Yesterday, Jeff Sessions–who is the most dedicated immigration reformer in the Senate–gave a speech at the Heritage Foundation with 15 yes or no policy questions he would like to ask the presidential candidates on immigration. You can see the list here.[Watch or listen online here.] Some may object to some civil liberties issues in a few of the policies such as biometric IDs, but for the most part, these are all very solid measures.

Most of these provisions were simply the president acting as chief law enforcement officer and enforcing and/or enacting the laws already on the book, or simply getting the funding for laws already passed. Sessions acknowledged that this list was far from complete, and it did not mention anything about birthright citizenship and cutting welfare to illegal aliens.

Two of his questions were if they would reject ”any path to citizenship” and if they would replace chain migration and the visa lottery with at least 50% of visas with some sort of merit based visas.

I think that these last two promises are a bit too vague. One could massively increase legal immigration and at. Furthermore, plenty of proponents of amnesty are now content to give indefinite legal status to illegal aliens with no definite promise of amnesty.

He elaborated on this a bit in the Q&A, and threw around the number of 500,000 legal immigrants a year, and said that there was no reason why all of them couldn’t already speak English upon arrival. He repeatedly emphasized that we can simply cannot accommodate all the people who want to come to this country, so we must select our immigrants based upon the national interest.

Sen. Sessions clearly understands what duties a president has towards the citizens of this country.

I don’t know if any candidate will end up answering his questions, and if they do, I doubt they’d be very sincere. At the end of the lecture, I wondered why Sessions didn’t run for President himself.