Marco Rubio - Position Changes


[Editor's Note: On Tuesday Mar. 15, 2016, Senator Marco Rubio announced the suspension of his presidential campaign in a speech at his Miami campaign headquarters. He stated: "The politics of resentment against other people will not just leave us a fractured party. They're gonna leave us a fractured nation. They're gonna leave us as a nation where people literally hate each other, because they have different political opinions… While it is not God's plan that I be president in 2016 or maybe ever, and while today my campaign is suspended, the fact that I've even come this far is evidence of how special America truly is, and all the reason more why we must do all we can to ensure that this nation remains a special place."]



We are not suggesting that position changes are good or bad. We understand they are important to voters, which is why we have included them. We list the current position as Now X (Pro, Con, or Not Clearly Pro or Con) and the former position as Formerly Y (Pro, Con, or Not Clearly Pro or Con).
Now Con

"The problem is we can't background check them. You can’' pick up the phone and call Syria. And that’s one of the reasons why I said we won't be able to take more refugees. It's not that we don't want to, it's that we can't. Because there's no way to background check someone that’s coming from Syria. Who do you call and do a background check on them?...

In the case of what’s happening in Europe, this is a swarm of refugees, and as I've said repeatedly over the last few months, you can have 1,000 people come in, and 999 of them are just poor people fleeing oppression and violence, but one of them is an ISIS fighter. If that's the case, you have a problem, and there is no way to vet that out. There is no background check system in the world that allows us to find that out, because who do you call in Syria to background check them?"
Source: Ian Tuttle, "Rubio's Refugee Reversal Is Good - but Long Overdue," nalreview.com, Nov. 16, 2015

Formerly Pro

"We would be potentially open to the relocation of some of these individuals at some point in time to the United States...

We'd always be concerned that within the overwhelming number of the people seeking refuge, someone with a terrorist background could also sneak in."
Source: Elizabeth Landers, "Marco Rubio Open to Allowing 'Some' Refugees into US," cnn.com, Sep. 8, 2015

Back to present position