Longer Shorter Brooks: David Brooks likes some immigrants (talented Asians!). Doesn’t seem to like others (Mexicans!). But if Amnesty-First “immigration reform” passes he won’t get to pick next wave. That’s the crucial point he seems to miss. The current debate is not so much about which immigrants are good for the country or how many.  It’s about whether we have enough control to be able to decide which immigrants (or how many).  We could want high-skilled. We could want low-skilled. But if we don’t have control we’ll actually get whoever and how many decide to sneak in — in recent decades, low-skilled.

If you want to amnesty the existing illegal population — after amnestying the previous wave, in 1986 — then you are buying the U.S. a credibility problem at the border. (“We really mean it .. OK, this time we really mean it … No, this time we really mean it.”) Why would any would-be illegal immigrant not try to sneak in, and wait for the next time?  Millions of people may decide to come. (See the crises now in Asia and Europe.) The only hope of retaining credibility — and control — is to implement new, effective enforcement measures (like a fence and a national E-verify and visa control system)  that can stop any new illegal wave. And that will never happen if the illegals are legalized first, as in last year’s Senate Bill. Once they’re legalized, their advocates will lose virtually all interest in measures to prevent further waves, while actually supporting campaigns to sabotage them by lawsuits and regulations (as in 1986) or by new legislation. The enforcement won’t happen (again).  We won’t have control. And it won’t matter which varieties of immigrants David Brooks prefers.

P.S.: Brooks concludes that

“Hillary Clinton’s daring approach to immigration, supporting a “path to citizenship” for undocumented immigrants already in the United States, is clearly the right one.”

Never mind that the “undocumented immigrants already in the United States” are, overwhelmingly, not Brooks’ beloved Asian “university graduates.” I urge the Clinton campaign to base its 2016 Hispanic outreach effort on firm Brooksian grounds: “Don’t worry. Those undesirable Mexicans won’t be coming anymore!”

It’s annoying how the liberal message machine is cranking up to make a big issue of “underinsurance” — due to high deductibles — without ever admitting that Obamacare may have made the problem worse, as Byron York notes.

(To be sure: Yes, deductibles were rising before Obamacare. York seems to be a arguing that Obamacare made them rise faster — and indeed there appears to be a big jump after 2010. They’ve kept jumping since. You can easily see how Obamacare might have misguidedly accelerated the trend: 1) In addition to requiring insurers to ignore “pre-existing conditions,” it larded up “essential benefits” — so insurers had to try to claw the money back elsewhere ( i.e. deductibles); 2) It pushed people into shopping on the exchanges,  where insurers tend to compete on the basis of monthly premiums, even if those premiums don’t buy that much insurance; 3) it tossed unsubsidized solo purchasers making as little as $47,000 into exchanges with the previously uninsured. When the exchanges turned out to be filled with lots of costly, sick and risk-taking people, insurers tried to keep premiums down by raising deductibles even more. If these unluckly exchange purchasers were in a more representative, society-wide pool they would not have to pay so much, either in premiums or deductibles.***

It’s also true that high deductibles are a traditional conservative remedy for rising health care costs. They may actually be working, in that respect. But they also can discourage even insured people from getting care or drugs that they need, for fear that they will wind up bearing the full expense. This happened to me recently — I went to an emergency room but walked back out when the intake nurse wouldn’t give me an estimate of cost — and I have a large, unnecessary scar on my leg to prove it.****)

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** — If I remember right, there was a pithy bumper sticker in the 1996 campaign needling Clinton for his promise to fix the (marginal) excesses of that year’s big welfare reform bill, which he had signed: “ONLY CLINTON CAN UNDO WHAT HE HAS DONE!” In the event, the fixes were made. And Clinton at least acknowledged the flaws.

***–Families USA, a liberal lobbying group, seems to suggest (without actually blaming Obamacare, of course) that Obamacare regulations directly require higher deductibles or co-payments for some benchmark plans on the exchanges: “Due to federal requirements that govern the way silver plans are designed, these plans must have higher cost-sharing for more extensive or complex medical care” (page. 19). I don’t know what “federal requirements” they are referring to.

**** — Will display on request.

Do You Have Amnesty in that Basket? Did Ted Cruz support an immigration solution that involved legalizing the 11 million or so illegals now in the U.S.? When we last left this dispute, Cruz staffers were denying it. True, a New York Times article had asserted that Cruz was carving out a “middle ground” on immigration, offering illegals legalization (work permits that would allow them to stay here) but making stopping short of the citizenship offered in the Senate’s “Gang of 8” bill:

Asked about what to do with the people here illegally, however, he stressed that he had never tried to undo the goal of allowing them to stay.

“The amendment that I introduced removed the path to citizenship, but it did not change the underlying work permit from the Gang of Eight,” he said during a recent visit to El Paso. …

The Times’ characterization wasn’t accurate, Cruz spokesperson Brian Phillips argued. Cruz was only offering his amendment “to show that Dems won’t allow any reform without pathway to citizenship,” not because he actually supported it.  Just a parliamentary device! See this Twitter exchange with MSNBC’s Benjy Sarlin:

Benjy Sarlin:  @RealBPhil Okay so to be 100% clear: If his amendment succeeded, he still would not have supported work permits for existing undocumented?

Brian Phillips: .@BenjySarlin 100% clear: Cruz’s amendment had nothing to do with that issue. [Emphasis added]

Even some experienced Washington hands seemed to buy Phillips’ explanation.

They shouldn’t. How can I be so sure? I’ve got proof! Here’s a video, the link to which was recently sent me by alert kausfiles reader J. In it, Cruz speaks directly to immigration “advocacy groups,” and clearly embraces his legalization-without-citizenship option as a big part of a solution that he supports. The most relevant passage starts around 3:30 in:

And I’d like to make a final point to those advocacy groups that are very engaged in this issue and rightly concerned about addressing our immigration system, and in particular about addressing the situation for the 11 million who are currently in the shadows. If this amendment is adopted to the current bill the effect would be that those 11 million under this current bill would still be eligible for RPI status.** They would still be eligible for legal status and indeed under the terms of the bill they would be eligible for LPR status as well, so that they are out of the shadows, which the proponents of this bill repeatedly point to as their principle objective — to provide a legal status for those who are here illlegally to be out of the shadows. This amendment would allow that to happen …

And a second point to those advocacy groups that are so passionately engaged. In my view if this committee rejects this amendment, and I think everyone here views it as quite likely this committee will choose to reject this amendment, in my view that decision will make it much, much more likely that this entire bill will fail in the House of Representantives. I don’t want immigration reform to fail. I want immigration reform to pass, and so I would urge people of good faith on both sides of the aisle, if the objective is to pass common sense immigration reform that secures the borders, that improves legal immigration, and that allows those who are here illegally to come in out of the shadows, then we should look for areas of bipartisan agreement and compromise to come together and this amendment — I believe if this amendment were to pass the chances of this bill passing into law would increase dramatically, and so I would urge the committee to give it full consideration and to adopt the amendment. …. [Emphasis added]

Does that sound like someone using a parliamentary device merely to smoke out the Democratic position, or someone sketching “middle ground” legislation he supports?

Note: I haven’t contacted Phillips to get comment. Don’t wanna be no Free Beacon! I’ll update and add any response here.

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** — “RPI” means “Registered Provisional Immigrant,” the legal status the Gang of 8 bill would have granted illegals within a few months of its passage. Citizenship would come later.

‘Turn around, Kasich, and show me what you got’: Roger Ailes to winnow GOP presidential field. …

Isn’t there the obvious solution to the GOP’s debate overcrowding problem: Brackets! It works for March Madness. It’s transparent. Break the field up into two or three sections. Assign candidates at random — no favoritism. Have each section go on for 90 minutes or so. Let the voters (and press) decide the winners in each division. If candidates want to take inter-bracket shots at each other, they can go ahead (and continue the sniping outside the event). … Seems better than the alternative of excluding people according to some arbitrary, rich-get-richer criteria. … What am I missing? [That the rich want to get richer-ed. Bucket. Almost all the GOP candidates are credible pols whom the big boys — and who’s that? — can deign to interact with.]

Backfill: Dan Schnur suggested this in a Caitlin Huey-Burns RCP piece a week ago. …

I have seen the future and it Zux! Here’s a useful Vox piece on why we shouldn’t panic about Facebook’s new “Instant Articles” feature. The piece is useful because it is so unconvincing. I wasn’t panicked before. Basically the Vox argument is:

a) Facebook dominates the web. (There’s a stunning chart demonstrating why the profitablity of practically every web site now hinges on Facebook.)

b) Facebook’s mysterious algorithm gives them the power to favor or disfavor specific publications or articles;

c) “Instant articles” will give them even more power to favor or disfavor specific publications, as more and more people read the articles that Facebook agrees to host on its servers;

d) So, hey, don’t worry!

P.S.: Vox‘s Timothy B. Lee argues that big news outfits like the New York Times can stand up to Facebook the way ESPN can stand up to cable operators. Even if that’s true,  you have to be a big outfit like the NYT or ESPN to have that kind of leverage, no? What does that mean for small, unaffiliated content providers (e.g., me, or Talking Points Memo) who don’t have protection from a big outfit? The pressure for concentration will only increase. The Web was supposed to be an Army of Davids.

P.P.S.: Lee says “There’s No Reason for Facebook to Censor Instant Articles.” Really?  You don’t think they’d ever tweak their secret algorithm to, say, disfavor articles calling for less immigration, or an end to Mark Zuckerberg’s precious H-1B visa program? I’m not so sure. (I didn’t think Tucker Carlson had a reason to censor my pieces to avoid offending Fox, but reality is cruder than the textbook models would have it.)

I predict a lot of Zucking up. At Vox it may already have started.

Why worry about inequality, Take 2: In Vox, Matt Yglesias argues explains that the Democrats’ famous “Great Gatsby Curve” is bunk. The Curve purported to show that money inequality has been accompanied by lower “relative mobility” — the ability of Americans to move up and down the economic ladder. But Yglesias notes  that “detailed analysis … does not show a decline in intergenerational mobility since 1971, even though inequality has skyrocketed.” Don’t tell President Obama.**

What liberals should focus on instead, says Yglesias, is more what Scott Winship calls “absolute mobility” — rising living standards up and down the ladder. But, according to Winship (whose work Yglesias cites on the Gatsby issue), inequality hasn’t prevented living standards from rising either for the vast majority of Americans, though they haven’t risen all that much. Elizabeth Warren may claim otherwise (“the top 10 percent gets 100 percent of the income growth over the course of a generation”) but her recent op-ed piece actually links to an article that refutes her point and supports Winship.

So if rising income inequality hasn’t undermined those two desirable types of mobility, why worry about it? Is there anything valuable it has undermined, some good whose arrow has actually started to point down as the inequality arrow goes up? I would say yes — social equality, the sense that all Americans are equal in the eyes of each other. Winship can’t easily disprove this because social equality is not an economic concept! If I were a Democratic speechwriter looking to stir up some anti-inequality votes, I’d try that angle.

To be sure: This doesn’t mean that, when it comes to social equality, the main economic problem is those at the very top getting richer. Stagnant wages for unskilled workers at the very bottom may be more important. It also doesn’t mean the way to undo the damage is to reverse the broad income inequality trend. The left (Warren and De Blasio included) has no plan that comes close to being able to do that. The most effective way to attack the problem may be directly (by building class-mixing institutions, like Obamacare could have been) rather than by trying to reshape the whole income bell curve.

But it’s hard to see how the recent changes in that curve — in an unequal direction — haven’t made the problem worse.

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** — Or Prof. Krugman.

Is Jeb now a human pinata on Iraq? I think so! After asking for a Mulligan, Jeb Bush has now given his second, and presumably final answer to the question of whether he’d still invade Iraq “knowing what we know now.” The answer is: “I don’t know what that decision would have been.” Somehow this is not satisfying in a presidential candidate! A president is supposed to be able to make up his mind. And, given the unpopularity of the Iraq War even among Republicans, Bush’s non-answer would seem to open him up to the argument that “You can’t still think going into Iraq now, as a sane human being, was the right thing to do.” That’s Laura Ingraham’s quote.

Among potential presidential contenders, Gov. Chris Christie has also already gotten in his whacks (“I don’t think you could honestly say that if we knew then that there was no WMD that the country should have gone to war.”) Ted Cruz says “Of course not.” Who’s next? If Marco Rubio piles on we’ll know the polling on the issue really is against the war KWWKN (Knowing What We Know Now) among Republicans. … Update: Rubio gets in his lick. (“Not only would I not have been in favor of it, but President Bush would not have.”) Also Kasich.

P.S.: The interesting Jeb answer would have been “no.” He can’t even dis his brother to that extent? Why is it so important to Jeb that there be no “space between me and my brother”? Tells us something about Jeb we needed to know, involving baggage (lots) and balls (not so much). …

‘LOL — Dad, You Screwed Up Your Iraq Position’: Damage control through New Media playacting is becoming Team Jeb specialty: 1) Did Jeb list himself as “Hispanic” on an official form? His son tweets: “LOL — come on dad, think you checked the wrong box.” Ha ha ha. 2) He’s asked if he’d invade Iraq even “knowing what we know now,” and he answers yes. Whoops. Then an ally just happens to email him (‘Hey, I’m a little confused by this answer so I’m genuinely wondering did you mishear the question?”) and says he emailed back “I misheard the question.” … It’s all very Webby and savvy and Shakespearean (talking about what the King did offstage). I suppose it has the virtue of not generating too much news while giving friendly MSMers an excuse to drop the story. But at some point it becomes too savvy and too cute, no?. Why do they keep having to do this? Don’t they trust their candidate to man up and do his own damage control? (Jeb strategist Mike Murphy didn’t have an ex-aide to Arnold Schwarzenegger tweet “Where there’s smoke there’s fire.” Schwarzenegger said it himself.)  …

Update: Jeb has now gone on the Hannity radio show and attempted to re-answer Megyn Kelly’s actual question (“knowing what we know now”). His second-chance answer: “I don’t know.” Seems like he should! …

Jeb’s Extra Layer of Protection: Fox‘s Megyn Kelly asked Jeb Bush, “Knowing what we know now, would you have authorized the invasion [of Iraq]?” Bush answered “I would’ve,” but then proceeded to defend the decision on the basis of what people thought they knew then. Bizarrely, Fox’s report on its own broadcast ignores the damning part of Kelly’s, question — the “knowing what we know now” part — and simply reports that Jeb “says that he would have authorized the 2003 invasion of Iraq.“ Politico‘s Mike Allen, linking to the Fox story in his widely read “Playbook,” ignores the hypothetical too — as does Politico‘s own report by Adam B. Lerner, until the very last paragraph, when it comes up in citing Laura Ingraham’s argument that Hillary wouldn’t have invaded “knowing what we know now.”

This is at least weird. Did Fox’s reporter not bother to listen to the first 15 seconds of the video that was embedded in his own story? I’m not saying there was a top-down Ailes-ordered conspiracy to protect Bush (not that this is inconceivable!). But I do think there is a reluctance in the professional press corps (which Allen epitomizes and champions) to believe that professionally prepped Jeb would say anything that dumb. So they reported the story as if Jeb had answered the question he would prefer to have been asked. The result was the same as if they’d been consciously covering for Jeb — much of the world does not know that he said he’d still invade Iraq given a) the absence of WMDs, b) the chaos now engulfing the region, etc.**

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** — That answer might be defensible, but politically it’s still a damaging thing to say running for President in 2015. Bush clearly was trying not to say it, even if that meant pretending Kelly didn’t ask what she asked.  Who knows if he thinks it? 

Slim Coverage! Last week, Mexican “regulators approved [AT&T’s] $1.9bn acquisition of Nextel.” With this acquisition (and others) AT&T plans to go “head-to-head with Carlos Slim,” who currently dominates the Mexican telecom market through his America Movil company, according to the FT.  … For some reason, I can’t find a story about this development in the New York Times. Is there a Tucker Carlsonesque rule Dean Baquet would like to tell us about? … [via Drudge] … Backfill:  Times Stays Slient on 2010 Slim-related story …

Fake But Accurate!  “Suicide Bear” appears to be a hoax. I should have suspected. But a well-targeted put-on can become a meme, no? Suicide Bear is the Happy Fun Ball of end-of-life ethics. That’s the ticket. … [Thanks to alert Tweeter R.]

Team Hillary Knows It’s Pandering: Vox immigration reporter Dara Lind tweets:

“Worth noting: HRC campaign stressed path 2 citizenship for DC press this AM. In speech this PM, geared to activists, stressed exec action.”

It’s worth noting because it suggests: a) Activists care more about work permits than citizenship, which gives the lie to the central conceit of the Gang of 8 bill (which assumes illegals want citizenship so much that their advocates would never block enforcement measures, even after they have work permits, if it might prevent them from becoming full citizens); and b) Hillary is wary of voter antipathy to executive amnesty, so when talking to a general audience she stresses a contrast with Republicans on a legislative issue (citizenship). That’s all the triangulation we’re going to get, apparently. …

Call it the Caudillo Test: It’s no longer enough for a Democratic presidential candidate to pledge to reform immigration laws. You have to pledge to end-run the nation’s elected legislature if it doesn’t go along. Good to know! …  P.S.: Hillary appears to have passed the Caudillo Test. Luckily, there is nobody general election voters trust more with unchecked power. Am I right? …  P.P.S.: Immigration activists now want Hillary to talk about amnesty as “part of her stump speech” to non-Latino audiences. In early 2015, or late 2016? I wouldn’t bet on the latter. … 

Update: Hillary’s talk makes it clear, if more clarity were needed, that the “non-citizenship” halfway house favored by Republican politicians is a non-starter — at least if the goal is to woo the Latino vote. Democrats will always be able to outbid Republicans, as Hillary did, by calling non-citizenship “second-class status” (which it is).  Arguably, the “non-citizenship” position is worse, in that respect, for Republicans. It’s one thing to tell illegals “You’re illegal, sorry.” But if you tell them they can have legal status and live here — well, what’t the basis for denying them full rights?  Because they’re brown? The implicit charge of racism, never far from the surface, becomes more plausible, not less. … Of course, if Jeb Bush or Ted Cruz ever makes it past the GOP primaries, they’ll quickly drop the non-citizenship demand (as Jeb already has, once). It’s an untenable positioner’s position. …

Strange New Dissembling: One of Ted Cruz’s obstacles, when trying to appeal to the GOP base on immigration, is a September 2013 New York Times piece giving him a pat on the head** for staking out a “middle ground” on immigration. As the Times told the story, this middle ground involved giving current illegals work permits, but not citizenship. Here is the relevant passage:

Asked about what to do with the people here illegally, however, he stressed that he had never tried to undo the goal of allowing them to stay.

“The amendment that I introduced removed the path to citizenship, but it did not change the underlying work permit from the Gang of Eight,” he said during a recent visit to El Paso. …

Mr. Cruz said recent polling indicated that people outside Washington support some reform, including legal status without citizenship.

Now, in 2015, Cruz’s spokesman claims (to MSNBC’s Benjy Sarlin) the Senator’s work permit amendment was merely a parliamentary device designed “to show that Dems won’t allow any reform without pathway to citizenship.”  It had “nothing to do” with actually supporting work permits for illegals.

This seems like transparent BS to me. Cruz was clearly basking in whatever warm feelings the Times and others would give to a pol who supports legalizing illegals with work permits — as an actual solution, not just a parliamentary trick. Yes, that doesn’t mean he would have supported the underlying Gang of Eight bill if the citizenship provisions had been removed. (There was a lot in the Gang of Eight bill.) It does mean he thought it was a significant policy initiative for him to propose legalization without citizenship — as if this would somehow reduce the incentive to come here illegally. (The Times‘ characterization: “He said he was against naturalization because it rewarded lawbreakers and was unfair to legal immigrants. It also perpetuates illegal crossings, he added.”) But, of course, the ability to work and raise your family here legally — which work permits provide — is the main incentive for border-crossers. Citizenship is just icing on the cake.

But you can read the New York Times piece and make up your own mind. …

P.S.: It’s also worth noting that, at the time, pushing a “non-citizenship” form of legalization (and making a big deal of that concession to appease the GOP base) was the amnesty lobby’s main strategy for getting a bill past Congress. That’s the main reason you’d put the option on the table — as part of a cynical plan to sneak through “Amnesty First.”

P.P.S.:  If Cruz now thinks the Times reporters gave his views a false spin — which has been known to happen! — did he object at the time?

P.P.P.S: Cruz’s actual position, underneath all the righteous muddling, seems to be a) unlike Scott Walker he is not skeptical about the effect of legal immigration on native wages, etc.; b) Like Marco Rubio, he would have an amnesty “once we demonstrate we can secure the borders,” whatever that means (and figuring out what it means is the crux of the issue) and c) Unlike Rubio, for Cruz citizenship wouldn’t be part of that amnesty. (That might please the base but risks creating an unsustainably huge cohort of mostly Latino second-class legal residents.) ***

P.P.P.P.S.: The really annoying thing about Cruz is the air he gives that he’s so smart, he’s figured it all out and everyone else hasn’t. He gave that impression to the NYT in 2013. His team gives that impression to Benjy Sarlin now.  But if you combine those two impressions you’re left with the sense that Cruz is hiding the ball, trying to please everyone at the expense of clarity, like any standard pol.

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** — “Strange New Respect,” in formal conservative terminology.

*** — Cruz’s campaign website doesn’t say much about immigration, as far as I can see, except for a call to “streamline our legal immigration system.” Weak!

“Insiders: Common Core is Jeb Bush’s ‘No. 1 problem'” That’s the headline on Politico‘s latest survey of GOP “insiders” in Iowa and New Hampshire. The trouble is Politico doesn’t seem to even have asked the “insiders” about Jeb Bush’s position on immigration.** So Politico has no way of knowing which of Jeb’s problems insiders think is No. 1. … Moral: If you limit the choices, you get the answer you want! No surprises. Fashionably Kazakhstanish! … P.S.: Is the Establishment Consensus Machine already in pre-mortem mode, prophylactically steering blame for Jeb’s loss to Common Core and away from his embrace of the Gang of 8? [That’s a crude, paranoid and unsophisticated view of Washington–ed. So it could be right then!]

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** — Politico apparently doesn’t publish the full survey. At least I can’t find it. If you can, let me know! A Twitter query of author James Hohmann produced no response. ..

Why Doesn’t Rubio Answer Bob Scheiffer’s Question? — Part II: I was wrong to suggest that Marco Rubio couldn’t say he’d learned his lesson on immigration but also admit — as he refused to do on CBS — that he’d sign his old “Gang of 8 bill” if he were president and it came to his desk. Depends on what lesson Rubio’s learned:

1) Lesson 1:  Rubio could say “Yes, I’d sign it. ” The bill’s OK, he thinks. But he’s learned that enacting it is a political impossibility. “We can’t do it.”  Voters simply won’t go along with an amnesty until they see that the border is secure. This answer would get Rubio off the hook for pushing a bad bill. But it also implies that the voters are wrong — specifically, wrong to be paranoid about trying to legalize before border security measures are firmly in place. Since that’s exactly what the Gang of 8 bill does, Rubio shouldn’t sign it if the voters are right.

2) Lesson 2: Rubio could say, “No I wouldn’t sign it. It’s not merely politically impossible. I’ve realized it’s a bad gamble to legalize now and hope enforcement measures actually happen later. Voters are right to be paranoid.” This is the lesson many Democrats, ethnic lobbyists and Republican donors don’t want to hear Rubio say he’s learned. It would make getting Dem support for an immigration bill much more difficult. But it’s the substantive admission many GOP primary voters would like to hear. Were they wrong to be paranoid, or right?

If Rubio wants their vote, it seems like he should answer. Otherwise they’ll (rightly) conclude he thinks they’re wrong, or he just doesn’t care — and he’s likely to try to slip a Gang-of-8-style “legalize first/enforce later” bill past them at the earliest opportunity.

“Forcing Black Men Out of Society”: The New York Times ed board righteously decries the “shrinking labor market for low-skilled workers” — yet supports mass low-skilled immigr … Oh I give up.

The U.S. is sending ONE MILLION DOLLARS in aid to quake-ravaged Nepal. Has Mike Meyers taken over the Obama administration?

WHCD ’15: I’ve been boycotting the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on principle ever since I stopped getting invited (except for the couple three or four — OK, it was six or seven — times I snuck in). An absurd event, of course — close to my vision of Hell. The Hilton ballroom is circled with rings of yellowish light, and it’s easy to imagine them as the flaming pits into which lobbyists are hurled in the afterlife. The Bosch-like qualities are part of what makes it fabulously enjoyable, especially for non-bigshots, assuming they still let non-bigshots attend. You may not be paid well, but it’s worth a month’s salary to feel you are part of this powerful, corrupt, yet insecure, preening and tacky fake community. Sorry I missed it.

Update: Daily Beast‘s Lloyd Grove ably uses the event to divine the capital’s mood! (“‘The Obama people are really bitter.'”) …

Kausfiles demands Comcast drop its merger plans: An old Ralph Nader trick, I’m told, was that when he found out the government was about to do something he immediately called a press conference and demanded that they do it. Presente.org, the indeterminately vaporous Latino lobbying organization, seems to be borrowing a related page from the same book, shooting out an email today (after this press report):

PRESENTE.ORG: COMCAST MERGER COLLAPSE WOULD BE HUGE WIN FOR LATINOS

So should the merger happen to collapse in the next day or so, you know whom to credit: Kausfiles! It would be a huge win for American workers beset by illegal immigrant competition and high cable prices. …

So while Scott Walker is questioning legal immigration levels, Ted Cruz is pushing a fast track for a trade bill with back-door guest-worker increases?  I never thought Cruz would blow his pre-campaign advantage over Walker (and the rest of the GOP field) on immigration, but that’s what he seems to be doing. … Maybe Cruz thinks he’s in the early Suck-Up-To-Donors** phase of the campaign, with the Rouse-the-Voters phase to come later — in the meantime, he’ll distract the base with social conservative theatrics. But, as Michael Barone and Byron York have pointed out, Republican primary voters are paying unusual attention to the race right now. How else would Walker rise to the top tier after a B+ speech at an early event in Iowa? …

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**– According to former Romney 2012 Finance chair Spencer Zwick, GOP donors are practically forming a cartel in the effort to back only a candidate who will push for amnesty and increased immigration levels. (“Even if Tea Partiers aren’t willing to get on board, Zwick said the GOP money men have learned their lesson: ‘I really believe that the donor community… now finally recognizes, and I see them only wanting to get behind a candidate that is willing to take leadership on his issue.'” — McKay Coppins, Buzzfeed.)

Is that Kriebling I hear in the distance? Mark Krikorian notes that Scott Walker is already fuzzing up his alleged epic shift to Sessionsism (on immigration) by declaring, through a spokeswoman, that

He strongly supports legal immigration, and like many Americans, believes that our economic situation should be considered instead of arbitrary caps on the amount of immigrants that can enter. [E.A.]

Talk of removing “arbitrary caps” brings back memories of the Krieble plan, championed by Newt Gingrich in 2012.  It’s a non-solution — essentially an open-border plan that would let employers bring in however many millions of workers they wanted (without “arbitrary caps” — i.e. limits).

You have been warned.

Hair Trigger Sneer: In the Washington Examiner, the otherwise estimable Philip Klein sneers at Scott Walker for saying that he’d worry about wages and job prospects for American workers when setting levels of legal immigration. According to Klein this shows Walker is “just telling conservatives what he thinks they want to hear” (which is entirely possible) and that he doesn’t understand “the broader philosophical or policy implications” and isn’t “able to make the transition to the big leagues,” which seems snotty.

Why isn’t what Walker understands this: If we’re not going to have open borders, we have to set the level of legal immigration somewhere. In making that decision, it’s surely reasonable to take into account labor market conditions and wage levels.

P.S.: What Walker said seems quite consistent with standard conservative plans (pushed by GOPs who support and GOPs who don’t support “comprehensive” reform) to give more immigration slots to higher-skilled workers and fewer to the low-skilled workers who bid down wages at the bottom, since it’s wages at the bottom we worry about most.

P.P.S.: Anyway, Walker only said wage considerations should be at the “forefront of our discussion.” If that doesn’t give him plenty of wiggle room — to take into account other factors, or to argue that more immigration will improve the economy for everyone — then he’s a less skilled pol than I think he is. …