John McCain is one of the universalists who see America as having no cultural basis and consisting of nothing but ideas. As he said in his address to Liberty University in Virginia in 2006:

We are not a perfect nation. Our history has had its moments of shame and profound regret. But what we have achieved in our brief history is irrefutable proof that a nation conceived in liberty will prove stronger, more decent and more enduring than any nation ordered to exalt the few at the expense of the many or made from a common race or culture or to preserve traditions that have no greater attribute than longevity.

Why does he stack the deck that way by speaking dismissively of preserving ”traditions that have no greater attribute than longevity”? How about preserving traditions that embody truth and beauty and that support and substantiate our cultural ideals? Perhaps because such traditions mean nothing to him.

Maybe this is why he is for amnesty. He doesn’t see the nation as a concrete and particular country in which an actual people live and work, but only as a carrier of universal ideals that are the entitlement of all humanity.