CNN Undercard Republican Debate: Live Coverage

Rick Santorum says we’ve “created a magnet” for illegal immigration. But the real magnet was the strong labor market of the 1990s and 2000s — and once that ended, immigration slowed dramatically. According to the Pew Research Center, more Mexicans are now leaving the U.S. than entering it. And net illegal immigration has fallen more or less to zero in recent years.

Rick Santorum’s assertion that there are “four times as many acts of violence against Jews than there are against Muslims, and I never hear the president talk about that” raised eyebrows in the office, but he’s basically right. The FBI logged 648 victims of anti-Semitic hate crimes in 2014 and only 184 victims of anti-Muslim attacks.

Excuse my New York City-centric viewpoint, but Mike Huckabee just implied in the debate that the Upper East Side of Manhattan is a liberal bastion. He’s wrong. In the 2013 mayoral election, Democrat Bill de Blasio lost the Upper East Side to Republican Joe Lhota, despite de Blasio’s winning by 49 percentage points citywide. I believe Huckabee was referring to the Upper West Side, which de Blasio won by 49 percentage points.