Romney can't keep ducking this immigration issue

Romney cannot afford to be vague — not when the issue is so visible and so immediate.

There are more than 50 million Latinos in the United States today, and Obama’s announcement on Friday that the government will no longer look to deport immigrants who can prove they were brought here before they turned 16 and are younger than 30, have been here at least five years, have no criminal record, graduated high school or served in the military, could affect as many as 800,000 illegal immigrants.

But many Latinos are also disaffected voters. In Florida, 638,000 Latinos are eligible to vote but are unregistered. “The people don’t want to vote,” Nelly Medina, a volunteer for the National Council of La Raza, told ABC News. “There’s a lot of apathy. The two candidates that there are, they don’t like either of them.”

And why would they? The President treats Latinos as he does every other special-interest group — as reelection pawns.

Meanwhile, Romney ignores them altogether, as if their votes won’t matter in November. But they will, especially in battleground states like Arizona.