RUSH: Walt in Garner Valley, California. Where is that, Walt? Where is Garner Valley, California?

CALLER: Up above Palm Springs, Rush. Merry Christmas.

RUSH: Ah, cool.

CALLER: What I wanted to say is, you know, I align myself with the Tea Party, but they need to change their attitude towards illegal aliens. Don’t get me wrong, it made me mad for years that they ran across the border, but, you know what, the Republicans, the Democrats let ’em in and we as a people hired ’em. Most of them are really nice people, they have married into families out here, and, you know, make the good ones citizens, throw the bad ones out.

RUSH: Okay, fine with me. Who’s in charge of finding the bad ones?

CALLER: Well, I don’t know. They’re gonna have to figure that out.

RUSH: I got an idea. Let’s find the ones that are breaking the law and get rid of them.

CALLER: Right, right, but you —

RUSH: Well!

CALLER: — can’t throw 15 million people out of this country. Come on.

RUSH: Nobody’s advocating that. I haven’t seen a single person advocate that.

CALLER: Yes, but they’re really down on them and they’re Christians, too. We need more Christians in this country.

RUSH: Who’s down on them?

CALLER: The Tea Party, and I align myself with the Tea Party. The Republicans. I mean, the base, you know, we got —

RUSH: No, no. They’re not down on these people. You’ve got to know better than that.

CALLER: Rush, I see it out here in California. They’re great people.

RUSH: What do you see?

CALLER: What do I see? I see, well, basically, racism. Saying nasty things about ’em. And they work for us. They work beside us. They’re good workers. They’re Christians. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not somebody on the left. I’m conservative.

RUSH: Right. I can tell.

CALLER: You still there?

RUSH: Yeah. Yeah. I’m here.

CALLER: But I just think we need to do something to help these people, the ones that are good —

RUSH: What do you want to do?

CALLER: Get rid of ones that cause problems and get ’em outta here.

RUSH: Okay, well, fine, what do you want to do?

CALLER: We can’t win that right now.

RUSH: Well, it’s easy to say, what do you want to do for ’em?

CALLER: What do I want to do for ’em? Well, let’s start, let ’em apply to become citizens.

RUSH: Oh.

CALLER: I know a lot of people think it’s not fair. My parents waited five, six years to come to this country, five years to become citizens themselves, and it’s not fair to people that are in line.

RUSH: You sound like Mitt Romney, you want to swallow hard.

CALLER: No.

RUSH: How are you gonna find the malcontents to get rid of ’em?

CALLER: A lot of people want to throw them out, they’d like to just round ’em up, and we can’t do that.

RUSH: But you’re the one saying to do it, keep the good ones, throw the bad ones out.

CALLER: Right. Check their records, see if they got —

RUSH: They’re in the shadows. We don’t know who they are.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Now, the last caller that we had, there’s one thing that he said, and it’s a no-win. It’s a no-win. Here’s guy who’s a conservative who’s claiming the Tea Party’s racist and doesn’t like these people ’cause he’s heard the racist comments out in California about the illegal immigrants. It’s time that we turned Christian, realized that there are a lot of Christians and welcomed ’em in. They’re already doing grunt work for us and this, that, and the other thing.

It dawned on me yet again that people do not understand principled opposition to amnesty. There’s nothing personal about it. It has nothing to do with these particular 15 or 20 million people. It has nothing to do with that. It has everything to do with borders. It has everything to do with preserving the country as we know it with a distinct and proud of it, damn it, American culture, which is why every immigrant in the past has wanted to come here.

There’s not a person I know that wants to deport, try to round up 15 or 20 million people and send ’em packing. It isn’t practical. It isn’t going to happen. What everybody wants is the border secured with active limits on the amount of immigration so that the flow is two things: economically acceptable and productive, and that something that used to happen automatically begins to happen again; that’s assimilation.

Every time I tell people that there was no immigration in this country for over 40 years, from the 1920s to the 1960s, seventies, they’re shocked. You’d be amazed at the number of people that do not know we totally closed the borders after the wave of European immigration in the 1920s. And we did it for one reason. That mass arrival of immigrants needed to be assimilated.

Now, they wanted to be. They wanted to become Americans. They had to learn English. They learned American custom. They became acquainted with American holidays. They studied for citizenship. All of this they wanted. And it took that many years to assimilate. All the opposition to amnesty is not personal to these 15 million people. It is, A, rule of law. If we lose the rule of law, that’s all we’ve got. We are seeing how really precariously structured this country really is.

We’ve got a document, the Constitution, that is the law of the land, and we’ve now got a president who, when he doesn’t like it, pretends it doesn’t exist. There is no mechanism other than censure or impeachment to deal with that. And the Republicans have taken both off the table. So there’s no signal that he must stop. If this continues, the United States is not gonna be what it was founded and the Constitution spells out. Somebody asked me on the phone recently, “Is it the honor system, Rush? Is that how it’s worked for 200 plus years, the honor system?”

What the caller meant was was it just high elected officials, presidents are just duty-bound to obey the Constitution? Well, partly, but it was respect for it, but it was also respect for the law. There was a reverence for it. Now, there’s always been opposition to it. Since the days it was written there have been people opposed to it. I don’t mean to present a Pollyannish picture here. But it is precariously balanced. If any given president or succession of presidents just decides to pretend it doesn’t exist, and if the other two branches of government aren’t gonna do anything about it, then it won’t exist, and this country, there will always be an America, but it won’t be what was founded. Who knows what it will be, but it won’t be. That’s what people are worried about.

They’re not worried about being overrun. It’s nothing personal here. It’s a desire to hold onto America and make it a beacon, keep it a beacon. Stand for something. We’re losing our economic stature and status to the ChiComs now. There’s a reason for this. And when you realize that amnesty and open borders is a weapon used by the anti-American left, that’s reason enough to oppose ’em. When you realize who wants open borders, when you realize the political and ideological motivation behind it, you are duty bound, talk about the honor system, you’re duty-bound, I would think, to stand up and oppose it.

It isn’t personal. It has nothing to do with ethnicity or race whatsoever. And, by the way, don’t go crazy crediting all these amnesty people with love of humanity. They don’t want these people to ever be self-reliant. They want these people to be voting as dependent incompetents. The political powers that be that are trying to make this happen see a wave of potential registered voters who are unskilled and uneducated and will never be self-reliant. Therefore they are always going to need support from government. They are seeking dutiful, respectful, appreciative dependents.

The open-borders crowd has no love for these people. That’s the thing that really bugs me. These people are pawns and there is no desire for these people to come here and become the best they can be. That’s not gonna serve the purpose of the political class. The value of these people is as future voters. The Democrat Party needs a permanent underclass, and as people in the old days, not so much true right now, but in the old days as people worked hard and moved themselves out of the lower quintiles of poverty and up until the middle class and beyond, they became less and less dependent on government. The Democrats had to replace them. And so Ted Kennedy thought after 40 years of no immigration, well, let’s open the borders.

That’s what it was all about. It’s inhuman if you ask me. And these people get away with getting all the credit for compassion and caring and big hearts. The people pushing this, in my mind, are the people who have the least real human concern. These are just pawns. It’s offensive in every which way you can think of. That’s why whenever you hear people talk seriously about this, border security is always the first thing required before anything else in a deal to take place, provable, demonstrable. That would mean years of border security before we do anything on amnesty.

You can’t just promise that you agree with securing the border and then we make ’em legal. You gotta show three years that you’re serious about securing the border. Then we do it. There has to be some value attached to this or it all becomes meaningless. Which, sadly, way too much of what used to be important is now becoming meaningless as the political class corrupts as much as they can for their own power.