Paul Ryan has emerged as a leading candidate to replace John Boehner as Speaker of the House.
For immigration patriots, this may be the worst possible news.
Rep. Ryan has a long record as a supporter of Open Borders and has been an active lobbyist for amnesty as well as a string of other pro-immigration legislation.
In the words of Bloomberg’s John Heilemann, who co-authored the book Game Change with Time Magazine’s Mark Halperin: “[Ryan’s] ties to the pro-immigration mafia ran deep. A protégé of [Cesar] Conda and an ally of [Rick] Swartz [founder of the pro-amnesty National Immigration Forum], Ryan was the staffer who had aided Jack Kemp and William Bennett in their crusade against Proposition 187.”
The Washington Times adds in a 2012 article that Ryan, “worked to water down the strict immigration limits in a bill Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), Texas Republican, was working to pass in the mid-1990s… As a staffer in Washington, he worked for Jack Kemp and Sen. Sam Brownback — both of whom were part of the Republicans’ pro-immigration wing, and who fought crackdown efforts from within their own party… As a congressman, he voted for a 2002 legalization bill, praised the 2006 Senate immigration bill backed by Mr. Bush and co-sponsored a 2009 Democratic bill that would have legalized immigrant farmworkers.”
Ryan has been working against immigration reform since college. His first jobs in politics were working for Rep. Jack Kemp against Prop. 187, the California ballot initiative which denied welfare to illegals.
He moved on to Capitol Hill where he spent time as a top aide to Rep. Sam Brownback, a leading pro-Open Borders Republican leader.
During the nineties – then almost three decades removed from the Ted Kennedy-led immigration rewrite– popular concern over the large-scale resettlement of poor immigrants caused members of both parties to push for substantial reductions. For instance, Senator Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) offered legislation to significantly reduce the number of green cards while inveighing against birth right citizenship. Even Senators Boxer and Feinstein, immigration-wars veteran Beck explains, were in favor of curbs.
At the center of this populist immigration-cutting effort was civil rights heroine, and black Democrat Congresswoman, Barbara Jordan. At the early stages, even Bill Clinton was in favor of the effort.
It was, Beck explained, the closest America ever got post-Kennedy to actually cutting immigration. But corporate-wing Republicans including Brownback rallied against and defeated the bipartisan immigration reduction campaign.
In 1996, John Heilemann wrote an extensive story in Wired Magazine about the push to kill the bipartisan effort to reduce immigration levels. Heilemann reports that Paul Ryan was credited for writing, “a series of highly influential, deeply devastating ‘Dear Colleague’ letters educating their peers about the hazards of [Lamar] Smith’s bill [to slash immigration rates].”
Heilemann writes:
The letters were mainly the work of Cato’s [Stuart] Anderson and Paul Ryan, Brownback’s legislative director.
Paul Ryan told Heilemann, “[Lamar] Smith was getting a free ride because he knew immigration law so much better than most of the other members… Once people learned what was actually in the bill, we were able to peel them off, one by one.”
Ryan was also responsible for shutting down attempts to mandate E-verify in the 1990’s, a measure which would have helped to reduce the surge in illegal aliens entering America.
Strangely, if not for Ryan’s efforts to block sensible immigration reform, he might not be a candidate for Speaker and third in line of Presidential succession but Vice President and the number two man.
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.
