Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., the son of Cuban immigrants, has urged his fellow conservatives to soften their rhetoric on illegal immigration. Above, he makes a campaign stop with Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney on Monday in Aston, Pa.Florida Sen. Marco Rubio spent the week in the spotlight as the latest potential running mate for presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney. The Hispanic lawmaker, anointed as the party's best hope for appealing to more Latino voters, came loaded for bear — rolling out an alternative to the Democrats' Dream Act.
Rubio has released few details of his plan to address illegal immigration, and says he wants to introduce a bill in the Senate in June. But, like the Democrat-backed version defeated by Senate Republicans in 2010, the legislation would help young people brought to the U.S. as children stay in the country legally if they attend college or serve in the military. By most estimates, between 800,000 and 1.2 million people would be eligible.
The key distinction between the Rubio and Democratic plans is in how people would be legalized. The original act would put people on a path to citizenship. Rubio's plan would stop short by issuing non-immigrant visas allowing recipients to remain in the U.S. for college or military service.
Rubio's critics say his plan would create a permanent second class of people unable to obtain the full rights of citizenship. Supporters, however, say visa recipients could still apply for citizenship through the existing process, which can take a decade or longer.
In contrast, Democrats say, their plan would naturalize people as citizens far sooner.
Rubio's Evolution On The Issue
Rubio's move is a departure from the hard line on illegal immigration he took while running for the Senate in 2010, angering many Hispanic groups who had hoped he would help push Republicans toward a pro-citizenship stance.
Rubio, 40, the son of Cuban immigrants, ran as a Tea Party favorite and avowed conservative. Since then, he has softened his position, having publicly urged fellow Republicans to tone down their hostile rhetoric about illegal immigrants before weighing in with his proposal.
With his considerable political talents, and hailing from an important presidential battleground state, Rubio has emerged as his party's most prominent Latino.
Hispanics' rapid population growth will give them a pivotal role in the 2012 elections, particularly in some battleground states. As a vice presidential candidate, or perhaps in some other prominent role in the Romney campaign, Rubio could help the Republican Party siphon Hispanic votes from the Democrats.
The political crosscurrents at play are dizzying. People on all sides of the immigration debate are closely watching Rubio assume the forbidding task of carefully crafting a proposal that meets several objectives: help repair the GOP brand among Hispanics; appeal to non-Hispanic independent voters who favor a path to citizenship; and upend President Obama and the Democrats' advantage on the issue, all without angering conservatives.
Here's a sampling of the wide range of opinions about Rubio's version of the Dream Act. This story continues below the graphic.
Obama seemed to derisively allude to the Rubio plan in a recent interview with the Spanish-language network Telemundo: "This notion that somehow Republicans want to have it both ways — they want to vote against these laws and appeal to anti-immigrant sentiment ... and then they come and say, 'But we really care about these kids and we want to do something about it' — that looks like hypocrisy to me."
He's not the only presidential candidate who might feel pressure. Romney himself must consider whether to embrace Rubio's proposal and risk being lambasted again by conservatives and the Obama campaign as a flip-flopper. The last Republican presidential nominee, Arizona Sen. John McCain, lost to Barack Obama in part because he was unable to energize conservatives, who hadn't forgiven him for the McCain-Kennedy immigration bill, which would have set a path to citizenship.
So far, reactions to the Rubio proposal have been mixed, even unexpected. For instance, some immigrant advocates who usually side with the Democrats on the issue have enthusiastically gotten behind Rubio, even though his plan appears to fall short of the original Dream Act. Their decision was made easier by their frustrations over Obama's failure to get the original act through Congress, as well as the record number of deportations processed by his administration.
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April 28, 2012 | 15:38 
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Republican politicians gathering at the National Rifle Association convention in St. Louis are eagerly pandering to a powerful political lobby that is intent on making the nation’s gun laws weaker and more riddled with more dangerous loopholes. Rather than tackling public safety risks like the Stand Your Ground law implicated in the killing of Trayvon Martin in Florida, Mitt Romney and others offered nothing but exhortations to defend the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms at all costs. 
For Op-Ed, follow @nytopinion and to hear from the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, follow @andyrNYT.President Obama has regrettably been avoiding the gun control issue. Still, Mr. Romney attacked him at the convention on Friday, promising to stand with the N.R.A. “for the rights of hunters and sportsmen and those seeking to protect their homes and their families.” This was a far cry from Mr. Romney’s 1994 campaign for the United States Senate when he assured centrist Massachusetts voters: “I don’t line up with the N.R.A.” Yet there he was in St. Louis, lining up. Newt Gingrich, in his over-the-top manner, urged a United Nations campaign to proclaim the Second Amendment “a human right for every person on the planet.” The convention, in its “celebration of American values,” has drawn tens of thousands of members to see genuflecting Republicans and to browse a seven-acre commercial mart of guns and shooting paraphernalia, much of it designed for the battlefields of war, not the home front. Notably absent are top Democratic politicians, who seem to have concluded that, despite thousands of constituents shot or killed each year, it is best to go silent about gun control. Polls show Republicans enjoy heavy support and donations from gun owners. In return, the gun lobby has had steady success in weakening gun laws — especially in the two dozen statehouses that followed Florida in enacting new self-defense laws to allow the instant use of deadly force in a confrontation rather than retreat from danger. These laws are fostered by the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council, with heavyweight business supporters like Walmart, a major gun retailer. The families of the victims killed and wounded in the Virginia Tech massacre do not come close to having such clout. For the tragedy’s fifth anniversary next week, they are having a hard time securing meetings with Washington politicians to fix the law that promised a more complete and up-to-date federal list of the mentally ill, who should be barred from buying guns. But two dozen states have submitted fewer than 100 mental health records each when tens of thousands should be entered, according to Mayors Against Illegal Guns, a national gun reform group. Financing to help state reporting efforts was supposed to be $1.1 billion over the last four years, yet Congress appropriated only $51 million. So goes the nation’s utter failure to deal with the gun menace. 
David Maxwell/European Pressphoto AgencyRick Santorum on April 3.
Mike Groll/Associated Press; Librado Romero/The New York Times; Mike Groll/Associated Press; Nathaniel Brooks for The New York TimesStephen M. Saland, Jim Alesi, Mark Grisanti and Roy J. McDonald. 
Gov. Andrew Cuomo signing New York’s marriage-equality bill into law. State Senator Jim Alesi, far right, is the lone Republican present. But one calamity darkened the mood of nostalgia and self-congratulation: the passage last summer of a law legalizing same-sex marriage. For many New Yorkers, the June 24 marriage vote was a rare moment of goosebump drama from a capital better known for tedious dysfunction. For the Conservatives, and in particular for Mike Long, the ex-marine who has been the party’s chairman for nearly half of its history, the vote was a triple humiliation. It was, first, a defining triumph for the state’s ambitious new Democratic governor, Andrew Cuomo. Second, it was an abandonment by Republican leaders, who had invoked party discipline to kill similar legislation in 2009. This time the Republican leaders publicly opposed gay marriage, but knowing that both public opinion and lobbying muscle were coalescing on the other side, they freed their members to vote as they wished. And that led to what was, for Mike Long, an unforgivable betrayal. All four of the Republican senators who voted for the bill and provided the necessary margin for it to pass had been elected with the Conservative endorsement, a prize for which opposition to gay marriage was an essential litmus test. Two of those wayward senators would not have won their seats without the Conservative boost. Try as they might to explain away the defections — perhaps it was the lure of money from gay hedge-fund billionaires, or some devilish deal with Cuomo — the Conservatives feared that this defeat, if not punished, could mean an ominous loss of influence. The four Republican apostates now had targets on their backs. It is difficult to construct an argument against marriage rights for gay people that doesn’t sound like an argument against gay people. Mike Long and his fellow partisans, like many conservatives nationwide, build their case on what they call “the defense of traditional marriage.” No society in history, they told me repeatedly, has extended marriage rights to homosexuals, and so we shouldn’t risk the unraveling of civilization by starting now. (Apparently they don’t count the 10 countries, from Canada to South Africa, where gays may legally marry and civilization endures.) I’ve had a few conversations with Long, trying to understand what harm they think they are defending marriage from. In one conversation I recounted my own classic wedding at the Holy Name of Jesus church, and wondered how somebody else’s less conventional marriage could diminish the joy of it. “Well, I don’t think it hurts anybody,” Long replied, “but I think a society has to have certain standards, and since the beginning of time, marriage has been between a man and a woman.” Marriage, he elaborated, is about children. “You’re not going to procreate children with same-sex couples.” I told him that would be news to my daughters’ school classmates, the ones with two moms or two dads. And by the way, we don’t prohibit elderly, infertile or just plain procreation-averse couples from marrying. “I know plenty of gay couples, O.K.?” he snapped back. “Some of them, if not all of them, are very good people, O.K.? I just don’t believe that society needs to change what the definition of marriage is to accommodate their lifestyle. That’s all. You know, that may be old-school. But I think Western civilization has done pretty good old-school.” The quartet of dissident Republicans are themselves fairly old-school, at least when it comes to the rest of their conservative credentials. They come not from liberal Manhattan or the upscale suburbs of Westchester County. They are upstate guys, from struggling former mill towns and diminished Rust Belt cities. So while the senators’ political calculus differs from district to district, their experiences give us a glimpse into how this issue is likely to play out in “real America,” as conservatives are fond of calling it, and not just in the coastal metropolises. Which is why the fates of these four are being watched intently by national lobbies and wavering politicians across the country.