Ramesh: I can’t speak for Rich, but my position is not that any candidate for the Republican nomination has to call for reductions in immigration to win. As much as I would like that — and as much as I believe it’s certain to happen at some point in the not-too-distant future — you’re right that it’s “a position that no nominee in my lifetime has taken.”
But Rubio’s challenge on immigration is a special case. He isn’t staking out a position from scratch; rather, he needs to do something extra to compensate for his affair with Chuck Schumer. He needs to buy conservative voters a really, really big diamond ring if he expects them to forgive his betrayal. And that ring would be overall cuts in legal immigration. It wouldn’t even be a pure flip-flop; just last week in the debate he identified the chain-migration categories as anachronisms, and if his proposed increase in skilled migration were appreciably smaller than the cut in other categories, then he could legitimately have it both ways.
Many conservatives won’t trust him no matter what he does (including virtually everyone commenting here and on Twitter). I certainly wouldn’t believe he’d had a change of heart, but that’s because I think he approaches the whole immigration issue opportunistically. Unlike Jeb, whose whole approach to this issue smells like one long apology for being a WASP, Rubio has nothing to prove in that regard and doesn’t care that much one way or the other about immigration policy, at least in an emotional or ideological sense.
My advice remains: Buy the ring, Marco, and put the fling behind you.
