The following are remarks as prepared by Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., on Sept. 2 at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, D.C.

There’s a special significance to this conference this year. Donald Trump’s victory was not just a victory for his movement, but for the ideas of the people in this room. National conservatism is an idea whose time has arrived.

The battle for our future is not between democracy and autocracy, capitalism and socialism, or even “Right” and “Left,” in the old meaning of those terms. It is between the nation and the forces that would erase it.

For decades, many of those in power—not just here, but across the West—have been locked in a cultural war with their own nations. We see that in many of the countries of Europe today, where the immigration crisis threatens to transform the ancient fabric of those nations—and all who object are menaced by an increasingly totalitarian censorship state.

While our First Amendment has traditionally insulated us from the most extreme forms of censorship, America, too, is threatened by the same elites, driven by the same interests and ambitions. They are the elites who rule everywhere but are not truly from anywhere.

National conservatism is a revolt against this fundamentally post-American ruling class. This revolt is a revolt from the Right—but also, a revolt within the Right.

For too long, conservatives were content to serve as the right wing of the regime. They, too, waged foreign wars in the name of global “liberalism” and “democracy.” They, too, rewrote our trade policies in service of the interests of global capital. They, too, supported amnesty and mass migration.

The Washington Consensus was a thoroughly bipartisan affair. It required the support of both party establishments to survive.

Until President Trump, the mainstream Right quibbled over the Left’s means, but hardly ever challenged its ends. Conservatives cheered foreign intervention after foreign intervention—not to defend America’s actual national interests, but to pursue the same fantasy of a “world safe for democracy” that the Wilsonian liberals have peddled for a century.

They backed NAFTA and welcomed China into the [World Trade Organization]—not because it was good for American workers, but because it served the same vision of a borderless marketplace championed by the Left, differing only over whether to trim a regulation here or tack on a labor standard there.

But perhaps the best example was on the issue of immigration.

The old conservative establishment may have opposed something like illegal immigration on procedural grounds—simply because it was illegal. But they took no issue with it in substance, and if the same thing was achieved through “legal” avenues, many of them would celebrate and support it.

At this point, it should be clear that the fact that something is sanctioned by our government does not mean it’s good for our country. That much is obvious with various forms of legal immigration today.

For decades, we heard that so-called high-skilled immigration was an urgent necessity. The H-1B visa, for example, was sold as a way to keep America “globally competitive.” Of course, we do have an interest in attracting the truly exceptional few, the very best and brightest in the world. But that’s not how programs like the H-1B have actually functioned.

Instead, they’ve imported a vast new labor force from abroad—not to fill jobs Americans can’t or won’t do, but to undercut American wages, replace American workers, and transfer entire industries into the hands of foreign lobbies.

We have funneled in millions of foreign nationals to take the jobs, salaries, and futures that should belong to our own children—not because the foreign workers are smarter or more talented, but merely because they are cheaper and more compliant, and therefore preferable in the eyes of too many business elites who often see their own countrymen as an inconvenience.

While our trade agreements kneecapped blue-collar workers—a slow-moving disaster, decades in the making—abuse of the H-1B is kneecapping white-collar workers right before our eyes. For the tens of thousands of Americans who were forced to train their foreign H-1B replacements just to get their severance package, the fact that it was “legal” is little comfort.

For decades, the mainstream consensus on the Left and the Right alike seemed to be that America itself was just an “idea”—a vehicle for global liberalism. We were told that the entire meaning of America boiled down to a few lines in a poem on the Statue of Liberty, and five words about equality in the Declaration of Independence. Any other aspect of American identity was deemed to be illegitimate and immoral, poisoned by the evils of our ancestors.

The true meaning of America, they said, was liberalism, multiculturalism and endless immigration.

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