Speaker Boehner had a “healthy” talk with the president this morning on immigration. Here’s what that meant:
ABC's @jeffzeleny asks @SpeakerBoehner the biggest area of agreement during his meeting w/ @BarackObama. His answer: Immigration.
— Jonathan Karl (@jonkarl) February 27, 2014
So, the “biggest area of agreement” between the Republican Speaker of the House and the Democratic president is to amnesty the illegal population before enforcement is fully in place and double future legal immigration. This exemplifies the bipartisan elite consensus against immigration limits.
Just last week a new poll reported that 59 percent of respondents want legal immigration cut by at least half (that includes 26 percent of the total who want legal immigration halted altogether). Just 11 percent favored the Schumer-Rubio (and Obama-Boehner) approach of doubling legal immigration to 2 million per year. Detailed results here.
A sober populist agenda, like the welfare-to-work proposal that Senator Sessions is crafting, that included curbing legal immigration from its current level of 1 million-plus per year, is the only way the Republican party is going to get back into the good graces of enough voters to succeed. It’s not sufficient, of course; other elements of a reform plan are also needed, as Mike Lee and others are laying out. But continuing to push the crony-capitalist agenda of mass immigration is never going to motivate all those disaffected right-leaning voters to show up at the polls.