Chris Christie’s Big Fat Mistake

By Felicia J. Persaud

News Americas, NEW YORK, NY: It must be something in the kool aid Republicans – or in this case Republican Presidential hopefuls – slurp!

Remember Mitt Romney’s flip flopping stance on immigration? Well turns out in the GOP Presidential hopeful ranks, flip flopping is fast becoming a character must have when attempting a run.

The latest flip flopper is none other than New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. Turns out Christie has quietly aligned the Garden State with Texas and the other 20 plus red states seeking to stop President Barack Obama’s executive order on immigration from moving forward. This according to Gordon MacInnes, head of the liberal New Jersey Policy Perspective group, will harm an estimated 149,000 undocumented immigrants in New Jersey that the President’s order could have helped.

This as a Rutgers-Eagleton poll in December showed that most New Jerseyans support Obama’s immigration policy that will provide an opportunity to apply for three years of relief from deportation and work permits, available to undocumented immigrants who arrived in the U.S. before 2010 and were under 16 years old or have at least one child who is a citizen or legal resident.

Christie, overcome most likely by a poll that showed him as least favorite to become the GOP front runner next year, jumped on board with the governors of Louisiana and South Dakota and filed a brief on Monday March 23rd urging an appeals court handling the Texas lawsuit to continue a freeze on the President’s November 20th executive order.

Guess Christie missed Whit Ayres book and advice all together. Instead, what he made was a big fat mistake that will ensure he gets absolutely no where in his farfetched hallucination of becoming President.

Christie’s Monday morning mistake will cost him big time, especially with the many Latino voters he won over in 2013 as he sought a second term as governor.

Now I bet the 51 percent of the state’s Latino voters are shaking their heads in disbelief. That is if they can even get their heads up after being thrown so viciously under the bus.

Of course Christie is down playing his conservative move: not mentioning the filing of the brief on his “Ask the Governor’’ radio show; not talking about it at a town hall in Morris County; completely ignoring it in Stafford at a ribbon-cutting at a drug abuse rehabilitation facility and certainly staying mum at a political fundraiser in Philadelphia.

But New Jerseyans and especially immigrant voters cannot forget. Just like immigrant voters across the country cannot forget the flip flopping of the likes of Scott Walker, Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush.

Christie should pay dearly in 2016 and so should all Republicans for throwing immigrant voters under the bus by stopping a plan that will help undocumented immigrants but doing nothing themselves to solve the urgent need for immigration reform.

The writer is CMO of Hard Beat Communications, which owns the brands News Americas Now, CaribPR Wire and Invest Caribbean Now.