Noah Millman wonders whether Romney will adhere to his relatively more conservative position on immigration in the general election, and he asks if it will matter:

It remains to be seen, of course, whether Romney sticks to those positions, or “evolves” for the general election. On the assumption that he does run a relatively restrictionist campaign, the interesting question to me is: how will we know whether it has any effect on the election?

Romney adopted an entirely new position on immigration during his first presidential campaign, but since then his position has remained more or less the same. That position is technically more “enforcement-first” than restrictionist as such, and he is decidedly in the Marco Rubio camp rather than that of Mark Krikorian. He has little incentive to move towards the ground that Perry and Gingrich occupied, and he would provide yet another reason for conservatives to stay home if he did. For that reason, I wouldn’t expect Romney to change his mind on his opposition to the DREAM Act, for example, or to stop supporting attrition through enforcement. Having spent so many years trying to build credibility with movement conservatives on immigration, it seems unlikely that he would go out of his way to antagonize them as the general election approached. Would immigration policy be a significant part of his campaign? Probably not. That will make it even more difficult to know what effect it has on Romney’s political fortunes.

It probably works in Romney’s favor that he has also distinguished himself as an unusually vocal critic of Chinese trade practices, which is even more curious in some ways because it sets him apart from every major party nominee for the last twenty years in their reflexive support for current trade policy. At the same time, voters that are most likely to find Romney’s messages on immigration and trade appealing make up one part of the electorate that finds Romney himself and what he represents to be very unappealing. He cannot and does not want to compete with Obama on industrial policy, and overall there is no getting away from the fact that he is a pro-bailout corporatist. Romney is almost uniquely ill-suited to deliver a relatively more restrictionist message, and that will tend to erase whatever advantage the issue might otherwise give him.