the United States and neither side of the political divide seems able to agree on the cause or how to stop it. The Republican party has long favored a strict stance that enforces the law and has been against any sort of immigration reform; however, this becomes a great deal trickier when the illegal immigrants in question are children running away from violence in their homeland.
Continuing to follow the strict stance is a risky move. This may still go down well with some of the party’s extremely conservative supporters but goes against the internal report after the party’s disastrous defeat in the 2012 election, which showed that Republicans need to reach out to more minorities ‒ particularly the Latino community ‒ if they want to win in 2016.
Some potential Republican candidates in 2016 have decided to adopt a humanitarian approach to the current crisis, while others have simply kept quiet; some, such as Texas governor Rick Perry and Senator Ted Cruz, continue to take the hard-line attitude. No one quite seems to know which approach will find favor with the voters.