“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.
There is a civil war in the Republican Party on immigration. Those on Trump’s side tend to see the enemy as including the party’s leadership, consultants, intellectuals and donor class. (The dust-up over Trump and Muslims is likely to bolster that perception.) But they’ve been courted by other GOP presidential candidates too, including Ted Cruz, Scott Walker and Rick Santorum.
Walker is already out of the race and Santorum has stalled in the low single digits. But Cruz is ascendant and Trump has been leading in the New Hampshire polls for a longer period of time than Walker’s presidential campaign lasted.
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. He can cite Ronald Reagan as well. The Wall Street Journal editorial page that championed Kemp and Reagan’s tax cuts also called for open borders. Republicans like Ryan tend to see America as a proposition or an idea, defined by the political principles laid out in the Constitution and Declaration of Independence.
In this telling, immigration affirms the truths we hold to be self-evident, particularly that all men are created equal and the unalienable right to the pursuit of happiness. The willingness of immigrants to come here is a testament to the success of those principles. “Immigration,” writes veteran conservative columnist George Will, “is the entrepreneurial act of taking the risk of uprooting oneself and plunging into uncertainty.”
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. It has already changed California from a state that twice elected Reagan governor and five times gave its electoral votes to Reagan and Richard Nixon to one where Barack Obama twice exceeded 60 percent of the vote.
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. Rep. Dave Brat, R-Va., defeated a sitting House majority leader in a Republican primary in part by running on this argument. It’s also central to the thesis of a recent book-length critique of H-1B visas and similar guest-worker programs co-authored by the popular conservative commentator Michelle Malkin.
Not everyone falls into one immigration camp or the other and many Republicans borrow some views from each. Most conservatives who want more immigration stop well short of supporting open borders. Most who want to keep immigration levels the same or even cut them are more measured than Trump.
But the debate frequently gets heated, with each side asserting that the other isn’t really conservative or Republican. Articles have appeared in conservative publications probing the connections between immigration restrictionists and liberal environmentalists who advocate population control. After Ryan criticized Trump, conservative columnist Ann Coulter suggested encouraging Muslim immigration into the speaker’s district so they can register as Democrats and vote him out of office.
Maybe it’s not such a “civil” war after all.
