Rand Paul constructs his Pathway to Sellout on Immigration: Rand Paul on Fox —

“Right now we have 11 million people in the country who are said to be here illegally. Well, if you do nothing, you’ll get 11 million more. So I think having no immigration reform is a non-starter. We need immigration reform.”

Hmm. Marco Rubio said that without “comprehensive immigration reform” we’d have “de facto amnesty” — that was his transparent attempt to bamboozle anti-amnesty types while pushing a bill that offered near-immediate legalization. Rubio couldn’t claim that without his amnesty bill we’d “get 11 million more” since the official line of many comprehensivists was that the borders were already secure (and also that Latin America had run out of potential immigrants).

Paul is admitting, in effect, that this party line is BS. The borders aren’t secure. O.K.! So why not secure them (with E-Verify, a fence, and a visa-tracking system)? Why pretend that the only way to secure them (and prevent “11 million more”) is with a “reform” bill that also almost certainly includes an amnesty plus a dramatic increase in guestworkers?** You wouldn’t make the first part contingent on the second part unless your real goal was to sell the GOP base the second part. Like talk of “de facto amnesty” or “back taxes,” Paul’s ‘doing nothing = 11 million more’ pitch should be a reverse dog whistle alerting border-control types that a politician is not their friend.

Paul’s path to sellout is all too clear: if he waters down the “secure the border” condition enough, he eventually he winds up with legislation that only promises a secure border in the future in exchange for amnesty and guestworkers today.  That was essentially the deal that failed in 1986 (because once illegal immigrants got their legalization their lobby worked to undercut the enforcement). It was the deal embodied in the “Gang of Eight” bill in the last Congress (which Paul voted against).

You can’t help but feel that this is the direction Paul would like to go — he proposed a mass amnesty early in 2013, and — most tellingly — he participated in a pro-“reform” stunt with Amnesty-First zealot Grover Norquist (hilariously mistimed on the day after Eric Cantor’s defeat by an anti-amnesty Republican).  Paul opposes a key enforcement tool, the E-Verify program for checking the legality of employees when they are hired. And he seems positively enthusiastic about the prospect of additional guestworkers. ***

Yes, if Paul is untrustworthy on the issue it doesn’t really set him apart from Scott Walker, Rubio, or Ted Cruz (the other conspicuous alternatives to the passionately pro-amnesty Jeb). The best Republican voters can do, in this situation, may be to secure clear, specific, high-profile promises**** that will restrict an untrustworthy candidate’s ability to backslide should any of them actually be elected. There’s a whole campaign left to do that.

But Paul would appear to have the furthest to go. Where Walker comes off like a pro-open-borders politician trying desperately to sell-in to GOP the grassroots’ pro-enforcement preferences, Paul seems like a grassroots politician itching to go the other way.

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** — Paul might argue that a big guestworker program would provide a legal avenue for foreign workers and stanch the flow of illlegals. This seems hard to jibe with his claim that “11 million more” will come if we do nothing. Suppose we instead have a giant guestworker program legally importing, say, 5 million workers. Are the other 6 million just going to stay home in Oaxaca, figuring “Hey, they let in some people from around here so I don’t care about finding work in the U.S. anymore”? It seems likely they’ll come illegally as they would have before — maybe more likely, if others from the neighborhood are now already in El Norte as guestworkers. And that’s before those 5 million guestworkers decide to overstay their visas, bring their families, and wait for the next amnesty.

*** — Paul’s also left himself a pathway to not sell out — he says he wants “do to little bits of what are doable and what really people believe in,” which might be effective enforcement measures, or might be millions more high and low-skilled visas.

**** — It would have to be way more specific than “I will secure the border first” — or “I will require ‘Congress to write and enforce a border security blueprint.'”

Trying to explain the perverse “progressive” support for an open borders policy (that would batter living standards for low-skilled workers, Alan Tonelson reaches for an old concept that seems to have fallen into unjustified disuse: liberal guilt (in this case,  guilt “over third world poverty, run truly wild”). … Matthew Yglesias, I think this means you. …

Stan Freberg, R.I.P.: From  “The History of the United States of America, Vol. 1 The Early Years”

Columbus: I only have a few dubloons on me, so if you’ll direct me to the nearest bank, I’ll get a check cashed.

Native: You out of luck today. Banks closed.

Columbus: Oh? Why?

Native: Columbus Day.

Columbus: Oh, yeah…We going out on that joke?

Native: No, we do reprise of song, that help.

Blinders On? Check! Fox News isn’t giving Rand Paul’s campaign a very enthusiastic send-off, some have noted. So which candidate is highly influential (on the right) Fox favoring? Seems like a big part of the story! You’d think a political site like Daily Caller would want to cover it. But no! …. OK, that just popped out. We’re moving on here. … For sure. ….Yessiree!….

Green vs. Green? California, where I live, is in the middle of a bad drought. The governor has ordered unprecedented mandatory water restrictions with the aim of reducing water use by 25 percent.  Restrictions on watering lawns, washing cars, and even showering are expected, as well as price hikes.

Here’s another potential water-saving idea: A moratorium on mandatory recycling. I would guess at least 10% of my water use comes from washing/rinsing all the recyclables I am required to separate out from the regular trash. We single yuppies use a lot of plastic take-out containers. Rinsing them makes recycling them easier and, more important, avoids having the recycling bins become a magnet for rats. All that rinsing is a huge hassle. I assume it is normally worth it because it cuts down on land fill use and conserves raw materials like aluminum.

But are those worthy ends more important, right now, than saving us from running out of one of the necessities of life? Seems like a no-brainer: It’s more important to save the water. We could start recycling again when it starts raining again.

Why hasn’t there been conspicuous talk by politicians of a pause in recycling? I don’t know. Maybe because environmentalists have too much invested in the recycling-industrial complex to even admit there are higher priorities. Maybe because greens don’t like to fight greens. Maybe nobody wants to depart from the pat, moralistic narrative of humans using too many resources and now paying the price. Or maybe there is some technical problem I don’t know about.

It seems worth at least discussing. Wouldn’t we make more progress fighting the drought if we made it the easy thing to do — i.e. by simply  not doing something most people don’t like doing anyway. “You don’t have to eat your spinach!” is apt to find a more receptive audience than “Stop taking showers.” Or do environmentalists only know how to hector?

Poll questions can be biased, especially on immigration (where, as with welfare, the results are very sensitive to changes in wording).“But when you ask the same question over time,” notes Mark Krikorian, “you get a sense of trends, and these don’t look good for the anti-borders crowd.” He has the details. …