After the arrest of a top executive under the Alabama's extreme anti-immigration bill, Missouri's largest newspaper, the St. Louis Dispatch, is urging Mercedes-Benz to head north. The time-warped Alabama is partying like its 1955. And pretty soon living standards in the state will start to resemble that time as well.

I'm sure there are many readers out there who are affected by this news. The fact that the cap was reached two months earlier than last year has caught many by surprise and underscores the need to quickly reform our skilled immigration rules to suit the needs of our modern economy and attract individuals who will make the country more competitive. And people seem to get it that professional degree holding immigrants generate jobs for Amerians.

I can remember Newt Gingrich taking surprisingly moderate immigration positions when he was House Speaker and am pleased to see he has not abandoned those positions just to get through the GOP primaries. Last night at the latest GOP debate, Gingrich made it clear that an enforcement only approach is not the way to go. Here's a video report from the NY Daily News:

Gingrich's plan is still kind of weird - draft boards of citizens who will make determinations on legalizing out of status individuals. I don't see that working in the real world.

Gingrich's gamble could be pretty shrewd. The conventional wisdom is that you need to take far right positions on immigration in order to win the Republican nomination and then have to figure out how to get back to the center to have a shot at getting at least a decent showing with Hispanic voters. But as I've shown many times over the years, most voters don't consider immigration one of their top issues and are not likely to vote against someone just because they disagree on that issue. Gingrich apparently understands this and is willing to roll the dice that he can survive the primary process without going extreme.