Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney and former house speaker Newt Gingrich, the two leading candidates, were campaigning in Miami midweek and seamlessly shifted their campaigns to suit an area influenced by Latin-America and the space exploration industry.

About 13% of the registered Republicans who will be voting in the primary are Hispanics (made up largely of people of Puerto Rican, Cuban and Dominican Republic descent). The candidates' messages were suddenly in Spanish and they bent over backwards to reassure the voters that they were not against immigration at all.

The fact that just more than one-10th of the Hispanic population is registered as Republicans in Florida - and looking at other states governed by Republicans, specifically Arizona and its position on immigration and the strong-armed, legally questionable tactics of harassing the Hispanic community - should serve as a reminder that the Republican party is anti-immigration, even though these candidates try to convince voters that it is not their position, personally.

It reminds me of someone who starts a sentence with: "I'm not racist, but ."

Taking questions from the audience during Thursday night's debate in Jacksonville, the candidates were asked which Hispanic politicians they would consider appointing as members of their administration, should one of them become president.

All four - Romney, Gingrich, Ron Paul and Rick Santorum - rattled off the names of pretty much the same people, which seemed contrived and gave the impression they did not know much more about them than their names.

Politicians always appoint people to unimportant positions in their administrations to appease constituents from various voting demographics. It is like a politically correct pot of gumbo but, as with the real gumbo, people look forward to eating the meat and fish and not the corn and carrots. These Hispanic appointments would have a corn-and-carrot feel to them.

During Monday night's debate, when Romney was asked how he would tackle immigration, he seemed to forget for a minute that his objective in Florida was to try to win the Hispanic vote. Instead he put forward the grandiose idea of so-called self-deportation.

"The answer is self-deportation, which is people deciding they can do better by going home because they can't find work here, because they don't have legal documentation to allow them to work here. We're not going to round them up."

Not only was this statement badly received by the Hispanic community, but his archrival, Gingrich, quickly pounced on it and shot back.

"I think you have to live in worlds of Swiss bank accounts and Cayman Island accounts and automatic $20-million-a-year income with no work to have some fantasy this far from reality," Gingrich said.

"For Romney to believe that somebody's grandmother is going to be so cut off she is going to self-deport? This verges ... this is an Obama-level fantasy."

Big words from someone who had revealed himself to be the worst kind of dreamer on Monday night.

Because Florida is the base for Nasa, the mid-Atlantic region has earned itself the moniker "Space Coast". And, not surprisingly, the candidates all had different visions of how to breathe life into an all-but-defunct space programme.

Nasa ended the shuttle programme in 2011 and, by extension, grounded America's vehicle to outer space.

The consensus among the candidates, with the exception of Romney, was to get funding from the private sector and allow them to share the cost of continuing the space programme.

Bordering on the fringe of ridiculous was Gingrich's proposed plan to build a permanent base on the moon by 2020.

He gave no explanation whatsoever of the need for a base on the moon and it seemed to be further evidence of his penchant for grand ideas that are not necessarily good ideas.

Romney, on the other hand, said the idea of the private sector funding the space programme was just plain silly.

Quoting his vast experience in the business sector, he stated: "I spent 25 years in business. If I had a business executive come to me and say they wanted to spend a few hundred billion dollars to put a colony on the moon, I would say: 'You're fired!'"

I'm with Romney. Americans have more to worry about here on the ground than some space base that would protect them from alien invasion .