National Review Editor: ‘Paul Ryan for President!’

“Paul Ryan for President!” blares the headline on a National Review post from its deputy managing editor, Fred Schwarz.

The editor’s Sunday post came just a few hours after House Speaker Ryan declared that curbing immigration levels would not be part of the GOP agenda. “We’re not going to be talking about visa caps in our agenda,” Paul Ryan told popular Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo when she pressed him on whether he would lower green card issuances.

Although Ryan has a two-decade-long history of pushing for open borders, the admission was significant, as 92% of GOP voters would like to see immigration growth reduced, according to Pew polling data.

Schwarz’s post also came just two months after Ryan passed an omnibus spending bill, which not only funded all of President Obama’s immigration agenda, but expanded it–prompting the National Review’s editorial board to write: “What were Republican leaders thinking?”

Nevertheless, in his post, National Review‘s deputy managing editor writes that in contrast to the GOP frontrunners, Ryan is “a respected and inoffensive candidate to offer a contrast to all the strong personalities in the Republican race, and Ryan is nothing if not Mr. Acceptable.”

The deputy editor did not explain how Ryan can stand opposed to 92% of the GOP electorate on what is perhaps the most seminal issue of this election and still be considered the “Mr. Acceptable” choice.

Schwarz continues, explaining how Donald Trump is simply unacceptable: “In this year’s race, you have a front-runner that GOP regulars don’t just detest but think could literally destroy the party.”

Again, Schwarz did not explain how a candidate who in New Hampshire–as the Washington Post reported— “won men, women, every age group, every ideology, people who had and people had not gone to college, and every single age bracket,” would somehow “literally destroy the party.”

Indeed, Trump has expressed his belief that his nation-state focus on pro-American trade and immigration policies–opposed by Paul Ryan– would help grow the Party and put states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and New York in play for the GOP.

Ironically, National Review’s Rich Lowry has previously suggested how expansive immigration policies– ardently championed by Paul Ryan– could “literally destroy the party.” Lowry likened Republicans who support pro-mass migration to those who would commit “assisted suicide”

Higher levels of Latin American immigration benefit the Democrats, while digging an ever-deeper demographic hole for Republicans. Pro-immigration conservatives fool themselves into believing that being pro-immigration will make it possible for the GOP to convert large numbers of Hispanic voters to their side. This is a party strategy that could have been crafted in Oregon, since it amounts to a kind of partisan assisted suicide…

For the Democrats, then, bringing new Latin American immigrants into the country is like importing more Upper West Siders or more sociology Ph.D.s–it adds directly to the Democratic voter rolls. And once immigrants are signed up there, they are unlikely to leave…

The latest data shows that Democrats have a 2-1 registration advantage over Republicans among Hispanics. In the 2002 midterm elections, when optimistic Republicans told themselves they had performed particularly well among Hispanics, Latinos voted 65 percent Democratic and 32 percent Republican in Senate races. In gubernatorial races, the split was essentially the same. If a 2-1 landslide against you is progress, you are in trouble.

Lowry wrote this piece over a decade ago. However, the electoral demographics of California do not seem to have shifted further right.

When Lowry wrote the piece in 2004, he noted that 32% of California was Hispanic. Today, the state is 39% Hispanic. “As of July 1, 2014, about 14.99 million Latinos live in California, edging out the 14.92 million whites in the state,” reported the L.A. Times in a piece entitled, “It’s official: Latinos now outnumber whites in California”.

“It is going to accelerate,” Roberto Suro, director of the Tomás Rivera Policy Institute at USC said. “This is really the beginning of a new phase that will play out over another generation.”

“State demographers project Latinos will account for about 49% of Californians by 2060,” the L.A. Times wrote.

Yet, as Breitbart News has previously reported, Paul Ryan was behind the effort to derail the bipartisan immigration curbs of the mid-1990s. NumbersUSA President Roy Beck has explained that “Paul Ryan is a part of the group that created the massive immigration problem facing the nation today. As a direct result of Paul Ryan,” Beck said, “there are an additional 10 million immigrants in the country [than there otherwise would be].”

It was unclear from the Ryan 2016 post whether National Review’s deputy editor believes Paul Ryan and his pro-mass migration position will put states like California in play for the Republican Party.

When radio host David Webb asked Paul Ryan in 2014 whether he thought “immigrants from the third world are more likely or less likely to support conservative policies,” Ryan replied by declaring that “some of the best Americans are the newest Americans.” Ryan explained that the GOP must expose new arrivals to “principles that they may not even have ever heard or seen before. This is a challenge that conservatives have to answer.”

While Paul Ryan’s message of cutting Medicare and corporate taxes was unable to secure California and her 55 electoral votes for the Republican Party in 2012 against President Obama, if National Review’s editor gets his way, Ryan may have a chance to try yet again.