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Good post.
Actually, this bill may ensure the eventual elimination of the GOP as a national party and make it, at most, a regional party although I cannot think of a region that it could thrive in.

I wonder if the national Repubs are thinking the demographic trend is unavoidable so they must get out in front of the Dems. This gives them the opportunity to say, “We were first on immigration reform!” However, this is naive at best and probably fatal to the GOP’s future viability.

The GOP leadership needs to be absolutely clear that (1) donor dollars are not the same as votes. If immigration reform gets your big donors to give you money, fine, but you will lose elections and pretty quickly your donors will leave to give dollars to winners who will get things done for them. (2) If you think being first on this issue will get you popular press—you are utterly wrong. You will be smeared in the press. That should be clear to you by now. You could field a candidate that walks on water and the press would smear you. The press wants you destroyed no matter what you do. (3) The House can pass immigration reform but the Senate will change it. The only certainty is that immigration reform will inflate Dem voter rolls.

There is no upside to this for you, the GOP. It doesn’t matter if Rubio and other GOP leaders engage in immigration legislation or not—they are playing a game they can only lose. Until they come up with a game that has a possibility of being a winner and not having catastropic downside potential (like increasing Dem voter rolls), the GOP is in serious trouble. I offer this suggestion. Don’t lose your existing voters. Start from that point. There are lots of new ideas you can add to that but don’t destroy your base. You can’t gain enough new votes to overcome that loss for years, if ever.