Mexican-Lebanese billionaire Carlos Slim controls the NY Times. Everyone pretends he has nothing but a financial stake in the company, but that’s nonsense. Slim became a billionaire because he knows how to handle himself around powerful people and their servants. In Mexico, he got going the old fashioned way. He built some businesses, got rich and then bought some politicians. He got rich enough to go public and take up a position within the Mexican ruling elite. That allowed him to get control of the telecom system and the mobile phone market that was just taking off. That made him a billionaire and put him into the global elite.

To be in the global elites means having friends at the top of the American political system. The NY Times is the official propaganda organ of the ruling class. It also losses money by the truck load. Saving the Old Grey Lady bought Slim a lot of friends in Washington. Now the good folks at the Times are returning the favor by letting the GOP know they better not get too aggressive on the immigration issue.

New Hampshire has one of the smallest populations of illegal immigrants in the country. Only about 5 percent of its 1.3 million residents are foreign-born, and 3 percent are Hispanic.

But tune into the Senate race between Scott P. Brown, the Republican, and Jeanne Shaheen, the Democratic incumbent, and you might think the state shares a border with Mexico, not Canada.

When someone called a talk radio show to ask Mr. Brown about global warming the other day, Mr. Brown immediately started talking about border security. “Let me tell you what I believe is a clear and present danger right now,” he said, brushing aside the caller’s concerns about the environment. “I believe that our border is porous.”

Footage of agents patrolling the rocky, arid Southwestern landscape is featured in Mr. Brown’s ads — not quite the piney highlands of New Hampshire.

A political group led by prominent conservatives like John R. Bolton, the former United States ambassador to the United Nations, attacked Ms. Shaheen last week with a video that juxtaposed two alarming images: a horde of people rushing a fence, presumably along the Mexican border, and a clip of Islamic militants right before they beheaded the journalist James Foley, a New Hampshire native. The ad was pulled after the Foley family complained.

Republicans have long relied on illegal immigration to rally the conservative base, even if the threat seemed more theoretical than tangible in most of the country. But in several of this year’s midterm Senate campaigns — including Arkansas and Kansas, as well as New Hampshire — Republicans’ stance on immigration is posing difficult questions about what the party wants to be in the longer term.

Some Republicans are questioning the cost of their focus on immigration. Campaigning on possible threats from undocumented immigrants — similar to claims that President Obama and the Democrats have left the country vulnerable to attacks from Islamic terrorists and the Ebola virus — may backfire after November. At that point, the party will have to start worrying about its appeal beyond the conservative voters it needs to turn out in midterm elections.

I always love the use of “some people question…” I once worked with a woman, a nasty shrew, who loved this device. She would deliver her insults via this imaginary third party. When someone objected, she would retreat into “I’m not the one saying this. I’m just relaying it.” The lefty media loves this tactic.

The other thing you see here is how the Cult sees the people on the other side as monolithic. They just assume the undifferentiated “other” they call “Republicans” are supposed to be in lockstep like the people in the Cult of Modern Liberalism. Therefore even one dissident means there are huge fissures within the GOP. The reality is the GOP is just the less insane side of the ruling class. The real divide on immigration is between the small ruling elite based in trendy cities and the vast majority of the American people, including recent immigrants.

That said, the point is to send the message. Immigration may be a nice sales pitch for this election, but don’t get any ideas about acting on it. The GOP knows better than to make Carlos Slim an enemy.