Breitbart News has unearthed another overlooked 2013 video that documents Paul Ryan and Democratic Congressman Luis Gutierrez’s aggressive stumping for Marco Rubio’s amnesty and immigration-expansion plan.
In a speech at the Erie House in Chicago, Ryan and Gutierrez provided more details about how they aimed to institute a formal open borders policy for the United States—that is, a federal policy of allowing any employer to legally hire any worker regardless of where they live.
This vision for the free movement of people across international boundaries is similar to immigration policy the European Union has among solely European countries– over the objections of rising insurgent populist parties. In his speech, Ryan lays out how the same legal structure could be adopted for the United States and all the foreign countries of the world.
“We want to have an immigration system that… has gates open to the people who are coming in pursuit of their version of the American dream,” Ryan told the crowd.
Ryan made the case for dissolving borders—declaring unabashedly that the United States “is more than [its] borders.”
“America is more than just a country,” Ryan said. “It’s more than Chicago, or Wisconsin. It’s more than our borders. America is an idea. It’s a very precious idea.”
This statement is significant because while a country has borders, “ideas” do not. If America is an “idea” rather than a “country” that means that refugees in Somali have as much “right” to a job in the United States as the children of the American revolution. In fact, every year, the U.S. issues five times more green cards than there are members of Daughters of the American Revolution.
Ryan began his speech by assuring the audience that he and Gutierrez see eye to eye on immigration.
“Luis talked about his peaceful protests and the arrests that resulted from them,” Ryan said. “That just goes to show that Republicans and Democrats might do things a little differently, but we don’t always see things differently. And that’s the point I just simply want to make here today.”
Activists for immigration expansion warmly received the couple’s message: Ryan and Gutierrez were even enthusiastically greeted by a mariachi band.
Even though Gutierrez has made clear previously that he has “only one loyalty…and that’s to the immigrant community,” Ryan seemed proud to inform the audience that he has been one of the biggest boosters of Gutierrez’s immigration policies, which prioritize the needs of foreign nations and foreign citizens above those of American citizens.
“Luis is right,” Ryan said. “Back in 2005, he and I tried to work on that legislation back then. I cosponsored that bill that Luis was the coauthor of. You know what, we’ve been trying to fix this system for years.”
While best-selling author Ann Coulter has repeatedly made the point that the United States is a nation “created by settlers, not immigrants,” Paul Ryan told his audience that America is not a nation with clearly delineated borders and sovereignty, but is instead an amorphous “land of immigrants.”
When people come to this country in pursuit of that [American] idea, they are expanding that idea, they are making our country better. We are a land of immigrants… This country is made great by the people who come to this country in search of a better life, in search of a dream.
America, however, was not founded by immigrants at all— and the history of America is one of assimilation, not ongoing immigration— as President Calvin Coolidge argued in his day before signing a bill that helped end all immigration growth for the next fifty years.
Despite this history, Ryan opted to retell a revisionist version of the past— one used by progressives to rob Americans of the vocabulary necessary to articulate their opposition to unprecedented waves of low-wage, third world workers into the country. In Ryan’s retelling, the history of the United States is a history of unbridled, large-scale immigration with no regard for the amount of immigration, its duration, or its origins:
I’m a product of a wave of immigration just like current immigrants are—Irish immigration. Most people in this country are a product of the various waves of immigration that we’ve had to America because that is America.
As a result of the nation’s green card gusher ushered into law by Ted Kennedy’s in 1965, the nation’s middle class has experienced sustained compression. Real average hourly wages are lower today than they were in 1973; all net job creation among working-age people went to foreign workers from 2000-2014; the number of struggling Americans forced to rely on welfare has reached a record high.
A plurality of American voters would like to see immigration paused in order to allow wages to rise, the middle class to expand and immigrants already here to assimilate.
According to a recent Pew poll, by nearly 10-1 margin Republicans want to reduce, not increase, the number of immigrants.
However, Ryan argues the opposite, suggesting that our immigration policy does not serve our “family interest.”
We all must acknowledge that we have an immigration system that is broken. It is not serving our interests as a nation. Our broken immigration system does not serve our national security interests. Our broken immigration system does not serve our economic security interests, and our broken immigration system does not serve our family interests… That’s why Luis Gutierrez and myself and other Republicans and Democrats are doing everything we can this year to try to make sure that we find common ground united behind the common theme that this is the greatest country in the world, attracting people in search of this great dream, and that we want to make it possible and real.
Ironically, Ryan’s desire to import an even larger influx of new immigrants, who prefer big government policies by a margin of two-to-one, may not bode well for a Republican Party of limited government conservatism.
Analysis shows Paul Ryan would be Vice President today if not for the enormous immigrant voting-bloc he helped create – a voting bloc that enthusiastically rejected his platform of entitlement and tax cuts.
A 2014 report authored by University of Maryland professor James Gimpel, found that: “the enormous flow of legal immigrants in to the country — 29.5 million 1980 to 2012 — has remade and continues to remake the nation’s electorate in favor of the Democratic Party.”
Examining the data in this study led the Washington Examiner’s Byron York to conclude: “The bottom line is that more immigration favors Democrats; there is no prediction of Democratic electoral ascendancy that doesn’t rely on demographic factors as the main engine of the party’s dominance.” As Reuters has reported: “Immigrants favor Democratic candidates and liberal policies by a wide margin, surveys show, and they have moved formerly competitive states like Illinois firmly into the Democratic column and could turn Republican strongholds like Georgia and Texas into battlegrounds in the years to come.”
Indeed, Breitbart News has previously exposed how the same electoral transformation is underway in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Experts say immigrants’ support for Democrats has nothing to do with Republican rhetoric, but rather is based on policies. Scholars have documented how Republicans will struggle to court immigrant voters unless they drop their platform of limited government policies.
If Paul Ryan believed that his message of cutting Medicare and corporate taxes was a winner with immigrant voters, presumably Ryan would have encouraged the Romney campaign to devote its time, money, and resources to winning California and its treasure trove 55 electoral votes— a state in which half of California children have a foreign-born parent.
Nevertheless, Ryan concluded his address with a call to action:
It’s high time we fix this broken system… to renew this belief, this idea that America is a land of immigrants and that that makes us a healthy country, that makes us a prosperous country, that makes us a country that passes on to each generation the idea that you can come here, and you can make a better life for yourself and, as a result, a better country for everybody else.
Ryan’s desire to codify the Brussels principle— of allowing people to legally cross into and out of the country without interference— would have the ultimate effect of dissolving any national identity and transforming the United States into a global commercial destination similar to the Cayman Islands— a place where companies can park their money.
As Pat Buchanan puts it:
Will the West endure, or disappear by the century’s end as another lost civilization? Mass immigration, if it continues, will be more decisive in deciding the fate of the West than Islamist terrorism. For the world is invading the West…. Countless millions are determined to come to the West, legally if they can, illegally if they must. And the more who succeed, the more who come… Western nations will be swamped. The character of their countries will be altered forever, and smaller countries will become unrecognizable. And as this is happening, ethnic and racial clashes will become more common… America is our home. We decide who comes in and who does not, how large the American family becomes, whom we adopt and whence they come… It has become the issue of 2016. Indeed, it is the issue of the 21st century.