The Washington Post story on today's corporate lobby day for open borders has this hilarious lead:
For years, pro-immigration conservative activists have tried with little success to gain an audience with top Republicans in Washington.
Are you kidding? "Pro-immigration conservative activists" are the "top Republicans in Washington." Boehner and Cantor prevented the passage of Lamar Smith's mandatory E-Verify bill. It took a constituents' revolt to keep Senate Republicans from backing amnesty in 2007. The leader of that pro-amnesty effort in the Senate was the party's presidential candidate in 2008, succeeding the immigration expansionist George W. Bush. Haley Barbour, former head of the Republican National Committee and a sometimes-mentioned name for the 2016 race, has justified mass immigration because "Colonel Sanders needs these guys." And do the names Grover Norquist, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Richard Land, Lindsey Graham, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce ring any bells? Even those officials who pretend to be hawkish on immigration are often lying; note Romney's campaign manager's admission that he opposed his candidate's support for enforcing immigration law.
This phony complaining about the inordinate strength of immigration hawks dates back to at least 2004, when the Wall Street Journal, of all places, griped about "deep-pocketed restrictionists". (I said then, and I'll say now: If there really are any deep-pocketed restrictionists, call me!) It's not "top Republicans in Washington" who have been frustrating the nation-breaking agenda of the post-American Right, it's Republican (and independent and even a lot of Democratic) voters. As Mexican political scientist Fredo Arias-King has written, immigration is a tool for our political elites, both Republican and Democrat, to usurp the people, "a tool to liberate the political elites from the Jeffersonian and Madisonian constraints."
Escaping from the restraints of the Constitution, and constitutionalism itself, has been at the core of the Progressive project for the last century and more. But why are "conservatives" helping them?