The People vs. the Powerful

Ryan Sager is upset that rank-and-file conservatives at the Conservative Political Action Conference are against an open-borders policy. "On the immigration panel mentioned above, Phyllis Schlafly took the hard line against immigration. 'The idea of giving any job to any willing worker is absolutely unacceptable,' Schlafly said. American workers won't and shouldn't work for the wages Mexicans and other Latin American immigrants are willing to accept, she said, and companies should be forced to pay them more. All of this met with wild applause from the audience."
I'm glad to know that the rank-in-file opposes the open-floodgates border policy of a president that they otherwise seem to worship uncritically. The context of Sager's remarks is a column arguing that social conservatives might alienate more libertarian Republicans enough to harm the party. He may or may not be right, I don't really care. The Republican party is destructive of both conservative and libertarian values these days. But I don't think that the immigration concerns of Schlafly and some movement conservatives, which seem to shared by the majority of Americans, as opposed to corporate and political elites, are going to harm the party.