Saying that you support legal immigration means nothing – I support legal immigration, too. But how much legal immigration? More than the 1 million we take now each year, or less? And how should we select immigrants? Under what terms should they be admitted?

For too long even some politicians who are hawkish on enforcement have used bold demands for more fencing and drones and whatnot as a smokescreen to hide their support for our corrupt, cronyist, nepotistic, and anti-worker legal-immigration system.

Walker’s very tentative and innocuous concerns about the level of legal immigration lack the frankness of Senator Sessions’s call for “immigration moderation … so that wages can rise, welfare rolls can shrink, and the forces of assimilation can knit us all more closely together.” But the furious opposition that Walker’s anodyne comments have provoked from Senator Cruz and the Wall Street Journal, among others, presages a healthy debate during the primary campaign and debates.