GOP Rep: Paul Ryan’s Immigration Policy Not ‘in Best Interest of America’

House Speaker Paul Ryan’s immigration policy is not “in the best interest of America,” says Alabama Rep. Mo Brooks.

In 2015, Brooks voted to elect Ryan as Speaker of the House after Ryan personally promised him that he would not bring up any major immigration legislation while President Barack Obama was still in office.

Yet Ryan swiftly broke that promise by quadrupling the controversial H-2B guest worker program in his omnibus spending bill, which immigration attorney Ian Smith explained would disproportionately “hurt America’s most  vulnerable workers” by allowing them to be replaced by temporary foreign workers.

“I don’t believe that Paul Ryan’s position on immigration is consistent with what is in the best interest of America,” Brooks told Breitbart. “But that’s why we have these policy debates and disagreements. I would prefer someone who is stronger on immigration, but Paul Ryan has assured me, again, for this next session of Congress—as he did during the last year, in which he was Speaker— that no bill on immigration will come to the House floor unless a majority of the GOP conference supports it.”

Breitbart News followed up.

Breitbart: “Well, last year he did put into the omnibus… [an] expansion to the H-2B visa program— even though he made that promise.”

Brooks: “I understand.”

Breitbart: “Do you think [he’ll keep] his promise this time… better than last time?”

Brooks: “I don’t know.”

Following Ryan’s broken promise, Congressman Brooks took to the House floor in January and declared:

House Speaker Paul Ryan claims increasing foreign worker visas [quote] “help[s] small businesses who cannot find labor when there’s a surge in demand for their labor like seafood processing, or tourism.” [end quote] This claimed labor shortage is unsupported by jobs or wage data and is political bunk!

“Mr. Speaker, while these surges in foreign worker visas and foreign labor work permits is a huge victory for special interests that profit from suppressed wages, it is a debilitating loss for struggling American families,” Brooks said. “Unemployed and underpaid Americans desperate for a good-paying job have every right to be angry at a federal government that takes American jobs from American citizens and gives them to foreigners.”

Perhaps presciently, Brooks added: “Americans have every right to be angry at Washington elected officials who care more about special interest campaign contributions than American voters who elected us. I hope these Americans will remember their anger during 2016’s primary and general elections.  That is the way to force Washington to represent us!”

“Mr. Speaker, I can’t speak for anyone else but, as for me, Mo Brooks, from Alabama’s 5th Congressional District, I fight for the economic interests of American citizens and against policies that undermine the struggling American voters who sent us here,” Brooks concluded.

According to Pew polling data, 92 percent of the GOP electorate is opposed to Ryan’s expansionist immigration agenda.

Reports analyzing Trump’s historic upset suggest that the American people did indeed “remember their anger” over Ryan and political elites’ expansionist immigration policies that put foreign interests ahead of the interests of American workers.

Yet Brooks now indicates he is undecided on whether he will vote to re-elect as House Speaker a man who has been one of Washington’s biggest advocates of open borders.

“The Speaker’s race… all really comes down to one thing,” Brooks says. “You can throw out the public policy, you can throw out all the personalities, it comes down to whether Donald Trump wants Paul Ryan as Speaker of the House.”

When asked if he thinks his constituents who just propelled Trump to victory want Ryan as House Speaker, Brooks said “my constituency wants Donald Trump’s wishes respected.”

As to his own preferences, Brooks explained: “I strongly prefer strong, aggressive leadership on behalf of Republican ideas rather than wishy-washy compromising leadership. In the context of the Speaker’s race, if Hillary Clinton had been elected president, we would definitely need a House Speaker with a stronger backbone [than Ryan].”

Yet, as proponents of immigration controls have noted, Ryan has demonstrated that he can be quite forceful when it comes to his efforts to push for expansionist immigration policies.

“There is nobody around in the party who is more fanatically dedicated to the cause of open borders than Paul Ryan,” Conservative Review’s Daniel Horowitz has explained. “Whereas most others could be talked off the ledge on this issue, Ryan is a true believer.”

“Open borders is in his ideological DNA,” Roy Beck, the president of the immigration control group NumbersUSA, has explained. “He’s an ideologue and has spent his whole life working for ideologues. Open borders seeps out of every pore of his being… This isn’t personal, it’s just who he is… Ryan is the heart and soul of crony capitalism.”

Indeed, Brooks himself seemed to suggest that if Ryan were elected Speaker, much of Trump’s efforts to enact his mandate on curbing immigration may have to be done against the wishes of Speaker Ryan. When asked about Ryan’s recent comments on CNN, in which Ryan indicated that the removing illegal aliens is not going to be a “focus” of a Trump administration, Brooks said:

“The President of the United States can enforce our immigration laws without any help from the United States Congress. The laws are already on the books. So if Donald Trump wants to secure our border and enforce our immigration law, he has the power to do that regardless of what the Majority Leader of the Senate or the Speaker of the House may think, do, or say.”

“[I] strongly disagree with him [Ryan] on whether the importation of huge amounts of foreign labor is good for struggling American families,” Brooks added. “I believe it costs struggling America families jobs. And those lucky enough to get jobs will suffer from wage suppression as a consequence of the floodgates having been opened— not only for illegal aliens, but also for lawful immigrants. If we had a booming economy, it would be one thing. But we don’t. We have an anemic economy. And Americans are suffering because of our open borders policy. The economic data is clear and irrefutable. All Americans— regardless of whether they are African American, Hispanic America, Asian America, or Caucasian American— have been hurt by the huge influx of foreign labor that takes jobs from American citizens and hurts the wages of those Americans fortunate enough to get jobs.”

Reports have documented Ryan’s longstanding support for the low-wage, high-immigration policies desired by the party’s donor class.

Despite the vocal objection of his Republican constituents, Ryan championed an omnibus spending bill last year that fully funded President Obama’s immigration agenda—including funding for sanctuary cities, unconstitutional executive amnesty, the resettlement of illegal aliens within the United States, the release of criminal aliens, tax credits for illegal aliens, and a controversial expansion of Obama’s refugee resettlement operation.

Dating back to his time as a Capitol Hill staffer in the mid-90s, Ryan was part of the effort to derail the bipartisan immigration curbs inspired by Civil Rights leader and late-Democratic Congresswoman Barbara Jordan.

In 2013, Paul Ryan worked hand-in-hand with open borders advocate Luis Gutierrez to push the Obama-Rubio amnesty agenda. Gutierrez has previously said, “I have only one loyalty…and that’s to the immigrant community.”

At a joint event with Gutierrez in 2013, Ryan made the case for dissolving borders—declaring unabashedly that America “is more than our borders.”

In fact, in 2015, Gutierrez was one of Ryan’s earliest supporters for his election as House Speaker.

It is unclear whether members of the House Freedom Caucus and conservative lawmakers—including Jim Jordan, Mark Meadows, Jeff Duncan, Jim Bridenstine, Brian Babin, Steve King, Matt Salmon, Alex Mooney, Gary Palmer, Barry Loudermilk, John Fleming and others—who voted for Ryan last year, share Gutierrez’s previously expressed support for Ryan and whether they will vote to elect him again as House Speaker on Tuesday.