Mitt Romney wasn’t always “heartless” on the issue of illegal
immigration. He once hired Community Lawn Service with a Heart, the
actual name of the landscaping company to which Rick Perry alluded
in Tuesday’s debate. Perry was reviving the story that Romney had
hired the company, which used some illegal immigrants from
Guatemala, to tend the ample grounds of his Massachusetts home.
Annoyed by Romney’s charge that he is soft on illegal
immigration, Perry had to dig something up to silence his opponent.
This story was the best he could do. In the grand scheme of things,
it is a pretty minor matter, but Perry pretended to treat it with
extreme gravity, arguing that it destroys Romney’s credibility as
an opponent of illegal immigration. Perry even circled back to the
story, triggering some boos from the crowd.
At first Romney literally laughed off Perry’s lunge. But
the fakeness of the laugh was quickly revealed by the sudden and
strange loss of Romney’s customary composure. Somewhat flustered at
the unexpected attack, Romney started grabbing at Perry’s shoulder
and made a nerdy appeal for help to “Anderson” after Perry kept up
his prepared, though poorly executed, patter.
Romney’s usually unflappable demeanor is one of his more
impressive qualities, but in Tuesday’s debate he betrayed the
prickliness of a perfectionist under fire. Above-the-fray aloofness
would have served him better. It would have strengthened the view
that his candidacy is inevitable. His defensiveness only served to
raise Perry up to his level and left the impression that a long
slog through the primary season with Perry may have just
begun.
Apparently Romney’s old lawnmower problem still bothers
him. Other prominent perfectionists have been unnerved by niggling
nanny issues. For Romney it is his trivial hiring of Community Lawn
Service with a Heart that still rankles. In 2006, the Boston
Globe
provided all hands-on-deck coverage of
Romney’s lawn maintenance, even dispatching reporters to Guatemala
to track down members of his old ground crew:
The Globe received a tip in July alleging that Romney was
using illegal immigrants to landscape his property. Reporters then
observed the lawn service workers outside Romney’s house more than
a dozen times, sometimes as frequently as twice a week.
Reporters tracked down four current and former employees
of the company at their homes in Chelsea and in Guatemala. All had
landscaped Romney’s property while working for Community Lawn
Service with a Heart, and their tenure ranged from one worker who
had joined the company just a month ago to another who had worked
there 10 years.
The Globe found one worker down in Guatemala
who recalled that the Romneys treated him nicely. He sometimes
got a “buenos dias” from the passing governor and a glass of water
from his wife.
Confronted with the Globe’s story, Romney said,
“Aw, geez.” A Romney spokesman explained that the governor was
ignorant of the immigration status of these workers.
The owner of the landscaping company, according to the
Globe, “said he met Romney through the Mormon Church and
said Romney has used his company’s services for a decade” without
ever asking about the immigration status of his workers.
Perry now calls this the “height of hypocrisy,” and the
Globe’s 2006 story adopts this same tone: “Even as Romney
travels the country, vowing to curb the flood of low-skilled
illegal immigrants into the United States, some of those workers
maintain his own yard, cutting grass, pruning shrubs, and mulching
trees.”
Did Romney knowingly hire illegal immigrants? Probably
not. On the other hand, he didn’t seem to care about their
immigration status until the Globe nabbed him and this
complicated his first presidential run. In Tuesday’s debate, he
said that he contacted the landscaping company after the story came
out, not to upbraid it for breaking the law but for exposing him to
embarrassment: “So we went to the company, and we said, ‘Look, you
can’t have any illegals working on our property. I’m running for
office, for Pete’s sake! I can’t have illegals!” That was perhaps
Romney’s most straightforward answer of the evening.
None of this would have come back up if Romney hadn’t
decided to play the hardliner against Perry on illegal immigration.
The truth is that neither candidate is blameless on the issue and
both look opportunistic. Is the moderate Romney really outraged
that the children of illegal immigrants receive in-state tuition
rates in Texas? No, but he has to pretend to be in order to tap
into Tea Party support. Is Perry really outraged that Romney hired
illegal immigrants to mow his lawn? No, but that was the only
weapon of revenge at hand. The scuffle will likely go down as
another petty and forgettable episode in the pandering sport that
is American politics.
