Has Rubio learned his lesson on immigration?

“Here’s my big worry,” Rubio told me during an interview while the bill was making its way through the Senate. “I fear that if this thing fails, the president will basically say to anyone in the U.S. who has been here more than three years, who has not committed a serious crime…he’ll say, ‘We’ll do for you what we did for the DREAM kids.’ And the problem with that will be you will have 10 million people legalized in the United States by executive order, so that when there is a new president, if it is a conservative, a Republican, one of the first decisions they will have to make is whether to yank that status from those people and deport them. I cannot imagine a scenario where a future president is going to take away the status they’re going to get. I believe it’s what [Obama] will do. Maybe not all 10 million, but he’ll do it for six million.”…

The obstacle was this: The Gang of Eight would have given millions of illegal immigrants legal status before the measure’s tough enforcement provisions were in place and running. Congress would have handed out the status along with a promise that enforcement was on the way.

Much of the public, including many Republicans, didn’t believe it. They suspected — not without reason — that Washington would legalize millions of illegal immigrants and then conveniently fail to fully implement the border security and internal enforcement measures in the bill.

Rubio understood that skepticism, but he did not fully grasp the depth of it until later, after the bill collapsed in the House. Last August, when he had time to analyze what went wrong, he told me, “The fundamental impediment to making progress on immigration is that people in this country, a large number of Americans and their elected representatives in Congress, do not believe that, no matter what you put in the law, they don’t believe the federal government will enforce it.”