THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

I have to keep repeating points until some dumbass conservative spokesman finally realizes how useful they are. Let me give you an example.

Pat Buchanan used to support open borders. He joined all the other conservatives in saying that that "free enterprise means the free movement of goods AND LABOR."

But the reason labor moves out of Mexico is because Mexico is a political disaster. If those laborers move to a country which is not a political disaster, they become the people of their new country. So they turn the country they move into into the same political disaster they came from.

I tried desperately to get conservatives to face this obvious fact. But they kept repeating, "free enterprise requires the free movement of goods AND LABOR." Open borders forever! I wanted to grab them by ears and shout into their faces, "You idiot, labor VOTES!"

So conservatives talked about free enterprise and worked to bring in all the anti-free enterprise immigrants they could.

I tried for years to talked to those morons about reality. I gave a paper at a major economic conference with a Nobel Prize-winning economist in the audience in which I pointed out, in more technical language, that if politically stupid people come up, they ruin the economy. No one disagreed.

Conservatives kept repeating that "free enterprise means the free movement of goods AND LABOR."

In 1982 I put together "The New Right Papers" for the world's third largest publisher just so I could make this one point in it. I finally got the respectable conservatives' attention. Free enterprise finally had a good argument against the "Free enterprise requires the free movement of goods AND LABOR" argument. This helped a lot in making National Review and other respectable conservatives oppose immigration.

Being against importing leftists always made political sense, but the argument was needed. Arguments matter. Ideas matter. And there is nothing that is as hard as getting conservatives to accept a good idea.

Conservatives take all their arguments from what liberals say. And liberals never approve anything that would be a good idea for conservatives.

So conservatives fought for open borders for decades. Again they surrendered the real fight without conservatives even knowing it was going on, and now the biggest state in the Union is a leftist bastion and the left's minority base is large and growing.