Arizona Senator Jeff Flake’s announcement that he doesn’t intend to seek re-election in 2018 included much navel gazing about the future of principled conservatism in a Republican Party led by President Donald Trump.

Among those principles under fire from Trumpism, Flake said in a speech on the Senate floor, is a devotion to free trade and immigration — supposed orthodoxies of “traditional” conservatives. When it comes to the latter issue, though, Flake has long advocated policies detested by the party’s conservative voters, if not its pro-business donor class. (RELATED: Jeff Flake On Retirement: ‘Couldn’t Run A Campaign I Could Be Proud Of’ [VIDEO])

A member of the so-called Gang of Eight, a bipartisan group of senators that wrote a failed illegal immigration amnesty bill in 2013, Flake has been a consistently supported of legislation that makes it easier for companies to import foreign workers.

Flake has voted for several bills to increase caps on both seasonal labor and foreign tech worker visas since entering Congress in 2001, according to a voting record complied by NumbersUSA. He also opposed measures that would have prevented U.S. trade negotiators from including immigration increases in free trade agreements.

Flake is perhaps best known for his involvement in the Gang of Eight immigration reform bill. The measure, which passed in the Senate but failed in the John Boehner-led House, would have provided a path to citizenship for millions of illegal immigrants. It also contained provisions that would have added hundreds of thousands of visas for guest workers in agriculture, low-skilled industrial jobs, seasonal work, and tech positions.

The guest worker provisions in the Gang of Eight bill were an expansion of policies Flake had backed in previous pieces of legislation. As a House member during the Bush administration, Flake co-sponsored four bills to boost the number of H-1B and H-2B guest worker visas, in some cases by almost twice their current levels. After becoming a senator in 2013, he voted for a trade promotion authority bill that gave the president the power, under the now-canceled Trans-Pacific Partnership, to expand immigration levels without input from Congress.

This spring, Flake teamed up with GOP Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina on a bill to codify the returning worker exemption of the H-2B visa program, another bill that would sharply expand the pool of seasonal foreign labor.

Flake’s voting record on amnesty for illegal immigrants and foreign worker programs has made him a favorite target of immigration hawks, who say the senator is beholden to business interests looking to import cheap labor. NumbersUSA gave him a C- in its legislative report card for 2015-2017, but an F- for failing to reduce “unnecessary worker visas.”

In his Senate speech, Flake said politicians like him have a “narrower and narrower path to nomination in the Republican Party” because of Trump’s malign influence on conservatism.

As Flake’s 30 percent approval rating in Arizona suggests, ardently pro-immigration Republicans may face more opprobrium from contemporary GOP voters than they have in the past. But Flake’s 15-year voting record shows a lawmaker out of touch with the Republican base on the immigration question long before Trump became the party’s standard-bearer.

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