RUSH: Jenny in Nevada City, California, I’m glad you waited. You’re on Open Line Friday. Nice to have you here.
CALLER: Thank you so much, Rush. Oh, my goodness, it’s such an honor to talk to you.
RUSH: Thank you. Thank you so much.
CALLER: I’ve been listening to you since you were in Sacramento. I guess I’m a Rush Baby.
RUSH: Well, you are.
CALLER: I am just so frustrated right now with California and listening to Schwarzenegger saying how we need help. We don’t need help. What we need is to close our borders. We need to send every illegal immigrant, alien, whoever, back to where they came from. I don’t care where they came from, but we’re paying for all of their health care, their welfare, everything else. I don’t know how to get my voice heard, every stupid California politician that needs to get their head out of their you-know-where to realize this. This is the number one problem in California, and I need your help.
RUSH: Yesterday on this program we had a discussion of the inflated prices of many goods and services in this country and the reason why I think long-term leveraged rollover debt that’s backed up by nothing has contributed greatly. I don’t want to repeat the whole discussion, but it comes down to, I’ll give you an example, we used health care. If health care were priced so that the average patient consumer could afford it, why, we’d have a whole different picture.
CALLER: Legal patients?
RUSH: Band-Aids would not cost $300. Now, people, ‘Rush, Band-Aids do cost $300, but why is it?’ And most people think it’s greed on the part of the health care providers because this is what the Democrat Party and the media has done. All business, all big business people, they are greedy. And when you’re sick, and you can go nowhere else, they are going to rape you. So a Band-Aid’s 300 bucks, a bed overnight, $600 to $800, depending on the hospital you go to. They do all these tests on you that you don’t need just to jack up the price. The reason a Band-Aid in the hospital is $300 is because hospitals are forced by law to treat people who do not pay, i.e., many of the people you just talked about. So you’re right, if those people were not putting stress on the system, in other words, if everybody was paying then market forces would reflect a little greater reality in health care, and this is not contained just to health care. There are a lot of items and services.
CALLER: How many stimulus checks went out to people that should not have gotten them? The money is being bled out of the United States and sent to other countries. We didn’t stimulate our economy. We stimulated every other country’s economy that the money is being sent back there for.
RUSH: Why do you think that is? You’re smart. Give me an idea. Why do you think this is happening?
CALLER: I think it’s because we’ve got politicians that are too stupid to tell employers, ‘Hey, if you’re caught with an illegal employee –‘
RUSH: No.
CALLER: ‘– you’ll be fined.’
RUSH: No, no, no, no, no.
CALLER: Because there are a bunch of libs running the country?
RUSH: No, no, no. You are an informed, average citizen, I can tell, you’re in Nevada City, California.
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: You’re looking at your state, and you’re looking at things that make literally no sense. You’re looking at health care, welfare, child care, education, whatever it is, payments made by you and other American citizens via your taxes to people who are not citizens and you’re saying, ‘How come nobody else can see this?’ The state is running a $42 billion budget, taxes are at an all-time high and going up, new fees are being added on. The people doing this have to know the problem. Why don’t they fix it? The answer is very simple. These people are looked upon as future voters, if they can be made legal with a program like amnesty. And don’t think that’s not going to come back once the Obama crowd gets in there. They’re going to be working with Senator McCain on this and we’re going to get glorious stories about how there’s bipartisanship and the defeated Republican presidential candidate is not bitter at all, he is eager and willing to help Obama work on a signature issue of comprehensive immigration reform, which will be amnesty. And this time there are going to be fewer Republicans around to stop it.
CALLER: What can I do as an average citizen to get the word out and make people realize this and start seeing what illegal immigration is really doing to our country?
RUSH: See, this is the frustration.
CALLER: That’s why I came to you, Rush.
RUSH: Everybody knows.
CALLER: But no one’s talking about it!
RUSH: Well, now, wait a second.
CALLER: Not one economist.
RUSH: Wait a second. The economists are just part of the Washingtonian elite crew.
CALLER: I know, I know.
RUSH: What do you mean nobody is talking about it? We stopped it last summer. Well, two summers ago. We stopped it.
CALLER: But then we started it up again.
RUSH: Well, no. What’s happened is they’re going about trying to get it incrementally now rather than one big fell swoop via things like the SCHIP program, the children and infants health program, throw in a little inclusion for illegal immigrants there. Look, politicians want those votes and they want the eventual contributions those people are going to make out of gratitude. However, I have to tell you, there is some good news to report here, don’t know how much, but deportations are up, sharply.
CALLER: Good! I’ll be happy to pay for a bus.
RUSH: And I’ll tell you something else. With the economic recession that we’re in, I’m reading, I don’t know what the numbers are, but a lot of illegal immigrants are just leaving. A lot of them being laid off because they’ll be the first to go and they’re leaving and they’re returning to their home countries. Not to say they won’t be back when things kick up, but there is some progress being made, and this is one of the reasons why some of the talk on this has died down because the people talking about it live in the real world. It’s a less pervasive problem right now because other problems are overshadowing it. But mark my words, elections have consequences and agendas are important and this is something that will rear its head. I’ll tell you how it’s going to happen.
Once we start coming out of the recession hopefully, fairly soon, once that starts happening, the same argument will be made, well, hey, business needs some labor and these are jobs Americans won’t do, standards are much higher. The whole cycle again, because the media will advance whatever it is the Obama crowd and the McCain crowd want advanced on this, because they would love to see it, too. Anything conservatives oppose, economists that you’re talking about, the media, Democrats, will be in favor of. So it’s a cyclical thing. But about the only thing we can do to stop this is to just raise hell like happened last time. And believe me, hell will be raised. People have not gone to sleep on it, they don’t think the problem has been solved, and they’ll be adamantly opposed to it if it’s tried in a massive way again.