"Marco Rubio is probably in the worst position. His bill would have
doubled legal immigration for the first decade after passage (granting
more than 30 million green cards in ten years, when you add in the
amnesty). The Schumer-Rubio bill also would have nearly doubled the
admission of “temporary” workers, which the Congressional Research
Service identified as a driver of new illegal immigration in the future."
Sen. Jeff Sessions has been instrumental
in giving voice to public concern over excessive importation of foreign
workers and its effects on jobs, government budgets, schools,
assimilation, security, and so on.
Whatever You Do, Don’t Mention Cutting Immigration
By Mark Krikorian
The Corner at National Review Online, February 25, 2016
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/431922/cutting-immigration-trump-vulnerable?target=author&tid=982
I get why respectable Republicans aren’t inclined to take her advice,
but Ann Coulter nailed it, in August: “If they want to undermine Trump,
take his issue.” Meaning immigration.
But how? They can’t “take his issue” with yet more promises to secure
the border. Those promises are hard to take seriously after the
Schumer-Rubio push for amnesty and increased immigration in 2013-2014,
the McCain-Kennedy version in 2005-2007, and Dubya’s initial foray that
was buried by 9/11.
Try as they might, Trump’s professional-politician rivals won’t get any
traction by either echoing or attacking his call for a wall and
increased deportations.
But the public debate on immigration has moved beyond the simplistic
“legal good, illegal bad” clichés, to focus on the actual level of
immigration, most of it legal. Sen. Jeff Sessions has been instrumental
in giving voice to public concern over excessive importation of foreign
workers and its effects on jobs, government budgets, schools,
assimilation, security, and so on.
This is where Trump was, and still is, vulnerable. As the New
York Times story mentioned by Charles documents, Trump has made
extensive use of guestworker visas to import foreigners to do “jobs
Americans won’t do,” actually turning away almost all American job
applicants.
Nor was this unknown. Reuters wrote about it in August. The Miami CBS affiliate reported on it in September.
So, to borrow from Ross Douthat, what are Trump’s rivals waiting for?
Why haven’t they pursued this obvious line of attack, one that strikes
directly at Trump’s key strength, one that casts doubt on his desire to
“Put American Workers First“?
Because they all want more immigration. It’s hard to point out
the disconnect between the call for “immigration moderation” in Trump’s
immigration platform (something he never actually says out loud) and his
own business decisions when you yourself are in favor of immigration immoderation.
Marco Rubio is probably in the worst position. His bill would have
doubled legal immigration for the first decade after passage (granting
more than 30 million green cards in ten years, when you add in the
amnesty). The Schumer-Rubio bill also would have nearly doubled the
admission of “temporary” workers, which the Congressional Research
Service identified as a driver of new illegal immigration in the future.
Nor has Rubio ever renounced this aspect of his bill. When asked at the
debate last month in South Carolina, “Why are you so interested in
opening up borders to foreigners when American workers have a hard
enough time finding work?”, he let forth a panicky cascade of non
sequiturs so non-sequitur-y that I’m surprised Maria Bartiromo didn’t
just laugh in his face.
And, as John Fonte pointed out on the home page yesterday, Rubio’s
“first post-Gang of Eight legislative proposal is not related to
enforcement but, instead, advocates more ‘guest workers’ and expanding
permanent immigration” – the infamous I-Squared bill, that could
quadruple H-1b visas and increase immigration in various other ways.
Cruz (whom I’ll be voting for Tuesday) isn’t in a much better position
to attack Trump on immigration. True, his immigration plan includes
“Halt any increases in legal immigration so long as American
unemployment remains unacceptably high” and he’s co-sponsored a bill
with Sessions to dramatically limit the H-1b program. But in the past he
sponsored a measure to quintuple H-1b visas, and even now doesn’t call
for actual cuts in immigration.
Conviction is surely part of the reason. While there is little support
for increased immigration among the public at large (North Korea is more
popular with Americans that increased immigration), there is widespread
support for it among elites. I think that’s probably the main
explanation for Jeb and Cruz.
But – and perhaps I’m being uncharitable here – I think money is a big
part of the explanation for Rubio’s mulish insistence on ever-increasing
immigration (as it was for Walker’s unwillingness to do more than hint
at immigration cuts). When a bill to increase immigration was being
considered in 2000, Tom Davis, then a member of the House Republican
leadership, identified the issue: “This is not a popular bill with the
public. It’s popular with the CEOs.” He elaborated elsewhere on the
importance of immigration to donors: “This is a very important issue for
the high-tech executives who give the money.”
But whether from conviction or calculation, the end result is the same –
one of the potentially most productive lines of attack against Trump
has been ignored by his opponents. Both as a matter of policy and of
politics, “numbers clearly are of the essence.”
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