Not Our Kind of People

National Review Online ^ | 2/9/07 | Mark Krikorian

[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.

[tarheelswamprat]

It should indeed be repulsive. Eventually, the rights of the "upper class" will be diminished.

I guess slavery's cheerleaders never really went away.

The "New World Order" is simply the "Old World Order" reasserting itself...

[HKMk23]

I agree with your proposals, and I would add that we need to seriously revamp the means by which people are able to come here legally. SOME of the impetus for people to immigrate illegally, is born of frustration with the effort required to do it legally; the uphill battle against paperwork, bureaucrats, and interminable delays.

NOTE: I do NOT mean WEAKEN the process; I mean STREAMLINE it.

It does not need to be as hard as it is.
It does not need to take as long as it does.
It does not need to be so error-prone.
It does not need to be so complex as to require the services of immigration attorneys.

[fishtank]

Bump on this.

I'm listening to Rick Roberts on KFMB and he's talking about it right now.

[Miss Marple]

I flat-out don't believe this comment was made.

1. It isn't sourced other than "a Congressman's wife". Easy to hide a made-up quote with sourcing like that.

2. Karl Rove is quite aware of the feelings of many in the party on the immigration issue. He is not stupid enough to make a comment like this, because he knows full well it would be reported in the press and used by the anti-Bush people.

Shame on the National Review for having no better standards than the New York Times.