Rep. Mick Mulvaney, who just last weekend was effusive in his praise for Paul Ryan as a potential Speaker of the House, is now backing away from that support of the controversial Congressman, whose widely-documented, two decade history of pushing for open borders has alarmed GOP voters.
Mulvaney’s shift suggests that it will be politically difficult for lawmakers to vote for Paul Ryan as Speaker of the House.
As The Hill newspaper writes, Mulvaney made clear that “Ryan would have to make ‘hard sell’ for Speaker.”
“Unless Paul comes out and says, ‘Look, I want to be Speaker, here’s why I want to be Speaker, and here’s why I think I’ll be different and better than John,’ it’s a real hard sell,” Mulvaney said in a Thursday radio interview.
This statement stands in contrast to his comments on CBS last Sunday, in which he seemed to suggest that the country and the Republican party may “need” Paul Ryan as Speaker.
“If we went down the list right now and said, ‘Okay, who could unite the party in the House?’ Certainly Paul [Ryan] comes right to the head of the list,” Mulvaney said. Even though the former-Vice Presidential candidate has denied his desire to assume the position that would make him third in line for the Presidency, Mulvaney declared, “Sometimes, you just need to do it. Right? The country needs you [Paul Ryan]. The party needs you [Paul Ryan]. And if he decides he wants to do it, that’s great.”
Mulvaney even made the case for Ryan’s conservative bona fides. “I think Paul is a pretty conservative guy,” Mulvaney said.
Since Mulvaney’s Sunday interview, however, reporters have honed in on Ryan’s support for amnesty, as well as his lengthy history of advocating for mass immigration. Following a Breitbart News story on Ryan’s role in many immigration expansion efforts— including his central role in derailing a bipartisan push to cut immigration in the 90’s— Politico published a story exposing this history as well. The Politico story also pointed out that Ryan held secret meetings with Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer to try to facilitate the passage of the mass amnesty plan.
Politico writes:
During Congress’ failed attempt at comprehensive reform the past two years, Ryan wielded significant influence behind the scenes— from keeping tabs on closed-door House negotiations to meeting privately with Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), a key leader in the Senate on an immigration overhaul. Schumer and Ryan shared a similar goal — sweeping changes to the nation’s immigration laws— and the two men struck up a casual relationship over at least five secret talks in Schumer’s hideaway at the Capitol to discuss how to get immigration reform done during the 113th Congress.
Prominent conservatives— from Phyllis Schlafly to Pat Buchanan to Rep. Steve King to Mark Levin, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham and Ann Coulter— have also sounded the alarm against a Paul Ryan Speakership. So too has NumbersUSA President Roy Beck an in exclusive interview with Breitbart News.
As documented in a lengthy video interview alongside Luis Gutierrez, Ryan is working to allow for the free movement of foreign people and goods. Ryan was one of the key architects of Obamatrade, and is also responsible for a widely-panned strategy to cut veterans’ benefits instead of benefits for illegal immigrants. He is also out-of-step with conservatives on crime. As The Weekly Standard’s Jeff Anderson highlighted in a recent column, Republicans who are joining the left to ram through so-called “criminal justice reform” are abandoning the Party’s platform of historically being the party of law and order. Anderson writes:
With crime rising in America and police increasingly under siege, many… Republicans have decided it’s a good time to liberalize federal sentencing policies—and to do so ‘quickly.’ One has to wonder at Republicans’ timing. At what would appear to be a Richard Nixon or Rudy Giuliani moment, Republicans are partnering with Barack Obama to respond like George McGovern… ‘As the great criminologist and professor James Q. Wilson said, ‘A high risk of punishment reduces crime. It just does.’ Republicans used to understand that.
Mulvaney’s move to distance himself from Ryan also follows Breitbart News’ recent reporting about Mulvaney’s former partnership with Paul Ryan to push Marco Rubio’s personal amnesty agenda through the House, as well as Mulvaney’s own controversial support for expanded immigration at a time when the foreign-born population of the U.S. is already at an all-time high 42.4 million.
On his website, Mulvaney argues that its still too difficult to get a U.S. visa. “The simple truth is our immigration system is broken… it’s too difficult to enter America the right way,” Mulvaney declares.
Mulvaney may be unaware of the 1965 immigration rewrite which eliminated President Calvin Coolidge’s immigration caps and opened up American immigration visas to almost anyone in the world. Year after year, hundreds of thousands of the world’s poorest immigrants enter America “the right way” – on American visas which entitle to them collect welfare, legally take U.S. jobs at lower pay, eventually cast ballots in U.S. elections and also to bring in additional relatives into the United States. It is specifically because Ted Kennedy’s 1965 immigration rewrite made it so easy to enter America “the right way,” that the foreign-born population in the U.S. has climbed from fewer than 10 million immigrants in 1970 to more than 42 million today.
Every year, America issues more than a million green cards— more permanent admission slips than any other country on Earth.
Every year, the Census Bureau reports, the U.S. lets in more than 1.2 million immigrants.
That means, as a result of our current visa policies, that every single day the U.S. brings in enough new immigrants to fill an overcrowded, metropolitan high schools.
Every week, the United States brings in enough new immigrants to fill the Staples Center, where the Los Angeles Lakers play.
Every month, we resettle a number of immigrants that is nearly the size of the population of East Los Angeles.
Every year, we add the equivalent of the entire city of Dallas.
Every three years, we add another entire city of Los Angeles through immigration alone. And these figures do not count the children of immigrants born in the United States. One in four children in the U.S. has at least one immigrant parent.
Since Mick Mulvaney was sworn into office at the beginning of 2011, we added one-and-half cities of Los Angeles exclusively through brand new immigrants.
More immigrants arrived in U.S. communities since Mulvaney came into office than the entire population of South Carolina when Mulvaney was first elected. For every one voter who cast a ballot for Mulvaney in his first election, the U.S. has since added 45 new immigrants to cancel out the electoral impact of a Mulvaney voter in both the presidential electoral college and in Congress. In just Muslim immigration alone, the U.S. gives more green cards to Muslim migrants each year— which allows recipients to eventually apply for voting privileges— than there are Mulvaney voters in South Carolina. According to Pew Research, only 11 percent of Muslim Americans identify as Republican or leaning-Republican, making them one of the most reliable Democrat voting blocs in the country.
Yet since entering office, Mulvaney has worked to further increase the size and electoral power of foreign citizens who support big government policies. Mulvaney said he thinks the United States should import even more poor foreign citizens who are “literally starving to death” in foreign countries. Unfortunately, while Mulvaney’s plan would disenfranchise his own constituents, diminish their job prospects, and drive down their wages, experts have shown that no amount of immigration will ever make a dent in global poverty. According to the Pew Research Center, there are nearly 5 billion people world-wide living on $10 or less a day. The globally poor and low-income population is fifteen times larger than the entire population of the United States
In a Congressional hearing in March of this year, intended to examine the fiscal impact of Obama’s lawless executive amnesty, Mulvaney used his allotted time to smear the reputation of Heritage’s acclaimed scholar Robert Rector, who is considered to be “the father of the 1996 welfare-reform law.”
Mulvaney explained that he was offended by Rector’s objective analysis that importing waves of low-skilled immigrants from poor countries has placed fiscal strains on federal entitlement programs.
Mulvaney condescendingly began:
Mr. Rector, every time I listen to you… the thing that just sticks in my craw is that I get the feeling that you think all immigration is bad… that’s the message you convey: immigrants are bad. And I have to disagree with that fundamentally… What Mr. Rector wants to do, which is keep everyone out, doesn’t work.
Mulvaney asked the Heritage expert, “What a healthy and functioning legal immigration system would look like.”
Rector began to respond to Mulvaney’s question: “When you look at the fiscal costs of immigration, immigrants who have a college degree pay far more in taxes— ”
Before Rector could finish, however, Mulvaney interrupted him to argue that the United States should not admit educated immigrants, who will contribute to our economy; but rather, should be importing poor, starving foreign nationals with little to no education. Mulvaney explained that those types of immigrants will serve the nation’s interest.
“We didn’t build the country on college graduates,” Mulvaney declared. “That’s just not how it worked. When my great-grandparents came over, they were farmers, they were literally starving to death. They were not college graduates, they were not doctors and lawyers. They came over. That’s how we built the country.”
Mulvaney’s historical analysis, however, is false in numerous respects. Until the Kennedy-backed immigration law went into effect, almost all immigration into the United States came from European countries with a shared political heritage— including Mulvaney’s own ancestors. Now, 9 in 10 green cards are given to immigrants from non-Western countries— including millions from countries including Somalia and Ethiopia. This wave of poor non-Western migrants is encouraged by Democrats— even though it keeps prior migrants impoverished— because they think migrants from failed states are likelier to support the Democrat political platform.
Moreover, America was not founded by immigrants at all, but rather British Colonists and European settlers. The American colonies, as Mulvaney should know, was originally part of Britain and its entire legal, political and social structure derived from centuries of Western heritage embodied by America’s highly-educated founders.
Another myth Mulvaney perpetrates is the idea that America had a historical policy of bringing in immigrants substantially less-skilled than Americans. But this is not so. The immigrants who arrived during the 1880-1920 immigrant wave might seem uneducated by today’s standards but had a completely standard amount of education for the time they lived and the economy they entered. There is no economic similarity between an Irish immigrant in 1890 without a high school education— who would find many available non-high schools jobs and who could never apply for welfare— versus an immigrant without high-school education today who would enter a highly-automated post-Manifest Destiny society with a shortage of jobs for low-skilled workers and guaranteed federal welfare.
Mulvaney also overlooks the fact that, following the 1880-1920 European immigration wave, Congress hit the pause button on immigration for fifty years. There was zero growth in America’s immigrant population for fifty years in the middle of the 20th century— in fact, the immigrant population shrank during that time while the native population doubled.
Rector again tried, in vain, to explain to Mulvaney his view that a healthy modern society would not bring in poor welfare recipients, but “bring in people who are net tax payers and will not impose additional costs on the extraordinarily overburdened U.S. taxpayer.” As Census data reported by the Center for Immigration Studies shows: “immigrant households use welfare at significantly higher rates than native households.” A companion study to that report found three in four immigrant households on welfare are in the United States legally, or “the right way” as Mulvaney would say— i.e. were issued a U.S. visa by the federal government.
But Mulvaney proceeded to emotively object to Rector’s factual analysis—insisting that a “healthy” United States immigration policy ought to import poor immigrants from developing countries.
Against Mulvaney’s continued protestations to the facts, Rector concluded by stating, “You have to simply acknowledge that if you bring in people who have very low education levels there is a fiscal cost.”
On this issue, Mulvaney stands opposed to his Republican constituents, although Mulvaney’s distancing from Ryan suggests he may understand the political consequences of publicly following his ideology on the issue.
According to a recent pew poll, only seven percent of Republican voters agree with the Ryan-Rubio “New America” vision of increasing the record-high 42.4 million immigrants living in the country.