Posted on 02/09/2007 11:45:59 AM PST by bondjamesbond
According to a congressman's wife who attended a Republican women's luncheon yesterday, Karl Rove explained the rationale behind the president's amnesty/open-borders proposal this way: "I don't want my 17-year-old son to have to pick tomatoes or make beds in Las Vegas."
There should be no need to explain why this is an obscene statement coming from a leader in the party that promotes the virtues of hard work, thrift, and sobriety, a party whose demi-god actually split fence rails as a young man, a party where "respectable Republican cloth coat" once actually meant something. But it does seem to be necessary to explain.
Rove's comment illustrates how the Bush-McCain-Giuliani-Hagel-Martinez-Brownback-Huckabee approach to immigration strikes at the very heart of self-government. It is precisely Rove's son (and my own, and those of the rest of us in the educated elite) who should work picking tomatoes or making beds, or washing restaurant dishes, or mowing lawns, especially when they're young, to help them develop some of the personal and civic virtues needed for self-government. It's not that I want my kids to make careers of picking tomatoes; Mexican farmworkers don't want that either. But we must inculcate in our children, especially those likely to go on to high-paying occupations, that there is no such thing as work that is beneath them.
As Tocqueville wrote: "In the United States professions are more or less laborious, more or less profitable; but they are never either high or low: every honest calling is honorable." The farther we move from that notion, the closer we come to the idea that the lawyer is somehow better than the parking-lot attendant, undercutting the very foundation of republican government.
This is why the president's "willing worker/willing employer" immigration extravaganza is morally wrong — it's not just that it will cost taxpayers untold billions, or that it will beggar our own blue-collar workers, or that it will compromise security, or that it will further dissolve our sovereignty. It would do all that, of course, but most importantly it would change the very nature of our society for the worse, creating whole occupations deemed to be unfit for respectable Americans, for which little brown people have to be imported from abroad. In other words, mass immigration, even now, is moving us toward an unequal, master-servant society.
To borrow from Lincoln, our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. When it comes to this, I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty — to Saudi Arabia, for instance.
Plus....
Social Security payments,
1099's,
liability...
One woman that I talked to in the neighborhood said that she didn't want her 12 year old son getting hurt pushing a lawnmower.
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Let me translate: I don't want to argue with the fat, lazy little brat and wrestle his GameBoy away from him.
I hope this isn't true. I already have a dislike for country club republican types.
Well said!
And some can even use both at the same time. ;)
&&
Well said!
If a child lives too soft a life growing up, they aren't going to be equipped to handle it when an unpleasant job comes their way.
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Not to mention the trials of raising children. I am just appalled at how poorly so many young parents are doing at that job, which is both physically and mentally challenging.
They should not. The limits on legal European immigration should be lifted, as well. Anybody who wants to come here and integrate into our society should have a chance at the spaces that we have available. And there should be a lot of spaces.
The problem is when you accept the people without making the spaces available. Then you have a sub-class of people that is criminal by definition. The people themselves are illegal. Such a person has little or no incentive to take on the responsibilities of citizenship.
Check out Post 95. Apparently the White House is saying that Rove was "taken out of context".
I would like to hear the context that makes this statement anything other than stupid and outrageous... Maybe if the full statement from Karl Rove was "If I wanted to say the most stupid, most divisive, most anti-American thing I could think of, I would say that I want open borders because... etc."
Short of that, I think "context" is pretty irrelevant.
It is not that Americans won't do these jobs, Americans won't do them for the pay that Mexicans will do them. When landscaping is significantly more profitable than a job at Blockbuster or Abercrombie, the kids will gladly cut the McGrass.
Installing drywall or shingle roofing used to be profitable occupations. The advent of illegal aliens ended that. Try to run a business doing asphalt roofs in most of this country. You can't. The tax cheat with the illegal alien crew will undercut you every time. You can't compete with him, he pays his workers 25% less than yours, and they're getting the same take home pay.
Mr. Yuppie doesn't care about that. His only concern is the square footage. Illegal aliens give him more of that. They're not contributing to our economy, they're exhausting it. Mr. Yuppie pays increased school taxes for the pool crew's kids, pays higher car insurance because the roofer has a wreck and no insurance, and pays higher health insurance premiums because the landscaper won't pay the emergency room and uses it as a personal physician. Mr. Yuppie also pays higher federal taxes and fees because of this. He doesn't care. All he sees is a large house with a big screen tv. He affirms himself with that. Sad, really, because he probably has no idea what he has in the house. He'll find out when he reads the divorce inventory.
So, what would you propose we do with the currently however-many-million illegal Mexicans who currently reside in this country.
Here is my proposal.
1. Control the border. Build the fence. Man the checkpoints. Stop those crossing illegally. Send them back.
2. Institute a citizenship track for those here illegally that requires them to register with the federal government and the state government where they reside. Take fingerprints, DNA, retinal scans, etc, to identify the person through biometrics, which will be entered in the national database. Issue them a smart card, encoded with this information, that is keyed to the national database. They will have the incentive to register because achieving citizenship is a possiblitity.
3. Require registered citizenship-track aliens to start following the law, or lose their status and be sent back to wherever they came from. So working under the table, drunk driving, domestic abuse, what-have-you, would all be punishable by deportation. Once deported, with effective border control, it will be difficult for them to get back in. And once an individual has lost his citizenship-track status, it should be well-nigh impossible for him to get it back, because they will be identified biometrically as a deportee.
4. Make achieving citizenship contingent on certain requirements, such as living here several years without breaking the law, learning to speak and write the language competently, being off the public dole, and learning US history and the basis of our government and civic responsibilities.
At the end of the process, say five years, we will have a new crop of citizens, who speak the language, understand their responsibilities, and have demonstrated an ability to comply with our laws. We will have weeded out those who don't want to assimilate, don't want to work, who are unable to obey the law, or do not learn the language.
I would say that at that point, we would be a heck of a lot better off as a nation than we are today.
Well summarized. We need you to explain in such simple language to the vote-pandering morons in government these basic facts which escape them.
My solution is that we increase our illegal alien flow to include politicians, pundits, and journalists. A corrupt Bolivian member of their parliament or assembly can screw things up and be just as corrupt as a Congressman, but will do so at a much cheaper price. Think how much we'll save if we pay Congressman Rodriguez $15,000 rather than Congressman Wasp $167,000, and pay his staff $10,000 rather than $50-100,000.
I would like to hear the context too. I should clarify that I have nothing against wealthy people (I'd like to be one myself) or country club members. I was referring to the Republicans who seem to only care about economic issues or who are otherwise elitist snobs.
It is not that Americans won't do these jobs, Americans won't do them for the pay that Mexicans will do them. When landscaping is significantly more profitable than a job at Blockbuster or Abercrombie, the kids will gladly cut the McGrass.
You're totally 100% right on this point. But in a capitalist system like ours, the labor market works pretty much the same way as most of the other markets: on supply and demand. If we weren't importing a massive de facto slave class into our country, these jobs would simply have to pay better in order to attract people to want to do the job.
Now, I fully understand that there are a lot of cheap bastards in America today, and what's sad is that some of these people have more money than they know what to do with.
Personally, I've never felt that depressing other people's wages ought to be the official policy of our country. Slavery light isn't particularly much more admirable than the real McCoy in my book.
I think its a shame that kids nowadays are not willing to get dirty and sweaty for a few summers doing manual labor.Certainly didn't do mean any harm and it made me appreciate the reality that every job has dignity although perhaps its not something I wanted to do the rest of my life.
Sure,there are many exceptions and you are one.I also work a job where I use my back more than my brains-The Post Office!
I just recall my summers at Lake Tahoe when many of my peers worked in the casinos for two bucks and hour.
Now it seems all the kitchen,housekeeping and grounds staff are Latino.
Do we know who the congressman's wife who heard this is?
Do we know the context of this alleged remark yet?
I grew up in a country club republican household, Rove could have just said NOKD and the country club repubs in the audience would have understood.
My mother is still of that mindset, but I would say I am more of a Crunchy Con in the true Russell Kirk mold.
When they get to a large US city like Los Angeles, the transition must be difficult for an outsider to understand. Even in the slums, the houses have solid walls, windows, and roofs. They have electricity and telephones. They have cars. They have toilets and showers. It's as if you were picked up by the Enterprise and got to fly around in Star Trek.
The underground economy is not all serfs, either. In slavery there were overseers and 'house niggers.' The business who uses illegal labor also has bosses. The ability to get illegals to perform when they don't speak the language and have no ties to a particular place has value. The boss knows this. He knows that the owner of the company has to pay him more and offer him perqs because he can produce. He can live quite well.
I worked among the cash economy in New Jersey and in L.A. for several years. When I went to Mexico, a friend of mine actually knew the place and showed me how many of the people live. It's just like those charity commercials on tv. You can find that among the wealthiest towns in the United States, too. Bartending is a very profitable cash job.
The thing that bothers me the most about the illegal alien influx isn't really the exploitation or the unscrupulous business practices. Let's face it. Mexico sucks. They risk death to cross the border because Mexico sucks. They are the most motivated individuals that Mexico has, and they are fleeing the country. They are smart enough to know that they have no chance to succeed in the corruption of their homeland. They are also the people who would force things to change if they couldn't run away.
But Mexico encourages them to leave, much in the way that upstarts are sent to far off places so they won't upset the apple cart. Even better than the Soviet deportation of upstarts to Siberia, when these people leave Mexico, they actually pump money back into the economy. As long as this happens, Mexico will remain a dump.
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