Marco Rubio Pushed for Immigration Reform With Conservative Media

...The big lie that Schumer-Rubio had to have was to not use the word “amnesty” to describe the amnesty bill...

The shamelessness with which the media agreed not to call the amnesty bill “amnesty” remains striking. The NYT, of course, was particularly disingenuous.

Of course, as Reg Caesar has pointed out, the Schumer-Rubio bill wasn’t really an amnesty bill because it was more generous than amnesty. A genuine amnesty bill would say: “You have to stop breaking the law, but we won’t throw you in prison for having broken it in the past if you leave the country now.” The Schumer-Rubio bill allowed the lawbreakers to continue breaking the law...

But immigration isn’t just another issue, like farm subsidies or taxes or even battling radical Islam. Immigration is a meta issue, one that affects almost every arena of national life — from politics to education to jobs to security to health care to national cohesion. If we set taxes too high, we can lower them later... But if we get immigration wrong, we can’t undo it: People are not widgets, and we can’t ask for a do-over after adding 30 million green cards in a decade.

What’s more, the deep gulf in views over immigration between elites and the public, between globalists and patriots, has given immigration a symbolic importance as a marker of legitimacy. As Ramesh Ponnuru has written, “A hard line on immigration, however it is defined, is now part of the conservative creed

In effect, Rubio is an Angela Merkel Republican — genuinely conservative on most every issue, except the one that counts above all others.

For this reason alone, he should be denied the nomination. If he were to succeed in getting it, the donor class and its politicians would take away the lesson that they can betray the voters all they want on this potentially nation-breaking issue, and simply talk their way out of it...

“Rubio is [John] McCain is sheep’s clothing,” Coulter explained. “He’s the Manchurian candidate. At least with McCain, conservatives knew we were getting an open borders zealot and just made the calculation that he could win. Rubio has half the conservative movement thinking he’s Reagan. I’ve never seen anything like it. He’s McCain without the war record or experience.”...

...you can count on the combination of President Rubio and Speaker Ryan to quickly pass an amnesty bill that (like the Gang of 8) contains only the most chimerical guarantees of new enforcement measures. You can also expect them to promote and defend trade, including “trade in services” that involves foreign workers performing those services on American soil. And what about the Sessionsesque suggestion that immigration levels actually be lowered? “We have a better chance of discovering time travel than getting Rubio-Ryan to take up immigration-reduction bill,” one Senate immigration advisor told me. Corporate lobbyists will be in the saddle, and the promising Sessions movement will have effectively been defeated — probably permanently, given how mass immigration creates ethnic lobbies for more mass immigration...