RUSH: I’m struck. I want to go back to what the commerce secretary, Carlos Gutierrez, said. He was marveling over the fact that such a deal, the immigrants are coming in for free, we don’t have to pay them to come in. That’s not true. That is erroneous. If they were coming in for free, there wouldn’t be as many complaints about this. Our forefathers came here for free. They came here for nothing but hope and opportunity. But the problem is that many of these people entering the country today are entering for free stuff. Free education, free groceries, free emergency health care, free commission of crimes without penalty, free money to send home, freeloading in general. Even the ones that come in here to work are making not enough to make up the balance of the redistribution of wealth that we’re paying them, because the courts have ordered this. We know this. So do Democrats. They’re getting a new victim class of voters for free and that’s important because their old constituency is dying off and aborting itself into a permanent minority status. It is. We have to be honest about this. Liberals are the ones that have most of the abortions. No government official will say this, but of course that does constrain me.
Let me throw another thing out and see what you think of this. I’m just throwing it out as a conversation point, as a little think piece.
Most of these people that are coming in from the southern border are Catholic, are they not? Alright. Nothing wrong with that. Start talking religion and people get their hackles up. But as Catholics — this is something the government would never say, just like they would never say that we gotta do this to keep the safety net going because we’ve aborted too many of our own babies, but you bring in millions and millions of Catholics, you might also think that you are providing a little bit of bulwark and resistance against Islamofascism. There’s more to this than meets the eye, but this notion that they’re coming here free, that’s not true. That’s what previous immigrants did. Here’s Laurie in Albuquerque, New Mexico, also in my top ten favorite girl names. Hi, Laurie, how are you?CALLER: Well, thank you. I’ve called you several times, so that’s nice to know. I’ve actually had a cardiovascular workout while I’ve been sitting here waiting for you because I was so angry when I first called, and then I got nervous on hold, and every time you bring up Chertoff or this other thing, I get all angry again. I think my blood pressure —
RUSH: That’s what life with me is like, Laurie, a never-ending series of up-and-down emotions.
CALLER: Truly, Rush, I can only imagine. What I called about is I was so angry watching President Bush because he’s talking about securing the Iraqi people for democracy —
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: — and securing their border —
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: — and we can’t let Al-Qaeda come through and I’m living in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and I’m watching literally the destruction of my America because these people have not fought for it, and they don’t understand fighting for freedom, and they bring their Third World corrupt culture with them, because they are not assimilating. They are not having to pay any price to become an American. I am just furious at him because I don’t understand why we can’t secure our border first and then deal with the problem later.
RUSH: Can I give you the blunt truth to this?
CALLER: You’ve been explaining the blunt truth. But what I’m saying is they keep telling us we don’t get it, and we do get it. We understand the assault. We look at the Bradys of the world and what they’re fighting for, and what are we going to have? If we import all of these people who don’t want to become Americans, what is he fighting for? The destruction of our country.
RUSH: No, he’s fighting for what he believes.
CALLER: Well, he absolutely does.
RUSH: And we still outnumber them.
CALLER: I understand that for a while.
RUSH: But, look, this is not an irrelevant question. Why don’t we do border security first? It’s a great question. It’s one of these common sense questions. Okay, if we’re going to have a certain level of immigration of this class, you know, the undereducated or uneducated and poor, which will be low wage earners, why don’t we secure, especially with the fact that any potential terrorist can sneak across the border —
CALLER: Exactly.
RUSH: All right, well, the answer to the question is, we don’t want to keep them out!
CALLER: I understand that Rush.
RUSH: Sorry.
CALLER: No, I do understand that. Like I said, I completely understand why we’re letting them in. But what is being threatened is our culture, is our identity, because we are not requiring them — plus additionally —
RUSH: Let me tell you something —
CALLER: — the INS is so broken as it is, they can’t even find the people that are here supposedly legally.
RUSH: Right, right, right, right, right, right — we know all this. The thing about this is, like I said yesterday, the politicians, they’re passing personalities, they come and go. The American traditions and institutions that made the country great need to survive. Now, these politicians doing this today know full well that the potential negative destructive impacts of this are going to happen long after most of them are out of office, and it’s going to be somebody else’s problem. They’re doing this now for their own political — Thomas Sowell had another great piece, three days in a row he’s written about this. He said, ‘Look, this is a deal for politicians.’ This is a piece of legislation to help out politicians and their immediate concerns, which are to get elected, and secondly to spend money.
CALLER: But that’s why the American people are so angry, because we are going to have to live with the consequences of it.
RUSH: Well, I tell you —
CALLER: There’s Fred Barnes and all —
RUSH: That’s right.
CALLER: — these people running around saying their astonished at the anger.
RUSH: You’re exactly right. But you know what’s going to happen? What’s going to happen is that somewhere down the road, your kids, grandkids, whatever, when they mature, when they get old and they understand the tax rate they’re going to be paying to pay for all this, at some point they’re not going to put up with it. The question is, will it be too late? Now, we conservatives have had a constant mantra that we have been attempting to persuade a majority of Americans to believe in, and that is that a never-ending welfare state and a constantly growing welfare state will be the end of this country as we know it. It won’t be the end of the country, it will be the end of the country as we know it. And isn’t it interesting that if I am right about this, that the whole reason — unsaid, unwritten, unspoken reason — for this limitless immigration, not only are we going to let the 12 to 20 that are here become legal, we’re going to say bring your families. We’re talking 50 million, a huge demographic shift.
These are people that are being brought in specifically to be able to pay taxes so that our social safety system doesn’t have to be reformed: Medicare, Social Security, all these things. That’s too hard, that’s too tough, politicians might lose their office if they actually engaged in serious reform. So we gotta keep it going, status quo, but we don’t have enough people here, for all the obvious reasons, we gotta import them, we gotta get ’em in here. But when they get here they’re going to be of the variety, they’re going to be unskilled and uneducated, and so they themselves are going to be accessing the social safety net.
While the wizards in Washington think this is going to solve a temporary problem of not enough people to pay taxes to provide retiree benefits and health benefits and all that, the simple fact of the matter is that this is going to increase the growth of the welfare state, and it is that precisely which is going to lead to the greatest pressure on the survival of this country as we have come to know it, and as it has been for a long time. So we conservatives have been right from the get-go. The welfare state, a never-ending, no end in sight to it, constantly growing welfare state, is going to put one of the greatest pressures on the existence of this country. The distinct American culture is impugned today, laughed at, rugged individualism, self-reliance, you start talking about those things, and the libs will come running for you. ‘Oh, yeah, easy for you to say. What about the poor; and what about the sick; and what about the hungry and what about the thirsty and what about women and minorities who will be hardest hit?’
They do not have the desire nor the faith for a majority of Americans to be rugged, to be individualistic. And, by the way, that’s not selfish. Self-interest is not selfish. Big, big difference. But self-interest is being portrayed today as selfishnessness, and of course selfishnessness means you don’t care about other people; it means you don’t have compassion; means you are cold-hearted and cruel; and you are a racist, sexist, bigot homophobe, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
People don’t want to be called that so they shirk into the shadows, and they shut themselves up. That’s the distinct American culture that is being aimed at with all this. So we conservatives have been right all along. The welfare state, never ending and growing is going to put the greatest stress and pressure on the aspects of the distinct American culture that have defined this country for over 200 years. Not too late, by the way, to fix this. Don’t become fatalistic about it. Not too late. But the battle will always be raging, because there will always be liberals who want a bigger welfare state. Never going to be won.