Clueless GOP elites want to turn the clock back to 2007 on immigration

Yet there is still a reflex toward the lazy conventional wisdom that all that ails the country on immigration is lack of an agreement to give an amnesty to illegal immigrants already here and to increase numbers of legal immigrants, in exchange for more bells and whistles at the border — what is commonly known as “comprehensive immigration reform.” Bush says not passing immigration reform is his biggest regret and John Boehner, out with a score-settling memoir of his time as House speaker, says it is his second biggest regret (after not forging a big fiscal deal with Obama). Boehner spends a lot of time mediating on how the GOP became, in his telling, “Crazytown,” a party of extremists and paranoiacs that eventually threw itself into the arms of Trump. The former speaker spreads the blame widely, but it evidently doesn’t occur to him that one major factor driving a wedge between the party’s establishment and its grass roots was the former’s insistence on repeatedly trying to pass immigration bills that Republican voters rejected.