Longer Shorter Brooks: David Brooks likes some immigrants (talented Asians!). Doesn’t seem to like others (Mexicans!). But if Amnesty-First “immigration reform” passes he won’t get to pick next wave. That’s the crucial point he seems to miss. The current debate is not so much about which immigrants are good for the country or how many.  It’s about whether we have enough control to be able to decide which immigrants (or how many).  We could want high-skilled. We could want low-skilled. But if we don’t have control we’ll actually get whoever and how many decide to sneak in — in recent decades, low-skilled.

If you want to amnesty the existing illegal population — after amnestying the previous wave, in 1986 — then you are buying the U.S. a credibility problem at the border. (“We really mean it .. OK, this time we really mean it … No, this time we really mean it.”) Why would any would-be illegal immigrant not try to sneak in, and wait for the next time?  Millions of people may decide to come. (See the crises now in Asia and Europe.) The only hope of retaining credibility — and control — is to implement new, effective enforcement measures (like a fence and a national E-verify and visa control system)  that can stop any new illegal wave. And that will never happen if the illegals are legalized first, as in last year’s Senate Bill. Once they’re legalized, their advocates will lose virtually all interest in measures to prevent further waves, while actually supporting campaigns to sabotage them by lawsuits and regulations (as in 1986) or by new legislation. The enforcement won’t happen (again).  We won’t have control. And it won’t matter which varieties of immigrants David Brooks prefers.

P.S.: Brooks concludes that

“Hillary Clinton’s daring approach to immigration, supporting a “path to citizenship” for undocumented immigrants already in the United States, is clearly the right one.”

Never mind that the “undocumented immigrants already in the United States” are, overwhelmingly, not Brooks’ beloved Asian “university graduates.” I urge the Clinton campaign to base its 2016 Hispanic outreach effort on firm Brooksian grounds: “Don’t worry. Those undesirable Mexicans won’t be coming anymore!”

It’s annoying how the liberal message machine is cranking up to make a big issue of “underinsurance” — due to high deductibles — without ever admitting that Obamacare may have made the problem worse, as Byron York notes.

(To be sure: Yes, deductibles were rising before Obamacare. York seems to be a arguing that Obamacare made them rise faster — and indeed there appears to be a big jump after 2010. They’ve kept jumping since. You can easily see how Obamacare might have misguidedly accelerated the trend: 1) In addition to requiring insurers to ignore “pre-existing conditions,” it larded up “essential benefits” — so insurers had to try to claw the money back elsewhere ( i.e. deductibles); 2) It pushed people into shopping on the exchanges,  where insurers tend to compete on the basis of monthly premiums, even if those premiums don’t buy that much insurance; 3) it tossed unsubsidized solo purchasers making as little as $47,000 into exchanges with the previously uninsured. When the exchanges turned out to be filled with lots of costly, sick and risk-taking people, insurers tried to keep premiums down by raising deductibles even more. If these unluckly exchange purchasers were in a more representative, society-wide pool they would not have to pay so much, either in premiums or deductibles.***

It’s also true that high deductibles are a traditional conservative remedy for rising health care costs. They may actually be working, in that respect. But they also can discourage even insured people from getting care or drugs that they need, for fear that they will wind up bearing the full expense. This happened to me recently — I went to an emergency room but walked back out when the intake nurse wouldn’t give me an estimate of cost — and I have a large, unnecessary scar on my leg to prove it.****)

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** — If I remember right, there was a pithy bumper sticker in the 1996 campaign needling Clinton for his promise to fix the (marginal) excesses of that year’s big welfare reform bill, which he had signed: “ONLY CLINTON CAN UNDO WHAT HE HAS DONE!” In the event, the fixes were made. And Clinton at least acknowledged the flaws.

***–Families USA, a liberal lobbying group, seems to suggest (without actually blaming Obamacare, of course) that Obamacare regulations directly require higher deductibles or co-payments for some benchmark plans on the exchanges: “Due to federal requirements that govern the way silver plans are designed, these plans must have higher cost-sharing for more extensive or complex medical care” (page. 19). I don’t know what “federal requirements” they are referring to.

**** — Will display on request.