Ever since Scott Walker began engaging on the national stage, he’s been dogged by questions about his policies on immigration. The Wisconsin governor admits that his position has changed from a few years ago, a change he attributes to having more opportunity to study the issue now that the cycle of elections in Wisconsin has finally played all the way out. Still, Walker has had some trouble defining the issue in a way that makes him stand out from the field.

Did he succeed last night? In an interview with Sean Hannity, Walker said that immigration policy should have as its first principle the protection and improvement of American wages, and not just the crisis management of today (via Daniel Halper):

HANNITY: … You took time to go to the border. What did you learn there, what insight did you gain from that experience?

WALKER: I went to Texas to the border with Governor Greg Abbott, who offered. I’m going to go back to Arizona, New Mexico, and maybe even California with local and state officials there as well. But in Texas in particular, Greg Abbott showed me, with the men and women on the ground from the local level to the state level to even some of the fine men and women who work for the federal government, and they showed that we’re just being overrun.

This is an issue of safety, of security, national security. It’s ultimately an issue of sovereignty. If the United States was being attacked on one of our water ports on the east or west coast, we’d be sending in our military forces. And yet we’re facing some of the same challenges with international criminal organizations — the cartels that are trafficking not only drugs, but weapons and humans, and we need to step up and be aggressive about it. That means securing the border with infrastructure, with technology, with personnel, and the federal government’s got to lead the way on it. We can’t expect the border states to do this alone; the federal government needs to step up and act on it. You can’t be talking about anything else until you do that.

Once you do that, then you can talk about enforcing the laws by using an effective e-verify system for all employers, one that works for small businesses, farmers, and ranchers, and making sure that any legal immigration, no amnesty, any legal immigration system we go forward with is one that ultimately has to protect American workers and make sure that American wages are going up. That’s the way we prosper for every hard working American in this country.

NRO’s Rich Lowry signals his approval of the new focus:

Scott Walker has taken some hits on immigration, including here at NR. But he did well on Hannity last night when he was asked about his trip to the border. He enunciated a position on immigration that is very sound, and expressed a concern about workers and wages that almost no other prominent Republican (besides Jeff Sessions) ever does.

Usually, economic arguments about immigration get tied to pro-business positions of providing low-cost labor for “jobs Americans won’t do.” This turns that argument on its head, arguing instead that businesses should pay the prevailing wage in American markets and that immigration policy should be calculated broadly not to impact that calculus. It’s a pretty nuanced argument intended to attract support among populists on both sides of the fence, perhaps most especially among blue-collar workers. If nothing else, it gives Walker a fairly unique position in the GOP field, and a way to provide a coherent argument to which he can return when the topic arises.

Lowry expressed hope that other GOP contenders will follow Walker’s lead, and it’s not bad advice. Barack Obama wants to make American wages the focus of his economic policy the next two years, and Hillary Clinton will undoubtedly try to do the same thing in her new campaign. This will force both to link their own policies to their open-borders preferences and explain the contradiction to the blue-collar workers that will be most impacted by them.