| Republicans Abandon Principle Out of Fear |
|
| April 3, 2006 |
|
BEGIN TRANSCRIPT |
 |
|
RUSH: All right, let me swerve into this immigration business, ladies and gentlemen, because we have an AP-Ipsos poll today, and of course -- of course! -- the vast majority of Americans are totally open to letting immigrants stay here. Of course! Who would have doubted it? "Americans are divided about whether illegal immigrants help or hurt the country, a poll finds. More than one-half of those questioned are open to allowing undocumented workers to obtain some temporary legal status so they can stay in the United States. At the same time, people doubt that erecting a fence along the U.S.-Mexico border could help to fix such a complex and enduring problem, an AP-Ipsos poll found.
"Two-thirds do not think it would work. 'You can't go and round up 11 million people and ship them out of the country,' said Robert Kelly. The Chicago lawyer is among the 56% of Americans who favor offering some kind of legal status. 'It just isn't practical,' he said. A smaller but still significant share -- 41% -- opposes offering any kind of legal status, giving voice to a law-and-order mind-set that bristles at the notion of officially recognizing those who did not play by the rules to get here. 'Illegal is criminal,' said Louella Kelly, a 65-year-old grandmother from Round Rock, Texas." So it doesn't surprise me, folks, doesn't surprise me at all we get the polls out here showing, "Hey, hey. Americans are cool with this. Back off."
Dick Morris has a column today in the New York Post. It's entitled, "Menace in Mexico," and it's about the immigration debate, and let me just read you a few short excerpts because I want to react to this, because this is a classic illustration of one side of this question whereas we're looking at it totally from the standpoint and within the context of fear. Voters, future voters, are they going to hate the Republicans? Is it going to backfire and so forth? So we've gotta forget what illegal means and we've gotta let 'em in and we've gotta go out and then try to get those people to be voters of our party on down the road. That's a fear-based argument, and you know something? In the process of doing that, can I just raise a little question here for you, ladies and gentlemen? Something for you to think about before I get into the Morris piece.
If conservative Republicans are going to compromise their principles, and they're going to have to compromise their principles, aren't they? Conservative Republicans would have to compromise their principles in order to go out and secure a voting bloc that votes primarily Democrat. Wouldn't we have to get rid  of our principles, turn into liberals? "Okay, yeah. We'll provide this benefit, and that benefit, we'll do all that if that's what it takes to get you to vote for us." That's one of the most alarming things about this to me, is how there are plenty of conservatives out there who are all for the amnesty program that's being talked about in the Senate bill, and they want to go ahead and do this because they're just scared to death these people are going to end up voting against Republicans. |
|
|
Well what good is being a Republican or a conservative if you compromise who you are and what your principles are in order to go get any bloc of voters? I don't care who they are, and don't discount that because that seems to be one of the things that's shaping up. But Morris writes here: "In its debate over how to change the U.S. immigration system, Washington neglected the impact in Mexico - which faces a crossroads election this summer. And Mexico's choice could not be more important to the United States. On July 2, the Mexican people will decide whether to elect ultra-leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (known as AMLO) as their next president. Rumors have abounded for months that Lopez Obrador's campaign is getting major funding from Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.
"And last month Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-Ariz)., a moderate Republican, told several Mexican legislators that he had intelligence reports detailing revealing support from Hugo Chavez to AMLO's Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). Chavez is a firm ally of Cuba's Fidel Castro. Lopez Obrador could be the final piece in their grand plan to bring the United States to its knees before the newly resurgent Latin left. Between them, Venezuela and Mexico export about 4 million barrels of oil each day to the United States, more than one-third of our oil imports. With both countries in the hands of leftist leaders, the opportunity to hold the U.S. hostage will be extraordinary. Think we have security problems now, with Vicente Fox leading Mexico? Just wait until we have a 2,000-mile border with a chum of Chavez and Castro.
"Lopez Obrador is not inevitable. Recent polls show the candidate of Fox's National Action Party (PAN), Felipe Calderon, closing in. But much will hinge on the resolution of the immigration debate now roiling Congress." Now, Morris' point is that if we come up with an immigration policy here that angers the Mexican people and they end up electing this far-leftist wacko Obrador, and he teams up with Chavez, that we will have just strangled ourselves, and he makes another case that we've got to be careful. Don't make 'em mad! Don't make the Mexican people mad! Don't start saying things that are going to cause them to backlash against the US by electing a government that will be absolutely horrible for us.
So here we go again: more fear. We got Al-Qaeda strangling us over there, we've got Iran working to nuke us, we've got the Chinese, the ChiComs working to nuke us, we've got the North Koreans and now we've got Hugo Chavez and Obrador. Oh, no! What are we going to do? Let me tell you. Let me give you the real analysis of the way to look at this. This whole business of this upcoming election in Mexico on July 2nd should underscore the urgency of the need to reform the corrupt government of Mexico and its status and corrupt economy. The point being that 40% of their people are poor and exporting their poor to our country and our helping them to do it will not reform that country.
It will keep the same elites in office or attract the very kind of leftist government that we fear. I mean, our effort, rather than not making people mad, and not standing up for our own principles, our effort should be on helping the Mexican government create governmental and business practices worthy of a democracy. These people are swimming in oil down there, and so many of their people are dead poor -- and somehow this is going to end up being our fault. Our current refusal to enforce our immigration policies, taking on the responsibility of subsidizing millions and millions of Mexican citizens has enabled Vicente Fox and others to avoid the kind of systematic reforms their system needs. I mean, you could look at it this way. |
|
|
You could look at it with all of the Mexicans that we've allowed to come here illegally, and let's say the number is 20 million. I've heard it anywhere from seven to 11 to 12 to 20 million. We may have actually by doing so staved off a Mexican revolution, a revolution that maybe should have happened. But we've helped stave it off. What we're doing by allowing Vicente Fox and the Mexican government to continue to have a corrupt government and an economic system here with a country swimming in oil where 40% of the people are just dead poor. This is not compassionate, what we're doing, because it's resulted in tens of millions of Mexicans, in Mexico, remaining dirt poor. We gotta deal with the root cause of the problem here. Now, some people say the root cause of the problem is the border and its insecurity, and our insecure status and so forth.
Yeah, that's true, but there's also something else at the root as well, and that is economic circumstances are such in Mexico that this many people want out of the place, and they come here. Now they've acquired magical status as future swing voters. Believe me, that's how they're being looked at, not just voters, but swing voters, and so they've become attractive to politicians. If we really wanted to help Mexico, we'd help them create a rule of law that they'll follow and an economic system that expands wealth creation across the board. I'll tell you, this is where some of our elite Republicans are going wrong. They're buying into the left-wing and ethnic lobby propaganda. They're running scared. They're surrendering the field, rather than sticking with first principles that work whether we're dealing with a communist state like the old Soviet Union or a failed government and economy like Mexico now has. That's what I mentioned earlier. We're abandoning our principles in order to try to get a stake here in this future number, whatever it is, of swing voters.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Let's think through this logically. This is the way it is right now. Only by coming to the US illegally do you get to continue to work here while preparing for eventual citizenship.  That's how the so-called reform would work. Does this make any sense whatsoever? Only by coming here illegally do you get to continue here to work here while prepping for your eventual citizenship. Meanwhile, if you happen to be in Mexico and you want to get on a pathway to citizenship in the US, what are you to do? Well, the inspiration you're going to find is to come here illegally. That's what you do. All the talk about what's good for the illegals, not a word about what's right for the people who wish to follow a legal path to our country, the American people will have to pay for all of it.
You know, Congress has the power. I just love when they act like they're innocent bystanders to the creation of the problem, and they come riding to the rescue every 20 years to solve it, when they've created it. We gave you the news last week about Senator Kennedy and an immigration bill in 1965 in which he promised that virtually everything that has happened would not happen, and now he's a leader with McCain in the Senate reform effort. Reform, my rear end! Congress has the power to increase legal limits of immigration, but it's nothing to do with right and wrong. It's a straw man. Even if we stipulate that a guest worker program helps to deal with people who are here illegally, how does that help stem the flow of future illegals? It does just the opposite. It's going to increase it.
We're going to have exactly the same problem we have now in the years ahead. When you legalize what is illegal, you are said to be courageous and compassionate, yet the root problem in Mexico isn't addressed. The illegal influx continues, and the politics of this has to make you laugh. It cracks me up. It probably makes you laugh, too. They argue that we need to attract this vote. You know the best vote, the highest Hispanic vote total George W. Bush ever got, was about 44% when he ran for governor of Texas. So if we continue to get a smaller percentage of the vote by a growing community in this country, will we win elections? We ought to be talking about taking our principles to all people regardless of race or religion and win the day with those arguments, not by pandering and embracing illegal behavior.
You've got some elites in Washington who are just hell-bent on this election angle, and they're worried that too much focus on keeping the illegal immigrants out of the country will make the Republican Party a minority party for the long term -- and they call people like me "nativists." Yeah nativists, xenophobes, racists, what have you. I mean, it's quite interesting. But what good is being a Republican or a conservative if you're going to throw it all out in order to attract certain votes from people who have grown up and been weaned on an entitlement mentality and expect that? And if somebody offers it, they're going to vote for it. So are we going to get in a competition with the left to see who can offer the biggest welfare state in order to get this swing vote of future Hispanics?
If we keep having more and more of them come into the country but we keep getting less and less of them to vote for us, how this accomplishing anything politically? At the same time, we're dumping our own conservative principles all over the place in order to secure whatever percentage of this swing vote. It's just fear out there, folks. Yeah, I'm sure I'll be accused of destroying the Republican Party. I know they're saying it. They're saying it about a lot of us here who have this position. In fact, "talk radio" is. You know, I well understand that I am talk radio, but I'm not all of talk radio. I have become the generic word. I'm like "Xerox" means a "copy machine." I mean, talk radio, when the left and the media talk about it. But how many times do I part ways with the so-called right-wing-talk radio bunch? Quite a few times. So when you hear talk radio is doing this or that and the other thing, understand what it is. It is an effort to discredit not just me, but everybody that does it. But we're not monolithic, and they are attempting to make all of talk radio be the same thing, and as you people who well know, who listen to the program regularly, such is not the case.
END TRANSCRIPT |
|
| Read the Background Material... |
|
Headline: Menace in Mexico...and the US Immigration Debate
By: Dick Morris
Date: April 3, 2006
IN its debate over how to change the U.S. immigration system, Washington neglected the impact in Mexico - which faces a crossroads election this summer.
And Mexico's choice could not be more important to the United States.
On July 2, the Mexican people will decide whether to elect ultra-leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (known as AMLO) as their next president.
Rumors have abounded for months that Lopez Obrador's campaign is getting major funding from Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. And last month Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-Ariz)., a moderate Republican, told several Mexican legislators that he had intelligence reports detailing revealing support from Hugo Chavez to AMLO's Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD).
Chavez is a firm ally of Cuba's Fidel Castro. Lopez Obrador could be the final piece in their grand plan to bring the United States to its knees before the newly resurgent Latin left.
Between them, Venezuela and Mexico export about 4 million barrels of oil each day to the United States, more than one-third of our oil imports. With both countries in the hands of leftist leaders, the opportunity to hold the U.S. hostage will be extraordinary.
Think we have security problems now, with Vicente Fox leading Mexico? Just wait until we have a 2,000-mile border with a chum of Chavez and Castro.
Lopez Obrador is not inevitable. Recent polls show the candidate of Fox's National Action Party (PAN), Felipe Calderon, closing in. But much will hinge on the resolution of the immigration debate now roiling Congress.
Lopez Obrador has attacked U.S. attempts to restrict Mexican immigration and will benefit tremendously if Congress alienates the Mexican electorate. A recent survey by John Zogby found that two-thirds of Mexicans feel Americans are racist and biased against them. A harsh shift in U.S. immigration policies could fuel a leftist victory in Mexico.
Mexicans are deeply offended by the idea of a wall designed to keep them out. Building a wall on the boarder without also starting a guest-worker program will play badly in Mexico. A wall with a guest-worker program might go down better, particularly if the legislation didn't include punitive provisions making illegal immigration a felony.
I have worked as a consultant for Fox and PAN, so I appreciate the delicacy of the political situation in Mexico. In Fox's election in 2000 ened the 71-year authoritarian rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) heavily dominated by old corrupt leaders linked to the drug traffic, Now PAN has nominated Calderon, once Fox's energy minister, to run for president.
The PRI's candidate this year, Roberto Madrazo, is widely expected to finish third - the party is still identified in the popular mind with the corruption of the past.
Most observers see feel the race will be between Lopez Obrador and Calderon. While the PAN candidate would be no puppet of the United States, he is fully committed to free market economics and wants a close relationship with our country. Lopez Obrador would be part of the Latin America's new, anti-U.S. left in.
That Latin Left includes Venezuela's President Evo Morales, who won as an overtly pro-cocoa-cultivation candidate. And in Peru, Ollanta Humala, a Chavez ally, is likely to finish first in this month's election and probably will win the runoff.
But Mexico, with its vast oil resources and its long border and free-trade agreement with the United States, would be the crown jewel for America's enemies. We have only to hope that Congress won't pass legislation that alienates the Mexican electorate and delivers the country into AMLO's hands.
Headline: The 1965 Immigration Act: Anatomy of a Disaster
Source: FrontPageMag
Date: December 10, 2002
By: Ben Johnson
America's current mass immigration mess is the result of a change in the laws in 1965. Prior to 1965, despite some changes in the 50's, America was a low-immigration country basically living under immigration laws written in 1924. Thanks to low immigration, the swamp of cheap labor was largely drained during this period, America became a fundamentally middle-class society, and our many European ethnic groups were brought together into a common national culture. In some ways, this achievement was so complete that we started to take for granted what we had achieved and forgot why it happened. So in a spasm of sentimentality on the Right and lies on the Left, we opened the borders.
Born of liberal ideology, the 1965 bill abolished the national origins quota system that had regulated the ethnic composition of immigration in fair proportion to each group's existing presence in the population. In a misguided application spirit of the civil rights era, the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations saw these ethnic quotas as an archaic form of chauvinism. Moreover, as Cold Warriors facing charges of "racism" and "imperialism," they found the system rhetorically embarrassing. The record of debate over this seismic change in immigration policy reveals that left-wingers, in their visceral flight to attack "discrimination," did not reveal the consequences of their convictions. Instead, their spokesmen set out to assuage concerned traditionalists with a litany of lies and wishful thinking.
Chief among national concerns was total numeric immigration. Senate floor manager and Camelot knight-errant Ted Kennedy, D-Massachusetts, assured jittery senators that "our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually." Senator Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, further calmed that august body, insisting "the total number of potential immigrants would not be changed very much." Time has proven otherwise. Average immigration levels before the 1965 amendments took effect hovered around 300,000 per annum. Yet 1,045,000 legal immigrants flooded our cities in 1996 alone.
The 1965 "reform" reoriented policy away from European ethnic groups, yet implemented numbers similar to 1950's rates in an attempt to keep immigration under control. However, Congressmen managed to miss a loophole large enough to allow a 300 percent in immigration, because they did not take into account two "sentimental" provisions within the bill. Immediate family members of U.S. citizens and political refugees face no quotas. Their likely impact on the nation was ignored, presumably because aiding families and the dispossessed cast the right emotive glow.
Yet leftists could sound like hard-nosed defenders of the national interest when necessary. In urging passage of the 1965 bill, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, D-New York, wrote in a letter to the New York Times, "The time has come for us to insist that the quota system be replaced by the merit system." As if merit is the operative principle along the Rio Grande today! Similarly, Representative Robert Sweeney, D-Ohio, insisted the bill was "more beneficial to us." In fact, the 1965 bill made "family reunification" - including extended family members - the key criterion for eligibility. These new citizens may in turn send for their families, creating an endless cycle known to sociologists as the immigration chain. The qualifications of immigrants have predictably fallen. Hispanic immigrants, by far the largest contingent, are eight times more likely than natives to lack a ninth-grade education, and less than half as likely to have a college degree.
The bill did not end discrimination based on what President John F. Kennedy called "the accident of birth." (This of course begs the question of whether birth within the nation, the basis of common national community, is just an accident, but let that pass for now.) It de facto grossly discriminates in favor of Mexicans and certain other groups.
Not only has the bill failed in its stated purpose, it has realized many of its critics' worst nightmares. Concern mounted that this bill would radically change the ethnic composition of the United States. Such things were still considered legitimate concerns in 1965, in the same Congress that had just passed the key civil rights legislation of the 1960's.
Specific influx predictions that were made seem tragicomic today. Senator Robert Kennedy predicted a total of 5,000 immigrants from India; his successor as Attorney General, Nicholas Katzenbach, foresaw a meager 8,000. Actual immigration from India has exceeded by 1,000-times Robert Kennedy's prediction.
Senator Hiram Fong, R-Hawaii, calculated that "the people from [Asia] will never reach 1 percent of the population." Even in 1965, people were willing to admit that we have a reasonable interest in not being inundated by culturally alien foreigners, and it was considered acceptable to say so on the floor of the Senate. Try that today, even as a supposed conservative! (Asians currently account for three percent of the population, and will swell to near 10 percent by 2050 if present trends continue.)
The only remaining Congressman who had voted on the 1920s quotas, Representative Emanuel Celler, D-New York, insisted, "There will not be, comparatively speaking, many Asians or Africans entering this country." Today, the number of Asians and Africans entering this country each year exceeds the annual average total number of immigrants during the 1960s.
Yet the largest ethnic shift has occurred within the ranks of Hispanics. Despite Robert Kennedy's promise that, "Immigration from any single country would be limited to 10 percent of the total," Mexico sent 20 percent of last year's immigrants. Hispanics have made up nearly half of all immigrants since 1968. After a 30-year experiment with open borders, whites no longer constitute a majority of Californians or residents of New York City.
As immigrants pour in, native Americans feel themselves pushed out. In 1965, Senator Hugh Scott, R-Pennsylvania, opined, "I doubt if this bill will really be the cause of crowding the present Americans out of the 50 states." Yet half-a-million native Californians fled the state in the last decade, while its total population increased by three million, mostly immigrants. This phenomenon also holds true in microcosm. In tiny Ligonier, Indiana, (population 4,357) 914 Hispanics moved in and 216 native Americans departed during the 1990s. Hispanics now outnumber the Amish as the area's dominant minority.
Thirty-plus years of immigration at historic levels have also had an economic impact on America. In 1965, Ted Kennedy confidently predicted, "No immigrant visa will be issued to a person who is likely to become a public charge." However, political refugees qualify for public assistance upon setting foot on U.S. soil. The exploding Somali refugee population of Lewiston, Maine, (pop. 36,000) is largely welfare-dependent. Likewise, 2,900 of Wausau, Wisconsin's 4,200 Hmong refugees receive public assistance. In all, 21 percent of immigrants receive public assistance, whereas 14 percent of natives do so. Immigrants are 50 percent more likely than natives to live in poverty.
Ted Kennedy also claimed the 1965 amendments "will not cause American workers to lose their jobs." Teddy cannot have it both ways: either the immigrant will remain unemployed and become a public charge, or he will take a job that otherwise could have gone to a native American. What is presently undisputed - except by the same economic analysts at Wired magazine and the Wall Street Journal who gave us dot-com stocks - is that immigrant participation lowers wages.
Despite the overwhelming assurances of the bill's supporters, the 1965 Immigration Reform Act has remade society into the image its critics most feared. Immigration levels topping a million a year will increase U.S. population to 400 million within 50 years. Meanwhile, exponents of multiculturalism insist new arrivals make no effort to assimilate; to do so would be "genocidal," a notion that makes a mockery of real genocides. Instead, long-forgotten grudges are nursed against the white populace. Native citizens take to flight as the neighborhoods around them, the norms in their hometowns, are debased for the convenience of low-paid immigrants and well-heeled businessmen. All the while, indigenous paychecks drop through lower wages and higher taxes collected to provide social services for immigrants. And this only takes into account legal immigration.
These results were unforeseen by liberals easily led about by their emotions. Others were not so blind. Jewish organizations had labored since 1924 to unweave national origins quotas by admitting family members on non-quota visas. The B'nai B'rith Women and the American Council for Judaism Philanthropic Fund, among other Jewish organizations, supported this reform legislation while it was yet in subcommittee in the winter of 1965. Roman Catholics had the twin motivations of still-evolving social justice doctrine and the potential windfall of a mass influx of co-religionists from Latin America. Other organized minorities pressured for increased immigration to benefit relatives in their homelands. The ultra-liberal Americans for Democratic Action, the ACLU and the National Lawyers Guild joined the chorus. Further, the Communist Party USA supported higher immigration on the grounds that it destabilizes working Americans.
Americans must realize demographic trends are not inevitable, the product of mysterious forces beyond their control. Today's population is the result of yesterday's immigration policy, and that policy is as clearly broken as its backers' assurances were facetious. A rational policy will only come about when native Americans place the national interest above liberal howls of "prejudice" and "tribalism."
|
|
|
| *Note: Links to content outside RushLimbaugh.com usually become inactive over time. |
|
|
