Ronald Reagan was pro-immigration. You should be too (if you claim to be a conservative).

Two quotes from Ronald Reagan's farewell address.

I've been reflecting on what the past 8 years have meant and mean. And the image that comes to mind like a refrain is a nautical one -- a small story about a big ship, and a refugee, and a sailor. It was back in the early eighties, at the height of the boat people. And the sailor was hard at work on the carrier Midway, which was patrolling the South China Sea. The sailor, like most American servicemen, was young, smart, and fiercely observant. The crew spied on the horizon a leaky little boat. And crammed inside were refugees from Indochina hoping to get to America. The Midway sent a small launch to bring them to the ship and safety. As the refugees made their way through the choppy seas, one spied the sailor on deck, and stood up, and called out to him. He yelled, "Hello, American sailor. Hello, freedom man."

Reagan, as he did so often in his rhetoric, set out what he understood by American exceptionalism - the idea of a place to which everybody could come and be an American, a place founded on the idea of "we the people" telling government what to do rather than the, sadly more common, other way round. At the end of his address Reagan set out his personal picture of the "shining city upon a hill" - of America:

I've thought a bit of the 'shining city upon a hill.' The phrase comes from John Winthrop, who wrote it to describe the America he imagined. What he imagined was important because he was an early Pilgrim, an early freedom man. He journeyed here on what today we'd call a little wooden boat; and like the other Pilgrims, he was looking for a home that would be free. I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it, and see it still.

Hardly a day passes without somebody, somewhere condemning the efforts of people to better their lives by moving to another place. And the people making these efforts get called "illegal", "parasites", "criminals" and worse. Yet, as P J O'Rourke once said about the people washing up on the coast of Florida only to be deported - "we should be running into the waves and giving these people citizenship". Reagan thought the USA was exceptional because it had always welcomed immigrants and refugees, and that these people as the ancestors of nearly all Americans had made the great country he loved.

I make no bones about rejecting the idea that immigration makes us weaker or poorer. Quite the opposite, an open society should welcome new people, should recognise these people bring new ideas, hard work and a contribution to our culture that makes us so much stronger. If Reagan was a conservative, and this most times was how he described himself, then as conservatives we should support immigration and open our doors to refugees.


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