Illegal Immigration and McCain

RUSH: Dan in Manalapan, New Jersey. Nice to have you, sir, on the EIB Network. Hello.

CALLER: Hey, how you doing, Rush?

RUSH: Great. Never better.

CALLER: Good. Just calling to speak about irrelevancy because the Drive-Bys seem to be, you know, pronouncing you dead already, and I started listening to you in August. I’m 29 years old. I live in a liberal state of New Jersey. When I was in high school I was a Clinton supporter and, you know, now I see the light. I understand just where they’re coming from. I’m not a socialist. I don’t want to go there. That was the first thing I wanted to say because now that I listen to you, I won’t stop listening to you, because I agree with what you have to say. You make so much sense it’s ridiculous. Something else I wanted to talk about was illegal immigration, all right. Here, we have people saying that there are jobs out there that other people don’t want. Well, what I do for a living is I dig holes, all right, I just got a $9,000 bonus. I dig holes. I install lawn sprinklers, all right? I have a foreman who is an illegal immigrant, okay, and I was talking to him today. I know what he makes. He makes less than me, but he makes pretty good money. He makes a little over $50,000 a year, and you can’t tell me that there is an American out there — I mean there is a lot of people who would love to be making $50,000 —

RUSH: It’s fascinating you bring up illegal immigration here.

CALLER: Isn’t it?

RUSH: Yes it is, because I have a story here, actually a commentary piece from today’s Wall Street Journal by Rosa Rosales called, ‘Immigration Misfire.’ You have provided me an excellent transition to it. I appreciate your comments, and you’re right, I make so much sense it hurts I think a lot of people. You said something about the Drive-Bys and my relevancy. Can I show you the hypocrisy of the Drive-Bys on this? The Drive-Bys are going against their own errant logic when they say a McCain victory is the end of Limbaugh. Why? They still cling to the flawed analysis that Bill Clinton beating me made the EIB Network into the powerhouse that it is today. Remember back in ’90, ’92, ‘Well, that’s the end of Limbaugh,’ they said. Then it mythologically became, ‘Limbaugh was made during the Clinton term,’ even though I started that term with 500 stations and ended up with 612, they believed that Clinton made me. So by the same token, audience grew during Clinton. If they believe that I reached my height because of Clinton in office, they should logically — earnestly, too — they should logically conclude that a McCain victory will expand my audience again, right? If the guy I oppose happens to win, and that makes me, which is what they said about Clinton, then shouldn’t they be writing, ‘Limbaugh secretly wants McCain to win because he knows his audience will skyrocket.’ I mean that’s the kind of sheer idiocy we are dealing with here in Drive-By analysis.

Now to this story, Wall Street Journal. It’s entitled, ‘Immigration Misfire,’ by Rosa Rosales. By the way, you have to understand, the Wall Street Journal big, big, big open borders people. They have a lot of advertising from Big Agricultural. They have ties to Big Agricultural, everybody does have ties to something, Wall Street Journal, huge open borders crowd. They were always in favor of McCain-Kennedy, the amnesty bill, not just in the news pages but in the editorial pages as well. ‘Political pundits used to maintain that the American electorate was galvanized around the issue of illegal immigration. Voters, they claimed, would punish any candidate who failed to take a tough stance on immigrants and did not adamantly oppose the ‘A’ word — Amnesty — in all its tortured definitions. Yet a funny thing happened in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Florida. The most anti-immigrant candidates performed below expectations, and those accused of supporting amnesty and in-state tuition for undocumented immigrants won. How is this possible? How could John McCain, the author of the McCain-Kennedy Comprehensive Immigration bill beat Mitt Romney, who aired anti-illegal-immigrant commercials more than 12,000 times in Iowa and New Hampshire alone? Well, it turns out that 57% of Iowa primary voters actually favored earned citizenship for the undocumented. … In Florida, Mr. Romney’s anti-illegal-immigrant message led Cuban Americans to vote for Mr. McCain by a 5-1 margin. Additionally, CNN exit polls showed that Republicans who favored deportation for illegal immigrants constituted only 40% of the vote, while 58% favored either temporary resident status or an earned pathway to citizenship. … Apparently, conservative voters respond to issues that impact their personal quality of life far more than they do to racially polarized rhetoric designed to pit one group of Americans against another.’

So here we go, once again the open borders crowd is telling all of us who opposed amnesty that we’re racists, this in the form of the Wall Street Journal. Now, let me ask Miss Rosales this question. If immigration is no longer a hot-button issue, why did Congress practically fall all over themselves to shut down any loophole that would have allowed illegals to get a rebate from the stimulus package? The answer is they knew that if illegals got a rebate check in the stimulus package, it would torpedo the whole thing. I have another suggestion as to why immigration might have born itself out the way it did in these early primaries. This is an AP story from February 3rd, a couple days ago. Illegal immigrants leaving Arizona and Oklahoma, they’re going to Texas. ‘Illegal immigrants are coming into Texas, but not from where one might think. The rush is coming from Arizona, Oklahoma and other states — places that have recently passed tough new anti-illegal immigrant laws. The two toughest measures are in Arizona and Oklahoma.’ I’ve got other stories like this.

When states pass and enforce tough laws, the problem changes, and people are seeing some change take place because the states are getting in gear on this. This whole open borders crowd is doing everything it can to discredit all of those who fought successfully the immigration bill. Let’s take this a little further and let’s take Miss Rosales’ piece to the presidential campaign. McCain now says he gets it, that we were right, we need border security first and all that. He says if the bill came back before his desk again, though, he would sign it. But he said we’re past that point. But he would sign amnesty if it came across his desk as president. So McCain’s out there saying he gets it, he understands now how fervently anti-amnesty people are, that we were right on border security and we’re going to do border security first. They don’t even acknowledge the facts on the ground now. They’re obsessed with amnesty and open borders, and they’re writers for Big Ag here at the Wall Street Journal. But point of this is that McCain’s supporters don’t even believe what he’s telling voters now. They know he supports amnesty and open borders, and that’s why they support him.

When the rubber hits the road, these people at the Journal and everywhere else think that when it comes down to it again, McCain will get amnesty done. They haven’t given up on this. I told you they have not given up on it. They’re not giving up on it. They don’t even believe McCain’s denials. If they did they would be railing against it like they did against us. But they’re not. That’s why the New York Times supports Senator McCain. They know he’s blowing smoke when he talks about taxes and border security now. The New York Times is endorsing the liberal John McCain, the McCain who hates the Republican Party and doesn’t have much love for conservatives, and you would not be wrong in thinking that they also support him because they think Hillary can beat him. It’s a win-win as far as the New York Times and the Washington Post are concerned. I you told this yesterday. Some of you out there, you go nuts when the media loves what we do, because you’ve been looking for approval from the wrong place. You’ve been looking for approval from the mainstream media. I get calls, not so many anymore, but I used to get a lot of calls, ‘Rush, I saw the mainstream and they finally –‘ why do you care what they say? Do you understand they’re never, ever going to be us, and if you rely on the mainstream media for your own validation, you’re going to forever be disappointed.

I guess there still lingers a hope and a desire that the mainstream media will love us and maybe it is that people think, my gosh, even the media love McCain, why, this is fabulous, it’s good to be on the side the media love. Let me ask you a question, ladies and gentlemen. How do you think the Democrats react if, say, a conservative publication endorsed Hillary? What if we ended up picking the Democrat nominee, what do you think their reaction would be? The Democrat reaction, ‘You want Hillary? Oh, wow!’ They would know we wouldn’t have their best interests at heart. They would think, my gosh, they think they can beat Hillary, okay, they want Hillary. The idea that we should let the Drive-By Media which is a bunch of libs pick our nominee is as absurd as suggesting the Democrats would let us pick theirs.