When Congress takes up the subject of immigration this spring, it is expected to debate measures that emphasize border security, not the temporary worker program that the administration once proposed.
But the larger point is that conservatives are right when they emphasize border control as a key part of comprehensive reform, though they predictably go way too far when they argue that the more welcoming parts of the legislation shouldn't kick in until the border is 90 to 100 percent secure.
So, in deference to them, Mr. McCain now emphasizes border security as the utmost priority.
Mr. McCain, who says he was chastened by the reaction to the immigration bill, has so far emphasized border security more than the Democrats have.
The Republican Party has long struggled to appeal to Hispanic voters, who overwhelmingly favor immigration reform with a pathway to citizenship -- a view at odds with those held by many GOP base voters, who tend to take a much more hard-line stance that emphasizes border security and the expulsion of undocumented immigrants. .
Rand Paul had a similar response, emphasizing his border vigilance.
The conversation was a reminder of the gulf between Democrats and Republicans, whose presidential candidates have emphasized increasing border security or deporting people who are in the country illegally.
Rubio also emphasized that border security, workplace enforcement and visa exit tracking are the first priority, and then something can be done about the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants already in the U.S. It was a high-stakes interview.
The number sounds startling but as Pew pointed out in a report last year, undocumented immigrants have been subject to a surprising number of federal prosecutions since 2005, when the US shifted its immigration enforcement policy to emphasize charging border-crossers as criminals, rather than simply sending them home.
In combination with eye movements at different spatiotemporal scales, the observed frequency-dependent encoding of image content might help to remove predictable input correlations in order to emphasize object borders and discontinuities within natural scenes (Desbordes and Rucci 2007; Rucci et al. 2007; Rucci 2008; Kuang et al. 2012).
