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> “First of all, Cruz is suspect on legal immigration. He seems to be okay with mass legal immigration generally, and specifically has bought into the myth that we have a shortage of high tech workers.”

You are misinformed, woefully incomplete in your knowledge and misguided likely by detractors. That means you’re not fit to lead a discussion on this subject of Ted Cruz and immigration.

To correct your misconception first recognize that Ted Cruz is talking about Einstein and Von Braun types of intellect.

It is a fact that America does not have a monopoly on great brains that exist and are born everyday.

Consider for sake of argument that the world has 10,000,000 scientific geniuses of which America has 50% born and cultivated on its soil and the remaining 50% are born throughout the rest of the world in places such as Russia, China and India.

What Ted Cruz is saying is that to maintain America’s superior technical edge, it must grab as much as it can of the 50% that are born outside the USA just as it did following WWII in bringing German brains to American soil.

It is a question of ‘market share’. America is still attractive to foreign scientists but only if they are recruited and given lots of assurances of academic freedom and plenty of budget to develop their ideas and carry on with others in their class.

Ted Cruz is not talking about tech workers programming a CNC machine or anything like that. He is talking about top university and corporate scientists.

It is analogous to sports. An American team will pay what it takes for top talent. Same thing goes in high level science.

Ted Cruz is not for mass immigration. He has said that illegal aliens must be found and deported. To ‘find’ them he says a system of identifying them must be implemented so they can be rounded up.

All of the above are easily verified by downloading and reading many of Ted Cruz’ amendments (none of which were passed) to the Senate immigration bill. Although none of his amendments were passed, he and his staff worked hard to get everything on record where he stands. And he is definitely not for any kind of amnesty or supportive of any path to citizenship for illegal aliens.

Do your homework and you will see.

Have you done your homework?

One of Cruz’ rejected amendments to the Gang of Eight bill was to increase the H1-B visas from 65,000 to 325,000. You think there are 260,000 Von Braun and Einsteins out there that we are missing out on every year? He clearly believes the myth of STEM worker shortages.

You say Cruz is not for mass immigration, and then talk about illegal immigration. I concede that he has been very good on illegal immigration, second only to Sessions perhaps. But mass immigration includes legal immigration too. In fact it’s more about our too-high levels of Democrat-importing legal immigration.

When Senator Sessions (the best we have on immigration) introduced an amendment to the atrocious Gang of Eight bill to clamp down on low-skilled legal immigration, Cruz voted against it. And in doing so he rattled off a bunch of nonsense and platitudes about immigration that really is beneath someone of Cruz’ intellect. And in doing so he bragged about his amendments to expand legal immigration!

Still think Cruz is against mass immigration?

To be fair Cruz does have good scores at Numbers USA, but they seem mostly to be based on his vote against the Gang of Eight bill. They don’t punish him for his amendments to increase immigration, probably because they weren’t part of a final bill. And I do seem to recall reading once where Cruz supports ending extended family chain migration, but I can’t find it now. And I greatly admired Cruz for refusing Dewhurst’s cheap challenge to a Spanish language debate during their primary fight. But read his own words at the link below and tell me he doesn’t support increasing mass legal immigration?

It’s simple really. Either the Republicans will end mass immigration (i.e greatly reduce legal immigration) or mass immigration will end the GOP. For conservatism to have a chance going forward, mass immigration must end. Demographics is destiny, and right now immigration is driving the demography ever more towards the left.

Cruz is a brilliant man. He is charismatic and articulate. We need someone like him to champion conservative comprehensive immigration reform. He could be out there calling for an end to chain migration. He could call for abolishing the absurd Diversity Lottery visas. He could call for cutting back on refugee and asylum visas. He could follow Sessions lead and advocate for poor, working, and middle class Americans (like those 6 million absent voters you mention). Combined with his excellence on illegal immigration and he could be great.