ACTUALLY, IT’S ALREADY HERE: James Antle on “The Coming Republican Immigration Civil War.”
“This is not conservatism.” With those four simple words, House Speaker Paul Ryan dismissed Republican front-runner Donald Trump’s proposal to temporarily ban Muslims from entry into the United States until the federal government gets terrorism committed in the name of Islam figured out.
“This is not what our party stands for,” Ryan added, “and, more importantly, it’s not what our country stands for.”
That may depend on how the party is defined. While elected Republicans have almost unanimously distanced themselves from Trump’s Muslim gambit, one poll found that nearly two-thirds of GOP voters agreed with him. Another determined that more than three-fourths believe the United States is accepting too many immigrants from the Middle East. . . .
Trump isn’t the most articulate or consistent spokesman for immigration control in the GOP. That distinction goes to Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala. And Trump’s Republican critics would be the first to point out he isn’t the most conservative. But his rise has fueled a family argument inside the party about how conservatives should view immigration.
Ryan’s position has a long conservative pedigree. He has followed in Jack Kemp’s intellectual footsteps. . . Restricting immigration, according to these Republicans, isn’t conservative because it requires government bureaucracies to interfere in labor markets. Immigration is like free trade and restricting it is like protectionism.
Adherents of the other immigration view tend to see America as a historic people, not an ideological abstraction. They also look at immigration as the pre-eminent national security issue. They may not go as far as Trump, but they worry less about the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria than the Islamic State in San Bernardino.
According to this side of the argument, too much immigration can also alter the political character of the host country. . . Effecting such a transformation at the national level, these Republicans argue, would frustrate just about every conservative policy objective and instead validate the thesis of hopeful progressive polemics like The Emerging Democratic Majority.
To these conservatives, current immigration policy is less like free trade than corporate welfare. . . .
Many Republicans in the Ryan/Kemp camp also purport to be national security hawks, and I believe they normally are. If there is a coming global war on radical Islam, however, increased restrictions on immigration will likely be necessary to ensure national security. So in a time of war, what is more important to “conservatives”: free trade/labor markets, or national security? It seems reasonable to assume that, to most Americans, a war necessitates that national security must trump (no pun intended), at least temporarily.