On Thursday, conservative activist Paul Weyrich died at age 66. Weyrich is best known for creating the Heritage Foundation and coining the term ”Moral Majority.” Yet I believe Weyrich’s greatest contribution to the conservative movement was to force it to address issues that actually had a constituency besides journalists and intellectuals. The New Right of the late 1970s and early 1980s focused on homosexuality, busing, feminism, gun control, the Panama Canal, and other issues that galvanized Middle America; but the establishment conservative movement would rather ignore.

Of course if there is one populist issue that pits Middle America against the establishment, it’s immigration. For the last four years that I’ve been active in the conservative movement; Weyrich has always been one of the more forceful and hard hitting voices against amnesty, and increasing legal permanent and temporary immigration.

Weyrich did not keep his opposition to mass immigration in ”safe” terms. He defended European Nationalist parties like the Vlaams Belang, and made it clear that immigration poses demographic concerns,

Many of our United States, especially in the West and Southwest, today are overrun with illegal immigrants, mostly from Latin America. Yet anyone calling for true immigration reform or the actual enforcement of laws already on the books frequently is labeled a racist. Suggesting that it might not be a good idea that the vast majority of public school children in Texas and California are Hispanic and that their parents may or may not be legal immigrants is intolerant and even cruel according to the left-wingers.

Dozens of obligatory tributes to the man have come out of the official organs of conservatism. Hopefully some of them will remember his commitment to patriotic immigration reform.