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Immigration Bill Must Be Defeated

by Rush Limbaugh - May 21,2007

RUSH: Let’s move on to illegal immigration here and where we stand today. We know that we’ve had the McCain-Cornyn blowup. McCain, by the way, in that blowup typified precisely what I pointed out to you in a brilliant two-hour analysis last Friday. McCain wants to get this thing done. He wants to have no debate on it, because the extracurricular politics will stand in the way. This thing needs to be put together behind closed doors in a back room with Democrat activist groups having veto power. Nobody will ever be able to see the whole thing. It needs to be rammed through. McCain doesn’t want you getting involved. That’s what extracurricular politics is. He doesn’t want you debating it, doesn’t want anybody having a chance to stop in the way, and I keep hearing this phrase, ‘it’s the best we can get.’ What a way to sell it. ‘It’s the best we can get.’ I just got an e-mail, ‘Why would you go to a Motel 6?’ I’m just assuming that’s where most people who would ask me to stay with their wife, their son, their daughter, and their pets would stay. At any rate, the bottom line, ladies and gentlemen, is that this cannot stand scrutiny; it cannot stand the light of day. It does not have broad-based support in the Senate. I think that all of you have been heard and you will continue to be heard on this. It’s clearly amnesty. It is giving up. It is caving in.

Now, we can talk about the Republican side of this all you want, but, frankly, that’s not the side of this that interests me the most pause because it’s probably easier to sum up. They’re stupid. They’re just blind on this. They have no clue what the result of this if it were enacted as written, would do to them. They have no idea what it would do to their party. They can’t. They can’t have any idea otherwise they wouldn’t be supporting this. They wouldn’t be for it, they wouldn’t be — the Republicans who are — wouldn’t be out there trying to push it. The interesting thing to me on this is the Democrats. I have a piece here from the AmericanThinker.com today by Steven Warshawsky and a fascinating paragraph that I happen to agree with totally. We mentioned last week all these numbers that are being thrown around are very low, 12 and a half million illegals, you look at their family members they’re allowed to bring in, 400,000 new every year, there’s no stopping this. If this were to be signed into law as it is, the numbers are so significant, we’re talking about a total demographic shift in this country.

Here’s the pull quote from Steve Warshawsky’s piece. ‘The demographic changes wrought by this bill…’ and this is what Ted Kennedy’s after, this is what all of the Democrats and the liberals who are for this know. ‘The demographic changes wrought by this bill are likely to make a meaningful conservative movement in this country — one dedicated to the traditional American principles of limited government, private property, free enterprise, personal responsibility, strong national defense, and patriotism — a practical impossibility.’ We are going to import so many people who will be, by their economic necessity, they’re going to be pursued and they’re going to be tied up, they’re going to become Democrat voters, and this brings about, in these great numbers, were this to happen, a genuine threat to the viability of a conservative movement in this country as having any practical reason to exist. It would be so small. This is the thing the Republicans don’t see. This is precisely why the Democrats are for this. If you look at it the way they look at things, they look at this like they look at everything else, through the prism of politics and how it can best benefit them, secure their power, and keep it, for many, many, many moons — a little Indian lingo there.

The point of this is to make it just impossible for the conservative movement to have any practical reason to exist in terms of a majority movement in this country. Some of the highlights of this piece: ‘Out-of-control immigration represents the greatest existential challenge of our time. By ‘existential challenge,’ I mean a public policy problem that goes to the heart of what it means to be ‘American’ and which threatens to fundamentally, and perhaps permanently, alter American society for the worse. Everyone agrees that ‘something needs to be done’ about the immigration problem. Yes, there are strong disagreements over what that ‘something’ should be. But few Americans believe that what we need to do is enshrine the current broken situation into law,’ and then expand it. Yet that’s exactly what this Comprehensive Destruction of the Republican Party Act of 2007 will do. Folks, it is an utter disaster, and it must be defeated. There’s no middle ground here. The best they can say, ‘Well, it’s the best we can get at the time. Something has to be done,’ and that is perfect Washington mentality. ‘Just something has to be done. Not the best, not something smart, just something.’ The unintended consequences.


Mark Steyn has a column, and he has written the best definition of legislation that I have ever come across. This piece of legislation is going to erase America. That’s the words of Selwyn Duke writing in a blog, it will erase America as we currently know it, and the Democrats are fine with that. They’re trying to remake the country in their own image anyway. They’re in the process of tearing down as many of the traditions and institutions as possible, and they want to rebuild the country in their own image, once and for all, none of this debate stuff, none of this argument stuff, none of this having to win elections, let’s get all these people in here to vote Democrat and make this something that’s just a fait accompli every four years. Here’s Mark Steyn’s definition of legislation. ‘As John McCain declared, ‘This is what the legislative process is all about.” Meaning you get behind closed doors, nobody knows what you’re doing, when you finish it, you ram it through so little nobody can see what you’ve done, and you tell people, ‘No, we don’t have time for this, so important, something must be done. We don’t have time for the usual procedures. We’ve got to get this done now.’ That’s what the legislative process is all about, to people like McCain, not letting you know what’s going on.
Also, legislation, ‘in the sense that it’s a sloppily drafted bottomless pit of unintended consequences on a potentially cosmic scale whose sweeping ‘reforms’ will inevitably require even more sweeping reforms of the reforms in a year or two’s time.’ This is what happens. The question is whether the reforms take place. Look at Simpson-Mazzoli, it was supposed to fix the problem. The first time Senator Kennedy talked about fixing this in ’65, was supposed to fix the problem. Anything they come up with, tax legislation, look at all the unintended consequences, ‘Oooh, gee, we didn’t think. We gotta go in there, reform the legislation.’ It’s just a cycle that keeps repeating and people think that when legislation is passed, that progress is taking place. This ought to show you that that’s not the case. We got enough laws. We have more than enough laws. This is to fix a mistake, that’s exactly what this is. The unintended consequences of Simpson-Mazzoli. Now we gotta go reform that reform, comprehensive immigration reform. This is going to create so many mistakes. Question is, are they mistakes, quote, unquote, the Democrats are eager to see made? I think they are. Del Rey Beach, Florida, this is Marta, welcome to the EIB Network. Great to have you with us.

CALLER: Hi, Rush, thank you for taking my call.

RUSH: It’s my pleasure.

CALLER: Well, here, with the new Z visa it’s my understanding they have to go in and pay a thousand dollars to get their visa, up front. Is that correct?

RUSH: It’s irrelevant.

CALLER: It is.

RUSH: They’re not going to be paying anything — two weeks after this — we’re going to speak hypothetically here. If this became law, a week or two — I think it’s five thousand in fines, whatever it is. They’re not going to have to pay it because we’re going to hear people like Senator McCain and others — by the way, it warmed my heart to see Lindsey Graham get booed out there in South Carolina. Stand up for yourself, Lindsey, stop trying to be McCain junior, it’s going to hurt you. Anyway, McCain, Graham, all these guys, will say, ‘We made a mistake. They can’t afford a thousand dollars. This is taking food out of their children’s mouths. We must be more compassionate,’ and they’ll wave it. There’s no incentive here, ma’am, to keep the immigrants out. The incentive here is to get ’em in here and get ’em in here yesterday.

CALLER: Exactly. But here’s my point. Even if they had to pay a thousand dollars, who of us can invest a thousand dollars and get back $10,000 in interest in a year which they cost us every year? Each one of them. That’s a pretty good return on your money even if they did.

RUSH: Okay, you just nailed another thing but I want to give you another way of looking at this. You’re looking at it the dollars and cents way. What you have to look at is what is this ideologically or politically? This is precisely the redistribution of wealth. Even if we did charge ’em a thousand dollars for their Z visa, they’re not going to be able, when they arrive here, to fund all of their necessary needs and wants themselves. You will. You’re going to be paying for that, because we’re a compassionate people. We can’t let these people starve. We can’t leave them hanging on the street if they can’t find a job even if they’re here. So your money, my money, your tax money, going to be redistributed to these people. It’s classic liberalism, right out in front of the open, right in front of our eyes. And remember this about your $1,000, everybody’s missing the point. It’s not about citizenship, they’re legal.

The minute this is signed into law, they are legal, and the courts have said they’re entitled to all these things that will require the redistribution of wealth. They’re entitled to it. So forget citizenship. As I mentioned, this is an important point and there are very few people I’ve seen anyway talking about this, and it’s how this era of immigration differs from most of the previous eras where it has always been controversial. And that is, there is nobody talking about assimilation. The immigrants are not talking about assimilating; the government is not talking about having them assimilate. There is no focus on that whatsoever. In other words, becoming, quote, unquote, American. In fact, we got systems in place to stop that, bilingual education, affirmative action, there’s no need to assimilate. So folks, it’s bad. It is a horrible, horrible piece of legislation. The very fact that these conferees negotiated this in secret behind closed doors don’t want anybody to see this, is all the proof you need of that.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Let’s talk about the Selwyn Duke piece, also in the American Thinker, great website today on the illegal immigration stuff, Selwyn Duke talking about why they won’t assimilate. There’s one key paragraph — the whole thing is good — but one key paragraph. ‘Traditionally, Americans never relied on government to achieve most goals, and ensuring assimilation was no exception. Many years ago, for instance, if a person insisted on dressing like an advertisement for the Middle Ages, didn’t learn the language or sought to impose strange beliefs in the workplace, he would have been fired or not hired in the first place. What this means is that the Moslem clerks and cab drivers who, respectively, won’t ring up pork and won’t pick up passengers with alcohol or seeing-eye dogs would have either changed their ways or returned to where ways don’t change. This enforcement of tradition through individual initiative is what almost every non-western country does and makes sense. If you’re so enamored of your native ways, stay in your native land.

‘If you tried this today, though, you’d receive a treatment from the proctologist of government bureaucracies, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Yes, because freedom of association has been trumped by lawless judges, citizens have lost control over their businesses, rental properties and, in many cases, organizations. Privately owned and financed entities can no longer determine who receives paychecks, who will be served and who will be rented to, thus removing the social pressure to conform that the common man would naturally apply via the exercise of his values in his castle. Likewise, local school boards have been robbed of the right to set dress codes and behavior standards reflecting the surrounding community. What this means is now you can’t refuse to hire a cross-dressing Columbian from Cartagena. Ah, it sounds almost Jeffersonian… almost. We’ve now traded liberty for perversity. America is being erased,’ in the sense that the distinct American culture is being erased because we don’t have the guts to stand up for it, like we did in the past when it came to massive numbers of immigrants.