CALLER: Yes. Good afternoon, Mr. Limbaugh.
RUSH: Good afternoon.
CALLER: Okay, first I’ll just briefly say that I’m a first-generation American, an offspring of Ukrainian ancestry, so I know very well what it means to come here legally, because that’s what my parents did. But I must say that I think that the question of illegal — I do mean illegal — immigration from Mexico is a geopolitical necessity for the foreseeable future.
RUSH: A geopolitical necessity to have both legal and illegal immigration from Mexico?
CALLER: Correct.
RUSH: What is the geopolitical necessity?
CALLER: Well, I think that basically there is obviously a large low-income group in Mexico that is having enough gumption to do what they need to do to come here to this country illegally and risk what they risk because the economy down there can’t support them, and obviously Mexico wouldn’t want to admit that, and we wouldn’t want to do that, either, and if they don’t have an outlet for those people to come here, those people would stay in that country and get discouraged, and you know what happens when you have a large discouraged populace that doesn’t think they have anywhere to go.
RUSH: You revolt and overthrow the government.
CALLER: Right. And then you have another Hugo Chavez, II down in Mexico, and if you think that $3 a gallon gas is bad, wait until it gets to five or six.
RUSH: Okay, you know, I thought this is where you were going to go. I thought he were going to go to oil.
CALLER: Well, that’s just part of it —
RUSH: I knew you were going to go to oil. I knew you were going to go to oil, and I had this sneaking suspicion that you were going to bring Hugo Chavez into this. I don’t know why, it was just my instincts on parade here.
CALLER: You have good instincts.
RUSH: I had a feeling that you were going to do this.
CALLER: Okay.
RUSH: In the context of, ‘We need we need oil,’ this is what nobody wants to admit. We’re in this mode in this country right now where we’re trying everything we can to get people convinced that we need to alternative energy, ethanol, and all this, but the bottom line is, the dirty little secret, is for all the pontificating on alternative energy, we would starve and die and cease to exist as a superpower if we lost access to oil — and since we are not going to drill for our own oil because we have a bunch of obstacles in the way to getting that done, we need cooperation from countries who are producing and drilling oil. Mexico just discovered a huge field.
CALLER: I believe they’re our number two or number three supplier of crude oil.
RUSH: Well, Canada is number one; Saudi Arabia is number two, but Mexico is high up on the list. And then, of course, you’ve got Hugo Chavez which is his own geopolitical problem that we’re going to face. We don’t know what we’re going to do about it. But Hugo Chavez has financial interests in some of the refineries in this country.
CALLER: Mmm-hmm.
RUSH: So, look, I say this again in the context that these are the things that Republican senators who are voting the way they’re voting would never tell us.
CALLER: Exactly right.
RUSH: That would doom their fate.
CALLER: I would think that, you know, to have the president and all these political leaders do what they do with this bill, and not quote, unquote, ‘listen’ to the populace and still try to put this through, there has to be something going on that we are just not being told. I think that’s the dirty secret.
RUSH: You’re exactly right, and I mentioned this in the last hour. Now, just so people don’t misunderstand, you’re looking at this as way, way, way down-the-road issue and you’re looking at it without any —
CALLER: (interrupting)
RUSH: Wait. Let me finish. I’m asking you.
CALLER: Okay.
RUSH: You’re looking at this without really examining the impact on the United States of the arrival of this kind of influx that could be 45 to 50 million people.
CALLER: No, no.
RUSH: I want to go back to your theory at first.
CALLER: Okay.
RUSH: Your theory at first was we gotta get these people out of Mexico because it’s the only way to keep Mexico stable.
CALLER: Correct.
RUSH: They gotta come here because it’s the only place they can. What if our attitude was like that about every country? What if we said, ‘Okay, the starving and the dying and the oppressed and the unhappy and the near-riotous. Let them all in’?
CALLER: Not every country shares a common border with us and, again if there was a socialistic dictatorship in Mexico, I think it wouldn’t just affect us. It would affect the entire, you know, global marketplace.
RUSH: Why let Mexico off the hook? Why? Why is it our responsibility to provide a haven? You are supporting the concept of a constant flow of illegals — which is, by the way, what the Senate wants.
CALLER: Mmm-hmm.
RUSH: You people need to understand this. There’s nothing in this bill that’s going to stop the illegal flow, even if all these currently here are made legal, however that happens, there’s nothing that’s going to stop it. They say there is, but there’s no enforcement here.
CALLER: Well, I think eventually what the hope is, what will stop it is that the Mexican economy over a decade —
RUSH: It ain’t going to happen.
CALLER: — or so will advance to the point —
RUSH: Ain’t going to happen.
CALLER: Well, I mean we have to have hope that it will because otherwise, you’re going to have a problem.
RUSH: No, you don’t hope. Hope is the wrong thing to have. You have to have a policy for economic revival. Hope will not accomplish anything. Hope may keep you alive a couple days if you’re in the bottom of a well.
CALLER: No, I’m saying the United States has to have the hope that Mexico, given time, will be able to improve their economic standards.
RUSH: If that’s going to be our policy, if hope is our policy, then we’re doomed. Because hope never accomplished anything.
CALLER: Well, ‘believe,’ then.
RUSH: Look at NAFTA and GATT. That was supposed to revive the Mexican economy. We have bailed Mexico out with loans from the Federal Reserve, $25 billion back in the mid-nineties. We’ve done everything we can. There are structural problems inside Mexico that make it impractical. They’ve had all kinds of time. They share a common border with us. We do trade with them. But somehow, after that wealth is not finding its way down to their ever increasingly poor population.
CALLER: No, but then so — so what’s — what’s the answer? I mean, something has to be done, otherwise —
RUSH: Well, let me ask you a question.
CALLER: Yes?
RUSH: What’s inherently wrong with revolution? If the Mexican people feel like revolting, let ’em revolt against their own government, not destroy our country!
CALLER: Well that’s a valid point.
RUSH: How did we come into existence? We came into existence via revolution.
CALLER: Sure.
RUSH: You have this idea we’re so big and so compassionate that it’s our responsibility —
CALLER: Oh, no, no, no.
RUSH: — to save Mexico.
CALLER: No.
RUSH: At what point does Mexico have to save itself? Mexico is just dumping people here. They’re happy! They’re educating people how to get through our border, how to get here.
CALLER: I’m saying it is in our society’s responsibility — I don’t want to say best interests, but it’s in our economic survival best interests in order to prevent that kind of turmoil in Mexico. Like I said, we have enough trouble dealing with little hiccups in our economy and not having, you know, everybody scream, ‘The sky is falling, the sky is falling!’ If you have some, you know, real problems on your back doorstep, I wouldn’t want that.
RUSH: See, here’s the problem with that. The problem is that your attitude is one of the United States in a constant defensive mode without having any control over our own destiny. If the United States’ future could be imperiled by a revolt in Mexico, then we are in bigger trouble than many people could imagine. You talked about a revolt in Mexico upsetting, let’s say, their distribution of the oil that they drill and so forth, that they produce. Let me tell you something. The people that sell oil are going to keep selling oil and they’re going to find whoever will buy it at whatever price the buyers will pay, whether there’s a revolution or not, because oil is the fuel of the world economy. It is the foundation of the world economy — and whoever has it is going to find a way to sell it whether their country is in revolt or not. If these revolutionaries get hold of the wells, that’s another matter, but that’s probably unlikely to happen. They’re trying to do that in Saudi Arabia. That’s one of the things Al-Qaeda would love to do. It’s what Saddam Hussein wanted to do. That’s why he went into Kuwait, and was making moves to get into Saudi Arabia to get hold of those oil wells.
I understand your concern here and what you’re trying to offer this audience as an explanation for why these guys voted the way they did and why they will never say any of this, because this would really doom ’em, because what they’re saying if you’re close to being right — and I agree with you that there’s something going on here that we don’t know: arm twisting, promises, some real reason for this, because these guys are risking, many of these Republicans are risking their future. Some of their futures may literally be over now, political futures because of this vote, depending on what they do on the cloture vote on Thursday. But when you call here and say that there has to be, for geopolitical reasons, an influx of legal and illegal immigration from Mexico, there is no justification for the numbers of illegals that will be made legal. When you have the ‘family unification’ aspect of this, we could end up with 45 to 55 million here, of low-educated, uneducated, low-skill people. We may be staving off whatever bad thing could happen in Mexico, but we’re ruining ourselves and our economy at the same time, and there’s no justification for that. Anyway, I appreciate the call.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: We go to Idaho, and Donna. Donna, it’s nice to have you. Thanks for the call.
CALLER: Hi. This is Donna, and I wanted to comment on this man who came through the legal requirements to get here —
RUSH: I knew it.
CALLER: — and he thinks that’s good, but he wants us to have another policy for the Mexicans to come lawlessly. I don’t think he understands very well what a country of law means, obviously.
RUSH: What he was trying to say — and I’m glad he called, but what he was trying to say — is he was trying to offer an explanation why this explicable vote in the Senate. Why in the world…? None of this makes sense! People destroying their careers potentially, ruining their chances for reelection, insulting us, telling us we don’t know what we’re talking about when we do; telling us we don’t know what’s in the bill. He was trying to offer an explanation, and an explanation that included as his theory, why these people in the Senate can’t be honest with us about what they’re really doing.
CALLER: I understand that.
RUSH: Okay. But he was simply saying we got great big problems out there south of the border, in our southern hemisphere, and a lot of our oil comes from there, and we can’t stand a revolution in Mexico, and so we have to help alleviate Mexico’s own tattering framework of social destruction and economic hardship and so forth. He’s just offering a theory as to why they’re doing what they’re doing.
CALLER: Yeah, we’ve been their welfare program forever, and as for you picking on them, for goodness sake, what other ethnic group has 15 million people floating around illegally in this country if it isn’t Hispanics? In our area, a spokesman for that group wrote a nasty letter to the editor and said, ‘We are 10% of your population, and we commit 90% of your crime, but it’s all your fault.’ She didn’t quite get that explained satisfactorily to me, but…
RUSH: She said that proudly. We’re 10% of your population. We commit 90% of the crime.
CALLER: Yeah, yeah! I can say it’s the truth, too.
RUSH: I know. I know. Look, I’m not agreeing with the guy, don’t misunderstand. Of course, we can’t absorb that number of people —
CALLER: No!
RUSH: — and maintain the America that always has been.
CALLER: And we can’t compromise our standards for oil or we’re not going to be America.
RUSH: That’s true. That was my point. We don’t have to compromise.
CALLER: No.
RUSH: It’s like this notion that we’re on the defensive, that we find ourselves prisoner.
CALLER: No.
RUSH: We’re the lone superpower on this planet, and yet every time that there’s something goes… We feed the world! It’s the morning update today. I don’t know if you heard it. The morning update today was about GivingUSA. GivingUSA is a group that chronicles and records charitable giving. Charitable giving last year was up through the roof. It was like higher even than in 2005 when we had Hurricane Katrina that, that tsunami over there, Hurricane Wilma. The American people, despite their level of taxation, despite all the obstacles that they face having their paychecks work out, we are still the most charitable nation on earth — and this doesn’t count the foreign aid budget that our tax dollars also contribute to.
CALLER: No, right.
RUSH: Yet whenever anything goes wrong in the country, guess who gets the blame? The United States! We’re destroying the world; we’re stealing the resources; we’re polluting the planet, global warming. And we act all defensive. That’s one of the things about this immigration debate that sort of irritates me. We act like we owe these people who are here illegally, an apology!
CALLER: I know.
RUSH: For daring to call it amnesty.
CALLER: We need to build the fence. We need to build the fence. It’s an insult to the engineers. I bet they were mad when they heard him say that, but he says that, ‘Well, they’ve got an engineering problem there in Smugglers Gulch,’ and it’s been held up for two years, which is, I believe, about the time it took to build Boulder Dam.
RUSH: I went through this. Look, this is something that really, really… Rich Lowry made this point. This is something that, when I put this in perspective, was frightening to me. You go back to the Depression. In the 1930s in San Francisco, we built the Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge both at the same time, roughly on time in four years. The Golden Gate Bridge fascinates me. The Bay Bridge is actually a more challenging engineering marvel, but the Golden Gate is fascinating. I went out and got books about how they did this and videos. I was fascinated by it. The Hoover Dam was built in the Great Depression. The Empire State building went up in 431 days! Five years after 9/11, we have a hole in the ground in New York City with Democrat attacks on Rudy Giuliani as being lousy at it. We’re not builders anymore. We have too much a defensive posture. We’re worried that we don’t offend people. We’re worried about our image in the world. Who cares!
CALLER: It takes longer now to fill out the permits and more money than it would to build the project, to get them filed and enacted on.
RUSH: Well, I’m going to tell you why.
CALLER: We’re paralyzed.
RUSH: It’s because you have a bunch of anti-capitalists that have grown very powerful in this country, and they’re pushing for their own socialist dominance. In fact, it’s interesting to note, too, because in China, they’re having trouble educating kids. Marx is not interesting to the students. The students are seeing this wild market development. In places like Beijing and Shanghai, development’s going crazy. They’re putting up buildings; people are driving cars, and students don’t want to read Das Kapital. They want to read about capitalism, because they want a part of it, they want a piece of it. So teachers are having big problems. The Chinese government has unleashed the free market there. They’ve tried to control it like Gorbachev did with ‘glasnost’ and ‘perestroika,’ but you can’t. Once you unleash freedom to people who have had it denied them, it’s only a matter of time before they’re going to get what they want.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I want to go back to the call we had from the Ukrainian immigrant, the legal Ukrainian immigrant, who offered his own theories as to why the votes are happening the way they are, because senators have far more concerns, geopolitical concerns in our hemisphere revolving around oil and Hugo Chavez, the stability of the Mexican government and so forth, that they can’t dare talk about, he offered as their reasons.
We’ve gone back and forth trying to understand this for I don’t know how long, ever since this most recent incarnation of the bill in the Senate came up. We all know that on the surface of things, the things that we could figure out, just on our experience guided by intelligence, that the Democrats simply see these people that are flooding in here as new victims, new members of the welfare state, requiring the government to grow larger and larger and larger, taxes to go up, so that the redistribution of wealth can take place, creating as many dependents as possible, and then eventually getting them legal and as many of them citizenship as possible so they can vote for Democrats, because that’s who they’ll vote for. Republicans, on the other hand, you’ve got a bunch of different lobby interests on the Republican side of this. One of them is big business, Chamber of Commerce, they like the cheap labor. There’s another element of this, and I remember mentioning this to you, oh, probably six weeks ago now, maybe even a little longer than that. What’s happening here largely is that we need — they’re flawed in their reasoning here, but it’s the old argument about saving Social Security.
We all know, if we choose to believe it, that Social Security has an endpoint where it’s going to require the taxes of one worker to pay the retirement benefits of one retiree, and that’s going to require a tax rate that workers won’t pay. You’re not going to go convince 20, 22-year-old people today that in 30 years their tax rate is going to be 75%. They’re not going to pay it. They’re not going to work. They’re going to join the welfare state and it will all break down. Congress doesn’t have the guts to take on Social Security reform and really reform it. It’s the third rail of politics. You’ve heard that. That’s the fastest way to cause yourself to lose an election. Actually, it’s the second-best way to now cause yourself to lose an election. The first best way is voting the wrong way on this immigration bill. But the influx of all of these people, the theory is, look at all these news taxpayers. Whether they’re legal or not doesn’t matter. They are paying Social Security taxes, even if they’re on an illegal Social Security card with an illegal number, the money is still being collected. Now, do the businesses that are hiring these people pass it on the government or not? Probably not in the case of illegals with forged numbers because a quick way to be identified as hiring illegals is a risk that some businesses don’t want to take. That’s what’s flawed about all this.
But the theory is that these people coming in will contribute all this new income because we’ve been aborting ourselves. We gotta throw this in the mix, too. Since 1973, run the numbers, 1.3 million abortions a year. We’ve aborted 40 million potential Americans, 40 million taxpayers who would be in the workforce producing income, generating wealth and paying Social Security taxes. Our replacement birth rate in this country is not what it should be. It’s a little low. So the fastest way to get bodies in here is to allow these illegals who want to come in, come in and pay their Social Security taxes, and put off the day of reckoning on Social Security for another bunch of generations to deal with and not have to make the hard choices now. I think that’s a factor, too. The problem with it is it will all fall apart because these illegals that are coming in and will be allowed in if this thing ever happens are going to be net drains on the whole safety net, because the low wages they’re going to be paid will not allow them to fend for themselves in enough areas. We’re a compassionate country, and so they’ll have to have free dental care, free health care, get all this stuff, and guess who’s going to be paying for that? You will.
The liberals love that ultimately because that’s just more taxes; that’s just bigger government; that is the greater redistribution of wealth. Believe me, liberals, if they could wipe out conservatism as a viable alternative ideology, they would love to be able to do it. If you bring 45, 50 million people in here that automatically vote Democrat, and you can create a minority that votes 90% Democrat like African-Americans do, then you could effectively end the existence as a viable force of Republicanism or conservatism or what have you. Those are all the Democrat motivations, which makes it even more puzzling why the Republicans don’t see it and they’re falling for it. Which leads then to, well, clearly they’re not that dumb so there’s gotta be something else going on here that we don’t understand. But I wanted to review the whole thing here because the vote that comes up on Thursday is another actual cloture vote. When the show started, I didn’t know there was another vote on Thursday. I saw Mark Krikorian’s post on National Review Online which, you know, bells and whistles went off, ‘Whoa, whoa, what is this?’ Then I started delving into it and finding out what’s up.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Michael in Austin, Texas, I’m glad you waited, sir. You’re next on the EIB Network.
CALLER: Ah, thank you, Rush. I hope I don’t blow this one.
RUSH: Wait, wait, wait, wait. How could you blow it?
CALLER: Well, there is a lot of other things I would rather talked about but I heard the guy from the Ukraine talk about the geopolitical potential of this —
RUSH: Uh, uh, I don’t want to be a nitpicker here, but it’s ‘Ukraine.’
CALLER: Okay.
RUSH: There’s no ‘the’ or ‘thee’ in front of it. We’re an educational, informative program here.
CALLER: Well…
RUSH: He was from ‘Ukraine.’
CALLER: Okay. I think this goes back, a lot of it, to the Cold War. I don’t think originally it was. A lot of us held our nose with Bush and the way he’s always saddled up to the illegal alien community around here, but in the last two years it’s like he’s thrown open the doors — and I think his reasons for doing it are far different from the Democrats’, and I don’t think we really know what his reasons are necessarily. You’ve got Russia that’s basically fomented the Middle Eastern terrorists, and they’re allies with Iran in a nonaggression pact. They will defend Iran, supposedly, if anyone goes against them. You have China with North Korea, and they also have control of the Panama Canal. You have Hugo Chavez down in Central America and you got a half a dozen people going on these talk shows with all sorts of different scenarios about potential for nuclear weapons going off on the shore, or, you know, on the coastland of America, and also potential EMP devices going off. Maybe he knows something. Maybe Bush knows something that we don’t. Maybe he’s concerned that we’re going to have a flood of just the masses from the south of the border in the middle of a bunch of chaos if our enemies orchestrate some form of attack against us and wants to engender a lot of support with those countries by allowing a large number of their citizens to go in there and have roots in there.
RUSH: All right.
CALLER: I mean, it would have to be something so big that… You know, maybe he’s got some piece of evidence he’s sitting on and —
RUSH: Look, I admire listening to people’s thought processes, because I admire people who think. I admire people who are not robots. But on this I respectfully say that that is a bit of a stretch. If I heard you right, we want a flood of illegals so we have allies if Al-Qaeda and the Russians and the Iranians decide to nuke us. Man, if we’re going to depend on illegals — and I don’t mean in joining the Army; I’m talking about creating goodwill so we have allies — we may as well just reelect Kerry and have him do the global test, turn over our whole sovereignty to what the rest of the world thinks. I don’t think with Bush that’s what it is. With Bush, he’s devout in his faith. I really think you’ve got second-term presidents and they’re concerned with legacies. I don’t know to what extent he has that concern. It’s not, certainly, as strong as Bill Clinton did, but I do think that with Bush, it’s probably a more simpler explanation than it is complicated. I think it’s these are the great unwashed. These are the ‘huddled masses.’ These are the people that want to improve their lives, that want to access the greatest country in the world because of the opportunity we have, and he’s not going to close the door on them. He’s just not going to do it. Now, there’s more to it than that. I don’t want to go into much more detail than that, but I think that obviously there’s some political concerns, too. I think there’s some misjudgments, miscalculations. I really do think that there’s some Republicans who think that these people are going to end up being conservative Republicans, because if they’ve pandered to enough we can show the people that we’re nicer to them than the Democrats are. It’s absurd! If you’re somebody who’s seeking to access relevant spot in the safety net, why would you go to the pretenders to get what you need when you can go to the real guys, in this case the liberal Democrats? Anyway, I appreciate the call out there Michael.