RUSH: Here’s George in Palm Beach, Florida. George, nice to have you on the program.
CALLER: Rush, how are you today? What an honor to talk to you. Thank you so much.
RUSH: I couldn’t be better, thanks for asking. It’s great to have you with us.
CALLER: Just a little background on me before I start this. I live in Palm Beach County. I live just a little ways from you. I live on the same side of the bridge as you. I’m exactly the same age as you. I’m involved in agricultural in south Florida. It’s been very good to me obviously. I agree with you 99.99% of the time, but you are absolutely wrong about this notion that you have that Americans will take the jobs that some of these immigrants are working in. It’s just not true. It’s absolutely not true, and I would really like to prove that to you and to show because I know what kind of person you are. I’ve listened to you for 18 years now.
RUSH: George?
CALLER: I know what kind of person you are, and it’s not true.
RUSH: George?
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: You know what? I will not even require that you prove it because I trust you. I believe you when you say it. My answer to you is, “Then let legal immigrants take the jobs if nobody will pick fruit or whatever.” By the way, in California, we had this argument some 20 or 30 years ago. You couldn’t get Americans to pick tomatoes and so forth. So they actually reengineered</a> the shape of tomatoes and built a machine to pick them so that human beings aren’t necessary.
CALLER: That’s totally — that’s a different situation. Those tomatoes are grown for processing. Everything down here is fresh market stuff, that’s what I do, fresh market produce.
CALLER: I’m not saying —
RUSH: Why does it have to be illegals?
CALLER: How are we going to make them legal to do it then?
RUSH: How are we going to–
CALLER: How are we going to make it legal for them to do it? How are we going to legalize them to do this work?
RUSH: There are two kinds of immigrants in this country to get in every year, legal and illegal, and I’m just asking —
CALLER: Rush, the legal ones have jobs. The legal ones are working in industries and they’re working.
RUSH: Not all of them. Now, wait a minute. I’m running out of time here. Are you saying — I got 30 seconds — are you saying the illegals are poor; the legals are accomplished and achieved when they arrive?
CALLER: I’m saying that the illegals are the ones that are working in our industry because the legals — they’ve gotten into society. They’ve gotten the better jobs. They’re not the ones that are taking these types of agricultural jobs.
RUSH: I’m glad you called because this illustrates one of the sides of the argument that is roiling the Republican Party. Agribusiness is very eager to promote the use of illegals to keep wages down, price of food down. George, I wish I had more time, but I’ve gotta run. I’m up against it.
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RUSH: I have to respond to the nice guy from Palm Beach, George, who is the agribusiness guy who was making it clear what the divisions are on the Republican side when it comes to this issue. He made the point that only illegals will pick his crops. He tried to say that legals come in and are more qualified than illegals and so forth, but the point about that is that he’s asking — I love the guy — but he’s asking to be subsidized. He’s asking for taxpayers to subsidize his business by looking past the law, so that he can hire people for a low wage or what have you. George, frankly I know you’re out there, and I know this is going to make you mad, George. You were a great call, and I gotta respond to it. But George is the kind of guy that was supposed to be fined under the Simpson-Mazzoli act back in 1986 for hiring illegals, and they promised that that would happen and so forth, and it hasn’t, and I wanted to mention that.
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RUSH: Here’s Tony in Ellsworth, Maine. Tony, I’m glad you called. Welcome to the program.
CALLER: Rush, one o’clock cigar dittos to you.
RUSH: Thank you, sir. Appreciate that.
CALLER: I agree that illegal immigration is definitely a problem and we definitely need to secure the borders, but I have to disagree with you on the guest worker program. I think it would actually bring some order to a burgeoning problem in this country. We have 11 million people that are, you know, supposedly 11 million people that are here illegally, and we have no tracking of them or anything. I think this guest worker program would give us some control over those, and anybody that is not suitable we can deport them. There’s a whole — when — remember when Bush announced this several months ago, it was last year sometime —
RUSH: Yes.
CALLER: — at first I had the reaction, “Oh, no, it’s amnesty,” but then I thought about it more and I said, “You know, it’s probably a brilliant plan because then we can get rid of the people that are undesirable.”
RUSH: Well, here we go. Guest worker program. Guest workers. Amnesty. It’s amnesty. Okay, we’ll call it guest worker. Are you disagreeing with me on this, Snerdley? Okay, all
CALLER: I really don’t know the answer. I think a lot of people that come here, come here honestly, they want to work, they want to better their lives and I think the majority of people that are here, you know, illegally they want to do that because of the economic opportunities. They want to be part of the, you know, American dream, and like Mark Belling said yesterday, it’s actually easier for somebody to get here illegally than it is legally, and I don’t disagree —
RUSH: Yeah, that’s the way it’s supposed to be. That’s another absurdity. But all these do not add up to excuses for not doing anything about it. They just don’t. You can’t justify it with any of the excuses that I have heard so far. I think actually what people are trying to do with this legislation is remove the word “illegal.” If they could, they’d legalize these people tonight to get rid of the issue, but they come up with a typical bloated bureaucratic piece of legislation that requires for its enforcement the people who are the targets of this bill to actually do all the work.
You gotta show up. You gotta pay a fine. You gotta go to English class. The question is, if want to track ’em and so forth, keep tracking their movements and find out how they’re doing assimilating, if they are or not — if they don’t show up, if they don’t show up and register and pay the fine — I don’t know what we’re going to do to find them because the argument we can’t deport them, and I understand one of them, it’s a large number. But if we’re not going to try to track them down now when they’re already illegal, what in the world makes anybody think we’re going to?
By the way, the figure 11 million, 12 million, it is a guesstimate. It’s a total guesstimate. I mean, there’s some statistical projection behind it to get to it. But it’s still a guesstimate. So we’re never going to really know if they’ve all shown up or not. We won’t even know if 75 or 80% of them show up. My guess is far fewer than that will, and then those that don’t how we going to know they even exist? How we going to know where they are? What are we going to do to try to track ’em down? This is all the enforcement side and I’m telling you the answer is zip, zero, nada.
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RUSH: You know, folks, I’m not trying to beat a dead horse. I’m really not, but I have these almost visceral reactions when I hear these arguments, “Well, we have to understand them. We must get to know them, and they’re poor, and they so want to come here and improve their lives.” Okay. Just because people want to come here, what does that have to do with setting immigration policy? We know people want to come here. That’s not the question. We don’t have an immigration policy because we don’t have problems getting people. We know they want to come here.
I mean, everybody would like to have four cars or a big house. Well, okay. Let’s pass a law allowing yourself to just go move into somebody else’s. Just go move into somebody else’s house and we’ll let it happen just because you want it. You can come up with all kinds of analogies to this that illustrate the folly of it. One of the things that is not being contemplated in this piece of legislation, we all admit that we have an illegal immigration problem, regardless what you think about how to fix it, do we all agree, ladies and gentlemen, in class today that we have an immigration problem? All right. We want to solve it.
Part of the solution here is creating disincentives to it, and there are no disincentives. I mean, this piece of legislation is pretty much just the opposite. This is an incentive to keep coming in illegally. Now, a disincentive would be punishing those who facilitate it, like businesses, which is the core enforcement mechanism in Simpson-Mazzoli, and it went by the wayside. Three employers, corporations, were fined when they told us they were going to capture four million illegals this way. They never do enforce this stuff.
You have to deny them driver’s licenses. You have to deny them in-state tuition to colleges and so forth. There are incentives to come here illegally. No system-wide punishment, free public school education, free medical care on the taxpayers’ expense. I mean, we’re incentivizing this, not disincentivizing. It’s not complicated. What’s lacking here is simply will and leadership. Nobody wants to. This is tough to lead on because you see a lot of
Here’s Cory in Watertown, South Dakota, you’re next on the program.
CALLER: Hi. An honor to be with you, sir, today.
RUSH: Thank you. Thanks very much.
CALLER: Well, I just had a point I wanted to bring up to one of your earlier callers. He said he couldn’t stay in business without illegal immigrants. To me, that sounds like the same argument that was used about 200 years ago just before the Civil War. We can’t keep our economy going without slavery. I mean, it’s ridiculous. The idea that you can’t keep your business going without having somebody you can pay less than minimum wage and not give them a decent living is absolutely ridiculous. It’s indentured servitude. That’s all it sounds like to me.
RUSH: No. No, no, no, no. (doing elite liberal impression) “It’s opportunity. It’s an opportunity, Cory, for people of the deprived places in the planet to come and experience and get their toes and feet wet planting the seeds of their American dream.” That’s how it’s portrayed. I’m being cynical, you’re absolutely right, but I’m being cynical with you just as a way of agreeing with you. But George from Palm Beach, and I know I’m making him mad out there, and I’m not trying to do that, but it is a stretch to me when you say that your business can’t operate without illegals.
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