RUSH: Here’s Mark passing through the Little Bighorn. Great to have you on the program. Hi.
CALLER: Hi. Great to be here Rush. I cannot believe I’m a actually getting to speak to the man himself. I am a gratified student in the Limbaugh Institute, and I want to thank you for inspiring me.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: You make me think more critically.
RUSH: Thank you very much, sir. I appreciate that.
CALLER: I’ve always believed that the simplest answers in life are probably the best, and I’ve never heard anyone on either side of the aisle propose something that is similar to what we had at Ellis Island in the turn of the last century. I mean, if it worked then, and if we do look back on history and say that it did work, and it did — well, it was more or less efficient, did what it was supposed to do — why are we not doing something similar and possibly in a joint venture with the Mexican government where they have screening facilities, prescreening facilities south of the border. As they come across we screen them again to find out what their goals are. You want to be a full-fledged American citizen, that’s great, we’d love to have you. You’re gonna learn to speak English and you’re gonna take the test. If you want to be a migrant worker and you want to come back every six months we’ll give you the workers visa —
RUSH: You’re asking questions that make too much sense and —
CALLER: Exactly.
RUSH: — they don’t have any relationship to the legislation pending.
CALLER: No. And, you know, it stopped being proposed because they don’t care. As long as they vote for them and keep them in office and con them into believing they actually do care. And if it ever were proposed, I believe I could hear the words coming out of the politician’s mouth, “No, no, no, we can’t do that.”
RUSH: I want to tell you something. You know me. I have said countless times that the Democrats want these people. They’re voters. It’s a permanent underclass. And you know, I’ve been struggling, is there any other reason I’m missing, is there some other inexplicable or unknown, unforeseen reason why the Democrats don’t want any real change to this system other than legalization? They don’t want any changes on the border. They don’t want any added measures on legalization.
What you propose is actually quite sensible. Okay, we acknowledge that people are gonna come here from Mexico, so we set up places where people in Mexico go if they want to come to the United States. And we interview them like we did at Ellis Island, “Okay, why are you here? What do you want to do? What are your objectives?” blah, blah, blah, blah. We check their health, we find out if any of them are sick and might be transporting a disease or whatever, and then we make a judgment based on policy guidelines at the moment. Instead we’re talking about fences and keep ’em out. Deal with the 11 million that are here. Every 20 or 30 years we grant amnesty and then wait for the next big batch to accumulate and grant some more amnesty. I realize sadly how partisan it sounds to say the Democrats simply look at these people as a bunch of future voters, but they do.
CALLER: Of course they do.
RUSH: They do. There’s no question that they do. And it can be explained as logically as anything else can. The Democrats need a lot of poor people dependent on government. That’s just undeniable. That’s the Democrat constituency. And as — pre-Obama — as people improve themselves financially and climbed ladders of success, they became less and less dependent on government, which made them less and less dependent on Democrats. And so those people might have stopped voting Democrat, stopped being Democrat. They need to be replaced, if the Democrats are to win elections. So that’s what this is. It’s patently obvious.
Now, to some people that sounds so cynical and so partisan, and the Democrats couldn’t possibly do that, but they do. So then when you ask a sensible question like this and balance it against what’s actually happening, I don’t have an answer for you. If we’re serious about immigration, it makes perfect sense. Because we don’t want to shut it down. We don’t want to make the country impenetrable in this way. We want to welcome people who are going to enhance this nation. I don’t have the answer for you other than to say that both political parties do have political objectives here that really don’t have anything to do with immigration.
CALLER: Well, am I still on?
RUSH: You’re still on but I’m sure you don’t have anything else to say, do you? You couldn’t possibly, after I —
CALLER: Well, all I had to say was when I hear talk about securing the border, I don’t know what that means. I have no idea what they’re talking about when they say we need a more secure border. I don’t have any input from them other than we need a secure border, we need a secure border. Tell me what that means because if you’re building a fence —
RUSH: Well, now, you know what that means. When people talk about securing the border, you know what that means. It means making sure that people aren’t able to illegally cross it.
CALLER: They’re going to, though. You had a wall in Berlin with armed guards. They’d risk their lives for freedom.
RUSH: That was to keep people in.
CALLER: They still try to get to freedom. If you’ve got a fence with no armed security they’re gonna cross the fence. It’s just a fence. They’re doing it every day with the fence that already exists. How big of a fence do you want to build? It’s never gonna work.
RUSH: Well, let me tell you something. Since you bring up the fence, the fence has already been authorized. Money has been allocated for the fence. It just hasn’t been built, and I think it was either Senator Sessions or Senator Cruz, might have been Senator Paul. One of them submitted an amendment to do what was already authorized, and the amendment was voted down. But the money for the fence has already been authorized. I forget how many miles of fence has been authorized, but a very small percentage of the fence authorized has been built. So somebody submitted an amendment to finish what’s already been signed into law. And that amendment failed. So the conclusion, they’re not serious about this fence business. They just did that for political reasons.
Folks, look, one thing I wanted to ask Senator Cruz, and I didn’t have time, and I should have written it down, we’re in this position because we never say “no” to a Democrat initiative. The Democrats want national health care. We don’t say “no” and oppose it. We have to have an alternative. So they’re always setting the agenda. And by virtue of that, it’s always us who seem to be contrarian. We never — well, not never, but seldom do you hear of Republican initiatives. And when they do exist, they’re always characterized as reactionary things.
I don’t understand, just because the Democrats want this, why do we have to have a version of it? The Democrats want amnesty, why can’t we just say “no” and fight ’em on that? Why do we have to, “Oh, you want amnesty? Okay, well, we don’t really like the way you’re gonna do it. Here, let’s try it our way.” Now, in this case we say, “Well, we need outreach to the Hispanics ’cause they don’t like us, and Rush, we just can’t say ‘no’ because the Hispanics will never like us. I mean, they already dislike us, then they’ll hate us.”
The Democrats want national health care. Why don’t we just say “no?” That’s the wrong thing to do. But we don’t say “no.” Well, I take that back. With Hillarycare we did say “no,” and look, we won. We did say “no.” So we can do it and succeed. But in way too many instances, I don’t care what it is, the Democrats decide they want something… and I guarantee you what has got the Republicans caught in the trap is this whole notion of what people are gonna think of ’em. They are so browbeaten by that and they so believe that Democrats are so loved, and Democrat policies are so loved, that when a Democrat supports something the Republicans better appear to be — That’s what all this talk of bipartisanship is, is Republicans agreeing with Democrats. It just ticks me off, the whole thing just ticks me off when I stop and think about it.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I want to answer the question about “we.” Why don’t “we” say “no”? Because, you know what I really have to do? We have to define who the “we” is. So when I say the Democrats propose something, why don’t “we” say “no,” well, what I’m talking about is the Republicans. But the problem with that is that there is a ruling class in Washington that is made up of people in both parties, and they don’t really think of themselves as Republicans or Democrats.
They’re identified that way for political purposes, but Washington is its own universe. So it’s true that the Democrats want 46 million undocumented Democrats to come into the country, 46 million foreigners, legal immigrants, whatever, Washington wants that, the Democrats want that. So when the Democrats want it, Washington wants it, and some Republicans. This is where we get hung up on the, “Why don’t we say ‘no,’?” because there are people among the “we,” Republicans, who support big government.
Oh, yeah.
Why do you think Tea Party candidates are opposed by the Republicans? You go back to the Christine O’Donnell and Sharron Angle races in the 2010 midterms. The reason the Republicans really were worried about Christine O’Donnell and Sharron Angle is they really thought they wouldn’t have a chance to win. The Republicans wanted the Senate. You could hear ’em say they wanted to control the chairmanships in the Senate. They wanted to get the chairmanships back.
There are Republicans that want to be in charge of the money, too. There are Republicans who want the power of controlling the money. And that’s what winning elections in Washington means. To a lot of Republicans, it isn’t about conservatism or liberalism or Democrats or Republicans. It’s about having the money or not having the money. Having the power over the money, having the power to spend it for whatever things that we’re trying to buy.
So there are a lot of Republicans who are also part of the “we.”
Democrats are some.
There are some of the “we” who agree with them.
So Washington wants illegal immigration? That means the Democrats want it, and some Republicans, too. Washington wants a powerful IRS. Washington wants Obamacare. Washington wants 46 million foreigners. There are a number of Republicans you know and I know that get saddled into the have to be categorized as in the “we,” and that’s the problem. When I say why don’t “we” say “no,” I’m making a fallacious assumption that all Republicans oppose this, and they don’t — and that ticks me off even more.