| The Immigration Problem |
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January 31, 2005 |
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BEGIN TRANSCRIPT |
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John Fund on the trail, his piece at Opinionjournal.com today has a subheadline that says: "Limbaugh issues a warning to President Bush. -- On Friday, Rush Limbaugh, a staunch Bush supporter, took two separate opportunities to warn the president that he faced conservative opposition on some key issues that could hurt his chances of passing the rest of his agenda in the second term. First was federal spending which is surging out of control. The other was immigration which Mr. Limbaugh told his listeners could break up the Republican conservative coalition à la Ross Perot." He quotes me as saying, this is an accurate quote, "We can't maintain our sovereignty without securing and protecting our borders in an era where terrorists around the world seek entry to this country." Warning to President Bush? I was actually warning the people in the audience as well as President Bush, I guess, but I was also warning politicians of all stripes about this. Now, let me just review in part what I said in these remarks that generated this story in the Opinionjournal.com, and there's also a story at WorldNetDaily.com. The fact is this, folks. Our federal laws as related to immigration are being violated almost without consequence.
When that happens, our whole rule of law is undermined; the respect for the law and the authority of the very Congress and White House that passed and signed these laws, all these things are undermined. A nation that cannot control its borders cannot control its sovereignty. Now, both political parties have determined that it is in their political best interests to pander to illegal immigrants, and that's exactly what they're doing. Both sides are pandering to illegal immigrants for votes. They're afraid to offend them, so important are these coalitions and this groupthink when it comes to politics rather than looking at the population as a whole in going after a population as a whole, the Democrats especially get into groupthink, but this whole notion of illegal immigrants as a group that we can't offend, is something that both parties have basically signed onto as their best political interests to do so. The justifications, however, for people coming here illegally are simply not legitimate excuses for violating federal law. We don't treat other lawbreakers with such kid gloves. A U.S. citizen doesn't pay his federal income taxes because to do so would mean selling the family farm. He doesn't get a pass. He has to pay up or serve time in the federal prison. What's happening here is that politics is trumping security and the rule of law.
What's very strange about this is that the political parties, both of them, are making the wrong political calculation. Most Americans, whichever party, oppose illegal immigration. What they support is legal immigration. But the Republican base, more so than the Democrat base, draws a line in the sand on this subject which is why it does in fact threaten to break apart the Republican coalition. Now, we've heard all the arguments. "Illegal immigrants are doing jobs that Americans won't do," and I used to believe that. There's a part of that that I'm no longer willing to sign onto. Because if illegal immigrants are now doing jobs that Americans won't do, then the government should increase the level of legal immigration, if that's the case, a legal immigrant or an illegal immigrant is of the same caliber. So if immigrants are doing the work that Americans won't do, then make those jobs filled by legal immigrants and follow the law. But there's actually even more to it than this. Illegal immigrants drive down wages which is why they're so attractive to a lot of business sectors, particularly Hollywood. They make certain jobs less attractive to citizens because they pay a lot less as a result and the benefits are frequently less as well so it becomes a self-fulfilling argument. |
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If illegal immigrants keep driving down wages and benefits, fewer and fewer citizens are going to want to do them. What's so ironic about this particular argument is that if there's a recognition that it costs too much to hire a citizen, then those who support illegal immigration on this basis or make this argument should be at the forefront in reducing the impediments to hiring U.S. citizens, but they're not. Instead they're out there demanding increasing the minimum wage, increasing the Social Security tax, increasing health care costs to employers, all of which drive up the cost of hiring U.S. workers, which makes illegal immigrants far more attractive from a cost analysis even then. So this whole self-fulfilling prophecy becomes a cycle. The strain on the hospitals and the schools that are overwhelmed with illegal immigrants, you add that in, and that they're required to provide them with services, it's enormous. It used to be that those costs were only felt in border areas in the U.S., but not anymore. There's not a major city or state that isn't feeling the cost of illegal immigration. Illegal, illegal. Close to 25% of the inmates in our federal prisons are illegal immigrants, and countries like Mexico are unwilling to take back many of the worst and most violent criminals, and this is becoming a major issue in California where even some Democrats are frustrated with Mexico's conduct.
Mexico is actively urging its citizens to come, illegal, to the U.S. as a way of avoiding reforming their own government and economy -- and money sent back to Mexico from the U.S. is the second or third biggest import in that country. Mexico is even considering allowing Mexicans who were in the U.S. illegally to vote in Mexican elections, to help further enhance the political influences of illegals in our country. And there are organizations set up in our country for the sole purpose of defending all this behavior, including going into our courts to block state initiatives and expand the benefits illegal immigrants receive in our country. Mark Levin has a chapter on all this in his latest book, Men in Black. I mean, the foreign minister of Mexico just last week threatened to go to the international courts to sue the people of Arizona over their Proposition 200, which denies all these services to illegal immigrants, and here Mexico wants to go to the international courts to tell the people of Arizona they can't enforce American laws. Well, hell's bells, folks! Now this is getting out of hand, all because of a bunch of political pandering? And I'm telling you, some guy's going to come along as a candidate, like a Perot, and make sense on this and siphon off a bunch of Republican votes that would otherwise go to a Republican president, say, in 2008 or whatever, and voila! The coalition's gone.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
 Now, look, folks, the most important issue about this illegal immigration business, though, relates to national security. As great as the economic impacts are, the national security issue is the most important one. Remember here, we're talking about illegal immigration. You know, both parties -- this story in the Wall Street Journal and others portraying me as warning President Bush, but I think both parties are pandering here to these groups that support illegal immigration, because they're simply afraid to offend them for fear of what it might mean on Election Day down the road, and the problem is this: some slickster candidate like a Perot is going to come along and is going to start saying all the right magical things about this. And to the growing number of Americans, this immigration business is more so on the Republican side a draw-the-line-in-the-sand issue than it is with Democrats. So if some guy comes along à la Perot and says the right things there is the potential for a number of Republicans to whom this is the single most important issue down the road, they'll support the guy, and there you drive down the Republican candidate for president's totals to 45 or 44%, and, voila! The third-party candidate again comes up with this opportunity here to sink a Democrat or send a Democrat into office by splitting the coalition.
I'm not saying it's going to happen; this is one of the obstacles that's out there. I'm trying to temper all this optimism I have with a little bit of reality, and my optimism is based in reality, but this is an issue that is festering out there. If we learned anything after 9/11, it seems to me that we must know who's here and who's coming here -- and today more than three years later we don't and we've got all kinds of left-wing groups that characterize any effort to identify people based on their place of origin as racial profiling. Even the TSA has bowed to this nonsense as an example. How can you have a guest worker program of the kind being discussed if you don't take the steps to determine who's here and why? And, even if you accomplish this, you tell these people that in six years or so when their guest worker terms have ended, that they have to apply for permanent status here, what's to stop them from simple going underground for fear that they won't qualify? Not much -- and by then since you've encouraged millions more to come here, the problem is arguably worse, and the American people understand.
This is sort of like the House Bank issue: It was easy to understand. Members of Congress are able to go to a bank, their own bank and write checks for money they didn't have. It was essentially not being limited by whatever your salary is. Need some money? Go write a check for cash! The House Bank will cover you, overdraft after overdraft after overdraft. Well, that's not hard to understand. Neither is this because the word "illegal" is prominent, illegal immigrant. I mean, we've got all kinds of prosecutors day in and day out trying to enforce all kinds of laws but this one gets scant attention, and the American people understand it. It isn't complicated. But for some reason the political leadership is unwilling or incapable or just not desirous of addressing it. I mean, they can't even strengthen the driver's license process, and the driver's license was the document used most effectively by the 9/11 terrorists to move around in our country. Some of them had multiple illegal driver's licenses. Now, let me add one more thing about this: Our laws permit the hiring of immigrants for jobs here in America, especially high-tech type jobs, and we should always make room for those whose skills are needed and we should always make room for political prisoners and we always have.
We allow hundreds of thousands of immigrants into our country legally every year, so no one is talking about anti-immigrant, an anti-immigrant approach here, despite the best efforts of the illegal immigrant lobby to say so -- and there is an "illegal" immigrant lobby, and they're trying to make all of those who oppose illegal immigration sound as though they're opposed to all immigration. That's not the case. In the past when we've had large influxes of immigrants. Again: the vast majority came here legally or were turned away. There were specific locations and centers they were required to flow through. They were checked for skills, criminal records, health issues, et cetera, but at no time in our history -- and I want to make this very clear -- at no time in our history has our government ever sanctioned the unchecked flow of illegal immigrants into this country. What's happening now is unprecedented. It's not going to take too many Prop 187s or Prop 200s that are overturned or attempted to be overturned, particularly by the government of Mexico, to enrage people and wake them up. Tim in Cayucos, California, you're next. Welcome to the program.
CALLER: Hi, Rush, how are you today? |
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RUSH: Just fine, sir, thank you.
CALLER: Well, I'm a Republican, and I'm in the agricultural industry, and I don't know how many people are aware of it, but I would say 70% of the labor in harvesting our food we gotta eat every day, comes from illegal aliens, and if we don't have a guest worker program, we're going to run out of food grown in California.
RUSH: Well, what makes an illegal immigrant far more employable to you than a legal immigrant?
CALLER: Well, most legal immigrants when they come here, or most people that live here, want to move up. You talked about we should allow high-skilled people in, but there's very few replacement people on low-skilled. I helped people get legalized in 1986. Fifteen, twenty years ago, most of those guys are too old to be doing the fieldwork. We need young replacement workers. We've always needed that, and I think one of the reasons our country is so successful is because we have a very inexpensive food supply. How we gonna keep the labor coming?
RUSH: Well, you still haven't answered my question. I understand the economics of what you're talking about, but as I said earlier I think it becomes a self-fulfilling cycle. We keep employing people because they don't cost very much, which encourages the process, which then causes Democrats to run around say, "Well, we need more Social Security taxes, and we need more health care benefits for these illegals," and the legal people in this country are paying more in taxes, which ends up suppressing prices for people to do the work. What is different? Not all legal immigrants are high-tech. I specified high-tech because many in the semi-conductor industry in the high-tech business out in California are taking legal, educated immigrants from various countries around the world. But I'm not talking about those kind of people to go pick food and your crops in your fields. What is the difference? These same people that are coming in illegally, what would be the difference if those same people were allowed in legally and then you hired them? What would be the difference?
CALLER: Oh, no. I would love it if they were brought in legally.
RUSH: That's all I'm saying.
CALLER: Okay, that has to be a major part of it, but every time that issue has come up over the last five or ten years it's become so political nothing gets done, and I like the fact --
RUSH: Precisely, because both parties are afraid to tackle it, for fear of offending.
CALLER: No. Tom Ridge and George Bush are both willing to tackle it. Don't say they're not.
RUSH: Well, no, they're not willing to attack the illegal aspect of it. I mean, they want to turn illegals into legal with a stroke of the pen and with a program. But to become a legal immigrant in this country you've got to go through a process, and these people are not, and we're going to just waive that process and we're doing it on the basis, "Ah, so many here we couldn't take backward steps on it anyway." Okay, even if you have an amnesty program, at some point, whether you call it that or not -- guest worker program, whatever you want to call it -- at some point we're going to have to start enforcing all of this so that the immigrants that do get in here are legal, even the ones that end up working for you.
CALLER: Well, right, but have a guest worker program and have replacements and realize the fact that people can only do physical labor in fields for so many years, and you need to replace them, and this thing has been just out of control for many years, then maybe there's millions of them. I know I speak to a lot of Mexicans in the farm, in the fields. They'll all admit to me the documents they're using are not real.
RUSH: You're just making my point here, and all I'm telling you is: What you and I think about this is not going to be the factor down the road. If this keeps up, and people... You know, the people of this country get what they want, Tim. I made this point Friday night in the speech, too. They get what they want. The country, the people, wanted abortion. They got it. They found a way. The majority of the people at one time wanted it. They got it. There are exceptions, but in a representative republic the people get what they want. Now, sometimes, I know, liberals impose things that people don't want via the courts and so forth, but for the most part, it's what makes this country great, people end up, the majority gets what it wants. Not all the time, but quite a lot. When you see people in California and the border states start passing these initiatives and say, "We're fed up with paying all of these benefits and education, health care and all this for illegals," there's a message being sent there, and this sentiment is growing beyond these border states. It's not just Arizona. It's not just California now. It's becoming prominent in a number of other states that are nowhere near the southern border, and as this picks up steam and the public gets angrier and angrier and angrier as nothing is done about it, it's going to have its point where it all collapses.
Then when you have this foreign minister of Mexico saying (paraphrasing), "All right, I'm going to sue the people of Arizona in an international court because I want the illegals from our country to get American benefits," I guarantee you, you let the word spread into Arizona and California of that, and there's going to be outrage about it. People aren't going to put up with it, and at some point, and I don't know when, that's why I'm issuing this as a little veiled warning -- and I could be wrong. I doubt it, but I could be wrong about this. I just think this is one of these things that's effervescing out there, the people of Washington don't get. This is not a problem in Washington, you know, the political parties are not -- well, the Democrats especially are not attuned to this. A lot of Republicans are. Tom Tancredo and a number of others are concerned about it. I'm just waving a little pink flag here. It's not yet red, but it's close to being that way. If anybody would just make a serious effort to reverse the tide, get some inertia and momentum going in the opposite direction, it would show people that somebody, some people somewhere taking it seriously. Look, I appreciate the call.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
You know, at the risk of offending our previous caller, the farmer, I think his call typifies the problem. I mean, his argument was that we won't have agricultural workers or cheap food prices if we get tough to illegal immigrants. And some people say the same thing about the construction business, that we won't have cheap construction prices because many of the construction workers are illegals. So if we don't continue to keep the borders open all these cheap prices are going to go away, is somewhat absurd. Why should the American taxpayer have to subsidize agriculture? We do it in so many ways. We do it with price supports. We tell farmers not to grow crops and pay them not to grow them. The family farm is dwindling away anyway. Corporate farming is quickly overtaking the family farm. But even so, when you just get right down to it, I'm sure people have an answer for me. "Well, we need to subsidize the agriculture business so we can eat cheaply. People have to eat, Rush! You can't get around that: People have to eat." Ah, fairness and so forth. All right, so the American people are supposed to subsidize the agriculture business. The American people end up paying for the social safety net for the illegals, so really how cheap is all this? We're paying for it in other areas; it's called taxes.
So while we think our food is cheaper because we've got illegals, we're having to pay for all of their social benefits and their health care and education, welfare benefits and all of that. We may pay less for asparagus, but in the end we pay more, don't we, in the form of taxes for other services? And these are the costs that never get factored in because you never pay it anyway. It's just deducted from your paycheck so you don't see it. But if there was a line item, if you got a bill every month from the government, this is what you owe for illegal immigrant health care, education, and welfare, I guarantee you the end would be at hand for subsidizing American business. The same people, the same people who support illegal immigration keep demanding that we raise the minimum wage. Now, somebody explain the logic in this to me. You price Americans out of the market, while at the same time encourage the use of illegals, and then you come around and say the American people don't have a "livable minimum wage" and we need to raise it. Well, we don't have a livable minimum wage because we have to raise it because we've got illegals doing jobs. And it's all done under the guise of, "It's helping us live cheaper, Rush," but in the end it isn't. Everything gets paid for and in this country the people pay for everything. Government pays for zilch because the government doesn't have a dime until they take it from us.
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Read the Articles... |
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Headline: Rush Limbaugh Issues a Warning to President Bush
By: John Fund
Source: The Wall Street Journal
Date: January 31, 2005
Rush for the Border
Limbaugh issues a warning to President Bush.
Monday, January 31, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST
ORLANDO, Fla.--In the aftermath of 9/11, conservatives bottled up their frustrations over some of President Bush's policies. Then they muted their criticism during the presidential campaign. But now it is spilling out in all directions--and the White House had better pay attention.
On Friday Rush Limbaugh, a staunch Bush supporter, took two separate opportunities to warn the president that he faced conservative opposition on some key issues that could hurt his chances of passing the rest of his second-term agenda. First was federal spending, which "is surging out of control," according to the Heritage Foundation's new "Mandate for Leadership." The other was immigration, which, Mr. Limbaugh told his listeners, "could break up the Republican-conservative coalition" à la Ross Perot. "We cannot maintain our sovereignty without securing and protecting our borders in an era where terrorists around the world seek entry to this country," he said.
Later that day, I spoke with Mr. Limbaugh backstage before he discussed immigration at a private meeting of 400 leading conservatives here. He told me his comments had been prompted in part by a wire story he had read that morning quoting Mexico's Foreign Secretary Luis Ernesto Derbez as saying his country might turn to international courts to block an Arizona law, passed by voters in November and taking effect this week, that bars illegal aliens from welfare benefits and requires proof of citizenship and a photo ID to vote. Mr. Derbez said the measure could lead to "discrimination based on [an] ethnic profile," and expressed sadness that exit polls found two-fifths of Arizona voters of Mexican descent had backed the measure (which passed with 56% statewide).
Rush has 20 million listeners a week, so if he decides to attack President Bush's plan to regularize immigration flows through a guest-worker program, he could help kill the idea. The president told reporters last week that he plans to make a guest worker plan a "priority," so last Friday he was peppered with questions about it at a private retreat for GOP congressmen at the Greenbrier resort in West Virginia. "Family values do not end at the Rio Grande river," Mr. Bush told the lawmakers, while assuring them his plan was not a backdoor amnesty program. He promised them more details in his State of the Union address on Wednesday.
He will have to engage critics in his own party more fully--especially since many Democrats will likely vote against his plan just to spite him. Many Republicans are steaming about what they see as White House obtuseness on immigration. Last month, Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin, the House Judiciary Committee chairman, held up passage of the bill revamping the nation's intelligence services until he got a promise that his colleagues would fast-track a bill that would make it harder for a foreigner to claim political asylum in the United States, impose strict national standards for driver licenses and strengthen border enforcement this year.
Now Mr. Sensenbrenner is furious over a USA Today story that quoted outgoing Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge as saying that a part of the intelligence reform bill that did pass doubling the size of the Border Patrol was "fool's gold" that wouldn't be included in the president's budget. "It's nice to say you're going to have 10,000 more Border Patrol agents in five years, but what other part of Homeland Security do you want to take money from?" Mr. Ridge asked.
Soon the five GOP House conferees who negotiated the intelligence bill sent a letter to President Bush demanding that he fully fund the Border Patrol provisions. Speaker Dennis Hastert's office told Human Events that he too favored inclusion of the funds in the president's budget.
One of the five signers of the letter to President Bush was Rep. David Dreier, chairman of the House Rules Committee. He is undergoing a swift political course correction on immigration. Last year, two radio talk show hosts in Los Angeles named John Kobylt and Ken Chiampou spent weeks urging listeners to defeat Mr. Dreier, who they claimed was only paying "lip service" to efforts to halt illegal immigration.
Mr. Dreier spent the last two weeks of the campaign promising a renewed focus on immigration, even running ads featuring his friend Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger calling him "tough as nails" on immigration. Mr. Dreier won, but his 54% showing against a woefully underfinanced Democrat was the lowest of his career. Only weeks after the election, Mr. Dreier announced he would introduce legislation to require creation of a photo-embedded Social Security card, which employers would be required to check with a national database to determine the immigration status of a job applicant.
Mr. Kobylt says talk radio has tasted blood on the immigration issue and he expects other hosts around the country to now pick up on the issue. "Republicans are in bed with businesses who like low labor costs, and Democrats have this socialist bent," he says. "But the taxpayers in this country cannot be responsible for a corrupt, bankrupt country like Mexico. We should start throwing employers in jail, a few fat rich white guys in prison."
Approaches like that, or Pat Buchanan's idea of a reverse Berlin Wall, are neither desirable or politically possible to implement (barring another major terrorist attack that is the work of illegal aliens). But the pressure to "do something" on immigration is mounting. While no incumbent is likely to lose his seat on the issue, three pro-guest-worker incumbents from Arizona and Utah faced primary challenges last year. As a result, many congressmen don't even want to hear about Mr. Bush's plan.
A clear-eyed analysis would tell them the political clout of anti-immigration activists is limited. The best showing by any of the anti-immigrant primary challengers was by state Rep. Randy Graf in Arizona, who won 43% against Rep. Jim Kolbe, a gay Republican who has always had difficulties with social conservatives. And more than 44% of Arizonans voted against Proposition 200, the initiative denying public services to illegal aliens, even though the state's border with Mexico has become the crossing point of choice for smugglers.
The illegal alien problem is a serious one in Arizona, one that my brother in Tucson observed during a 30-year career in law enforcement. Erin Anderson, whose family settled in Cochise County on the Arizona-Mexico border in the 1880s, says the tide of illegal immigration has led to increased crime and made the property of many ranchers effectively worthless. Over 230,000 illegals were arrested last year in Cochise County alone (population 122,000), a fifth of the whole country's total. Even so, Proposition 200, a relatively mild anti-immigration measure, won only 58% in Cochise County, a showing that was two points below President Bush's.
Even though the political impact of anti-immigration sentiment can be exaggerated, Mr. Bush would be wise to take steps to ensure that immigration doesn't become what crime and abortion became for the Democrats: wedge issues that drove many voters to the other party. He will not come close to passing a guest-worker program until he proves his bona fides in areas of legitimate concern on immigration.
He should start with recognizing that border security is now inextricably tied up in the public's mind with homeland security. Mr. Bush signed off on increases in the Border Patrol's budget. He owes it to Congress to keep his end of the bargain, override Mr. Ridge, and make clear in his State of the Union address the money will be appropriated.
Mr. Bush could then propose limits on election fraud, which was an indisputably popular part of Proposition 200 in Arizona. Federal immigration officials have falsely told election officials in Maryland and other states who want to weed illegal aliens from their voter rolls that it is against privacy laws for them to share such information. Mr. Bush could stop such stonewalling.
The 1993 federal motor-voter law imposed onerous restrictions on the ability of states to purge voters who are ineligible or noncitizens. It should be amended to make purge procedures easier. Federal funds for election reform could also be made contingent on states requiring that voters show proper identification if they vote in person or sending copies of such identification when submitting an absentee ballot.
Mr. Bush also needs to crack down on scofflaw officials who are thumbing their nose at federal immigration policy, including some in his own party. In September 2003, for example, Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York signed an executive order forbidding New York policemen to share information on immigration offenses with the Immigration Service, except if the illegal immigrant breaks some other law or is suspected of terrorist activity.
Immigration is certainly more complex than many border-control advocates would have you believe. But supporters of rational reform that would regularize the flow of immigrant labor should recognize that it must be accompanied by measures to address the legitimate concerns of Americans who worry the federal government has completely lost control of the borders. Many voters don't trust any plan coming out of Washington, whether it's by Mr. Bush or anyone else. It's that concern that is driving Rush Limbaugh and other supporters of the president to send up political warning flares.
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