"But there is a point at which Big Business conservativism diverges from Free Republic conservativism. You can see it when the Wall Street Journal defends measures that help preserve giant dinosaur companies---at the expense of small businesses."
Actualy WSJ is pretty good at being for free markets rather than for protectionism or big business breaks.
But ... On immigration issue, there is a conflict between business needs for labor supply and the demand in jobs. The WSJ favors free trade in capital, free trade in goods, and free trade in ... people. Thinking only in economic terms, and ignoring cultural contexts, Government investments/costs/welfare etc. it seems like a great idea to have free trade in people.
They miss the point that our own labor pool then gets underbid to the point of oblivion. 'immigration/labor protectionism' akin to 'business/goods protectionism' kicks in. But its one thing for businesses to adapt and suffer global competition, its another for people in their own communities to have to face global competition from immigrants from impoverished nations. This is exporting poverty from say mexico to the US.
The right answer is moderation: Moderate immigration levels to accomodate those demands and needs, but not higher than the economy can tolerate or to the point where wages suffer.
The 1 million immigrants we get legally today is probably about right, but we also have about 500,000 illegal immigrants.
You could make the case for even higher levels - perhaps - but it would be a strained one, as even at current levels, you can detect wage depression. Certainly there is no economic justification for the kind of absurdly high levels projected for the bill, as shown by Heritage.
But even then, Heritage updated estimates are for 60 million new will make our legal immigration levels, or 3 million a year ... this about triples our immigration levels.
Maybe business will like that, but will they like higher welfare load creating tax burdens, stagnant wage levels for the unskilled, and the social dislocations of more and more immigrants from impoverished countries - crowding, traffic, etc.
The other right answer is for us to be selective about the *kind* of immigrant who comes - a self-reliant contributor to society. If we get that type, no problem.
What we COULD do is to stop having chain immigration and make more immigration employer sponsored. This is easily achieve by limiting family migration further than it is ...
If business wants to raise the H1B caps, fine, but lets lower the family migration caps.
I agree with most of your post and feel you have stated the general issue pretty well.
"Actualy WSJ is pretty good at being for free markets rather than for protectionism or big business breaks."
I wanted to respond to this specifically. The WSJ favors big business, as opposed to real competition, in various ways, in my opinion. However, I will admit that I cannot remember most of the examples I have read over the years.
One that sticks in my mind is the way the WSJ opposes just about any antitrust action that has ever occurred. They say, and you might agree, the antitrust impinges on the market. This is wrong however. Monopolies destroy free market, hence some antitrust is necessary to maintain a free market. I will grant that some antitrust actions are abusive, but I don't think I've ever seen the WSJ support one.