WASHINGTON, D.C. — Illegal immigration might be the single strongest issue holding the conservative movement together right now. Everyone wants illegals gone, and no one cares if the migrants have committed other crimes or not — this is about the restoration of American culture for Americans to enjoy.
National Conservatism (NatCon) had its fifth annual conference in Washington, D.C., this week, where speakers addressed a variety of issues like where the right should be headed on things like gay “marriage,” what America’s relationship with Israel should look like, the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement, education, and so on.
But over the course of the three-day event, immigration seemed to be brought up at every turn. Multiple panels and speakers addressed the issue, and the message was loud and clear:
Getting rid of illegals is not enough.
Border czar Tom Homan gave an update on some of the numbers, telling attendees that Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection have overseen nearly 400,000 deportations so far. “Just wait and see” the kinds of numbers the agencies can do with 10,000 more Homeland Security agents coming on board, Homan added. He also said that the average per-day gotaways at the border have gone from 1,800 during the Biden administration to 16 on the day prior to his speech, while the “historic” amount of death and sex, drug, and human trafficking supported by the Biden regime had diminished significantly.
Various speakers made absolutely clear the damage that has been done to the country through immigration writ large. Americans have long hated illegal immigration, but many have now woken up to the generational damage both legal and illegal immigration it have caused. Corporate pressure on compliant politicians has led to untold numbers of third-worlders with unrecognizable, inferior cultures fundamentally untethering Americans from their homeland.
That is why discussion of the H1-B visa program blew up in December and January during the Trump transition. Elon Musk crashed out, essentially claiming every call center jockey is the next Einstein, and Trump weighed in in support of the notoriously abused program. The Trump administration is also in the process of defending an Obama-era rule that allows the spouses of H-1B recipients to receive work permits — despite having zero approval from Congress.
But Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., was correct when he said: “The main function of the H-1B visa program is not to hire ‘the best and the brightest,’ but rather to replace good-paying American jobs with low-wage indentured servants from abroad.”
An important theme of NatCon was that legal immigration needs to be dramatically lowered and disincentivized. Moreover, allowing more than half a million Chinese into the country with student visas, toying with the idea of mass amnesty, and requiring a measly 1 percent remittances tax on physical money or checks is just not going to cut it.
The U.S. government needs to simultaneously focus on removing the millions of illegals from our country, while also cycling out the legal migrants, including visa holders, those here on often bogus claims of asylum or refugee status, and perhaps implementing a selective denaturalization process.
Electoral power was a particular focus of Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, who noted the “disproportionate favoritism of electoral power” for states like California, New York, and other “sanctuary states” whose congressional apportionment is boosted by the counting of illegals — each one of whom disenfranchises an American.
Uthmeier said that although illegals are not supposed to be able to vote (the evidence says they do), they are effectively given franchise by being counted in the census for purposes of congressional apportionment. He estimated that if they were not counted, there is the potential for 20-30 congressional seats to move around, stripping many from places like California and New York, where illegals are a larger portion of the population. Apportionment is also a deciding factor in how federal funding is distributed.
The issue has been a focus of the Trump administration, which has called for a new census to ascertain how many actual Americans are in the states to count for apportionment.
Pleas from leftists about “compassion” and insistence from establishment Republicans that corporate revenue — upheld in many ways by the slave wages of illegal and legal immigration — is more important than the flourishing of Americans are not passable anymore.
“How did all of these Western governments simultaneously decide to commit suicide? Why would we, out of nowhere, import lots of people — who we are probably going to have to pay for — who aren’t part of our culture and [will] ultimately make demands in our society?” author and Blaze Media host Auron MacIntyre asked at the conference.
MacIntyre explained the social dynamic of any society held together by traditions and community: The institutions that people who share a common heritage build exist for those people to thrive and give them leverage — what MacIntyre called an “opposing sphere of influence” — against government power and so-called “elite” forces that serve to benefit most from the undermining of community.
“The religion and folkways of these communities are established by generation after generation practicing them as if they are simply part of the rhythms of life. The beliefs are transcendent, delivering authority from forces that no earthly power can produce,” he said. “These communities build institutions to perpetuate their way of life and care for the well-being of their members. … They preserve its culture, and they aid members who require assistance.”
Aiding members of the community who require assistance is what welfare systems should be for. But as Mark Krikorian, executive director for the Center for Immigration Studies, noted in his discussion, the U.S. has not made a distinction between “the deserving versus the undeserving poor.” He added that the “implicit rationale of a welfare system” is that “we have a responsibility to our fellow countrymen that is different and greater than we have to foreigners.”
But 54 percent of immigrant households in America are on at least one welfare program, Krikorian said. That number takes into account all legal and illegal immigrants, including naturalized citizens.
According to Krikorian, however, 59 percent of illegal immigrant households use some form of welfare, often through their children, who have likely been given citizenship under the false understanding of “birthright citizenship.”
The welfare use rate is extraordinarily high for Americans, too (about 40 percent), but, “as alarming as that is, these are our people,” Krikorian said, so at the very least it does not violate the basic principle of obligation to fellow countrymen.
Why are we going to such lengths to subsidize apparently unproductive immigrants in American society?
“In order to gain more power, the ruling class must find a way to dissolve all opposing spheres of sovereignty, including those that are built by middle-class communities,” MacIntyre said. “To achieve this goal, the ruling class has to ally itself with a lower dependent class that can be used to unseat the entrenched kulaks [those who built the cultural institutions].
By the ruling class’s calculation, it can kill two birds with one stone. Importing culturally unrecognizable, economically dependent people produces a large body of replacement voters who can be politically manipulated because of their dependency, while providing cheap labor for a class that can afford nannies and landscapers. In the process, members of the middle class drop into the lower class, making them dependent as well, thereby destroying the cultural institutions they have built as a bulwark against government power.
MacIntyre said that a domestic class of dependents can sometimes be used, but that it “really less than ideal” because they still come from “the same folkways and traditions” of the middle class. Importing class conflict is a quicker, more efficient way of destroying a society in order to increase power.
“Bringing in … foreign underclasses is far more reliable because they have zero connection to the land or its traditions, and are more willing to turn against those that are already residing there,” he said. “They often don’t speak the language and tend to require a level of state welfare. It’s not just that the immigrant class is not motivated to expose the expansion of the state. They actually actively require the growth of the state in order to succeed.”
Not importing these kinds of dependent people used to be the norm of American immigration policy dating back prior to the founding.
As Krikorian explained, a 1645 Massachusetts policy blocked people who were likely to be dependent on welfare once they arrived. A 1691 New York law is another example. Eventually, all colonies did the same, and after the American Revolution, all states followed suit.
In 1882, the federal government passed a law that excluded any immigrant “unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a [public] charge.”
But the Clinton administration took the “public charge” rule and basically made it nonexistent, because an immigrant is not considered a “public charge” on society unless the cost is in cash or if the individual is in a long-term care facility, Krikorian said. If an immigrant lives in public housing, uses food stamps, is on Medicare, or has children receiving free or reduced-cost school lunches, he is not considered to be on welfare.
That rule remains in effect to this day, because an attempt to change it during the first Trump administration was shot down by a judge. Krikorian said his understanding is that the Trump administration is going to try to change it again.
A lot of politicians like to float the idea that keeping immigrants off welfare might get the job done, but Krikorian said plans like that are “a shiny object, a distraction used by libertarians and corporate promoters of mass immigration, who don’t want the underlying policy of mass immigration to be questioned, but want people to talk about what really is kind of a side issue.”
Krikorian told The Federalist after his discussion that we would not even have to talk about immigrant welfare if the United States’ policy were simply to shut off the migration spigot and stop importing these people in the first place.
But, as MacIntyre argued, importing these people for the purpose of class conflict is part of the plan. The immigrants are brought in, the middle class is blamed for the economic inequality, and they are forced to give up the cultural and economic wealth they have been building for generations.
The “natural barrier” of the institutions the middle class built against the expansion of the state is destroyed as the middle class itself becomes a poorer dependent class, and their “existence becomes more unstable.” Then, when the institutions are destroyed, “virtue quickly starts to fade.”
“The charities are exploited, the common areas are defiled, and those who maintain them see no reason to continue the effort, because they don’t recognize the people who they are now sharing the country with,” he added.