Politico: Inside Jared Kushner’s Two Missions Impossible

Editor’s Note: This is a work in progress.

Politico:

“Kushner told lawmakers on Tuesday that his immigration plan won’t reduce the overall number of immigrants entering the country — a priority for many of the president’s most ardent political supporters. “If there isn’t some reduction in the number, then the White House risks alienating some of its strongest supporters,” said Steve Camarota, the director of research for the Center for Immigration Reform, which supports reducing immigration levels. Camarota said the plan is likely to unite Democrats in opposition and divide Republicans, a risky move as the president heads into his re-election campaign.

The senior administration official disputed this assertion, telling POLITICO that immigration restrictionists are a “pretty fringe” group that have not “been an important part of the president’s base.

“They have bullied a lot of the most rational people out of the conversation,” this person said. …”

Did you hear that?

According to senior administration officials, the immigration restrictionists are a “pretty fringe” group who have not “been an important part of the president’s base.” Obviously, the much greater constituency among Trump’s base are the supporters of regime change in Iran and Venezuela, criminal justice reform, radical Zionists who want Israel to annex the West Bank and, of course, the Republican establishment and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce who backed him so strongly in 2016.

The Kushner immigration plan does nothing to change our current unsustainable immigration levels. It simply changes the composition of the immigration so that we are importing more high-skilled immigrants to compete with the American workers in the middle class who saddled themselves with tens of thousands of dollars of student loan debt to earn a college degree. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable are getting fed up with this recent tiny rise in wages.

“The proposals pose risks as well. Satloff, who bantered with Kushner on stage, has written that Kushner is “boldly dismissive of expertise.” He warned in an article in Foreign Policy that the plan could set off a chain of dangerous events in the region, starting with the Israeli annexation of the West Bank, and pressed the Trump administration not to release it at all. Barring that, Satloff urged Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to go directly Trump and tell him to “abort the plan.”

The White House seems undaunted by these risks. “There’s risks to not doing anything, too. He doesn’t know what’s in our plan, he doesn’t know what we’re doing, so I think it’s a little naive of him to be saying that without really understanding context,” a senior administration official said of Satloff. “The one thing we are not going to do is do it just like these people in the past in order to get these idiots praising us.”

So, the plan for Middle East peace to let Bibi Netanyahu and Israel annex the West Bank like the Golan Heights? Why didn’t anyone ever think that was the solution before?