I hear people talking about Marco Rubio’s plan to do comprehensive immigration reform, but I can’t find the plan. He’s been giving interviews, and I can try to piece together a plan by reading transcripts of those interviews. The fullest explanation I could find was in a column/interview written by Matthew Kaminski in the Wall Street Journal. Then there is the brief press release that Rubio issued in response to the president’s plan. I actually agree with Marc Caputo’s take on Rubio’s plan. He is being purposefully vague on details.
What piqued my interest was seeing Erick Son of Erick’s declaration that he doesn’t like Rubio’s plan. I tried to understand his argument. I really did. I even followed his link to Ben Domenech’s objections, but I found his column almost impenetrable, as well. Some of the charges that Mr. Erickson levels at Rubio’s “plan” don’t seem to be warranted by what Rubio has so far put on the record.
I was confused almost immediately.
On the specific plan, for lack of legislation, it is clearly written by a group of men who seemingly love government, but do not love free markets, small businesses, or individuals. It is a plan based on faith in government, not free enterprise or the American people.
I read that first sentence about twelve times before I began to have confidence that it didn’t contain fatal typos and might actually be an honest effort to communicate. There is no specific plan. Rubio is not a “group of men.” Erickson appears to be conflating “Rubio’s plan” with the plan of the Group of Eight. But the Group of Eight includes Democrats Chuck Schumer, Dick Durbin, Michael Bennet, and Bob Menendez. Rubio is also part of the group, but their plan isn’t his plan. It’s not Jeff Flake’s plan, or Lindsey Graham’s plan, or John McCain’s plan. It is the Group of Eight’s plan.
In any case, Erickson seems to think that he knows what is in Rubio’s plan. I’m guessing that he is just assuming that Rubio’s plan is the same as the Gang of Eight’s plan, although Rubio has been out freelancing all over the place.
Erickson doesn’t seem to know what he is talking about in any case. The Domenech piece he attempts to use for intellectual underpinning, is really an incoherent effort to blame Cesar Chavez for creating undocumented migrant workers, and it at least seems to argue that we should let our fruit-pickers enter the country legally and gain citizenship rights. In other words, the article he links doesn’t support Erickson’s argument in any kind of direct way. Erickson opposes efforts to “secure the border” because he recognizes that the Republicans will never agree that it has been secured. He opposes any kind of E-Verify system as an effort to make employers prove a negative (that the people they’ve hired are here legally), but that is not only a stupid thing to say, it is directly contradicted by Rubio in the Wall Street Journal piece:
Mr. Rubio stands by workplace enforcement as an essential component of any immigration reform. If the guest-worker and expanded high-tech visa programs are adopted, he says, “you want to protect those folks that are coming here . . . and the value of their visa and the decision they’ve made. You’re not protecting them if you allow their wages and their status to be undermined by further illegal immigration in the future.”
He says that modern technology—whether E-Verify or something else—ought to let employers easily check whether their hires are in the country legally. Enforcement is meant not to “punish” but to provide employers “safe haven,” he says.
Finally, Erick Son of Erick offers these objections:
The plan does nothing to address the black market for unskilled, low cost migrant work. It does nothing to deal with the long delays in the present immigration system. It does nothing to actually solve our immigration problems, but hides behind the construct of “comprehensive” reform. Along the way, it potentially adds more people to already overwhelmed entitlement programs, but then that too is another kicked can.
The problem with this is that it ignores virtually everything that both the Gang of Eight and Marco Rubio have said. For example, Rubio complained that the president’s proposal “ignored the need for a modernized guest worker program that will ensure those who want to immigrate legally to meet our economy’s needs can do so in the future.” Updating the guest worker program, creating a reliable E-Verify system, tightening security at the border, and incentivizing people to enter legally rather than illegally, would all be things that address the black market for low cost migrant work. Moreover, even the president’s plan doesn’t offer ObamaCare or entitlement programs to people until they are naturalized.
Basically, Erick Erickson agonized over whether he could support a plan that he doesn’t even understand, and then concluded that he could not. It’s kind of the opposite of the ritual that Rush Limbaugh went through.
