During Paul Ryan’s recent primary, he was attacked as a “globalist.” That term might have some polemical value, but it is misleading as to Paul Ryan and some other key Republican leaders who basically agree with him. Paul Ryan might be wrong on some things, but he is patriotically wrong.

Ryan (like Jeb Bush, and Marco Rubio) isn’t like the German politicians who are trying to submerge their own polities in a sea of European values and Middle Eastern refugees. They don’t want to drown America within some North American superstate. They already think the United States is the shining city on a hill. They want something like open borders because they are working through the logic of Ronald Reagan’s Farewell Address.

Reagan said:

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.

Some on the left (and even the cosmopolitan right) support open borders because they value those outside their home countries as least as much as they value their fellow citizens. Others on the left think of allowing unlimited immigration as a form of national atonement for previous communal sins. That isn’t the case with the Ryans, Bushes, and Rubios.

Their city on the hill is great because it is structured in such a way that it will always benefit from “anyone with the will and the heart to get there.” Limiting immigration might be fine for loser countries whose national identities are based on assumed kinship, but it is unnecessary for a propositional nation like the U.S. Some might worry that low-skill American workers of all ethnicities are showing a troubling decline in social capital, but Marco Rubio reminded us that America is the place where your starting place does not determine your destination, and it was Jeb Bush’s allies who told us that America is all about the “right to rise.” If you think that repairing the social institutions of low-skill America will be a slow and expensive process that would be complicated by using the immigration system to increase the low-skill population, then that just shows that you lack faith in American exceptionalism.

This isn’t globalism. It is imprudent, and is blind to contemporary social conditions, but the Ryans, Bushes, and Rubios (and, one suspects, many other Republican officeholders) aren’t being blinded by cosmopolitanism. They are being blinded by a hyperbolic American nationalism.