David Drucker goes back to the tape and looks at what Ted Cruz was saying about legalizing illegal immigrants back in 2013, the subject of debate this week between the Texas senator and Marco Rubio.
What he finds is that not only did Cruz express sympathy for work permits without a path to citizenship, but he also wanted to “expand high-tech workers, which the tech industry so desperately needs” and “expand agricultural workers, which the farming and ranching community so desperately needs.”
This comports with my own take:
Cruz has always been to Rubio’s right on immigration and was never a supporter of Gang of Eight in any meaningful sense. His amendment heightened the contradictions within the coalition behind the Gang’s bill. There was significant daylight between Cruz and Rubio on this issue even in 2013.
And yet Cruz has also clearly moved to the right on immigration since then. He was for increasing H-1B visas, now he’s for a six-month moratorium on the program. He was for increasing legal immigration, now he’d freeze current levels in place until the American employment picture improves. He once defined amnesty as a path to citizenship, now he more understands it as legalization more broadly.
It’s not as if Rubio, who has gone from supporting attritition through enforcement in his 2010 Senate run from Florida to Gang of Eight in 2013 to calling his signature legislation a mistake and sounding pro-enforcement again in 2015, hasn’t budged at all on immigration. It happens.
Cruz would do well to neutralize this issue just by acknowleding he’s been listening to Republican primary voters.
