RUSH: Here’s the New York Times story.  This guy’s name is Eduardo Porter, and he is at the New York Times editorial board, and here is his idea on immigration reform.  Now, you tell me what you think this is.  “Maybe the answer,” writes Eduardo Porter of the New York Times, “instead lies in another direction.”  He doesn’t want a wall.  He thinks Trump’s full of it.  Any Trump idea is wrong.  That’s what he’s countering here. 

“Maybe the answer, instead, lies in another direction. Rather than building a bigger wall, [his solution] consists of opening a door in the wall we have. The best way,” he writes, “to stop illegal immigration may be for Mexico and the United States to create a legal path for low-skill Mexicans seeking work in the United States.” You follow that?  Maybe the solution to illegal immigration is to stop calling it illegal! (laughing) Maybe the solution to illegal immigration is we get together with Mexico and we create a legal path for specifically low-skill Mexicans who want to work in the U.S. 

And that path… Think of it as a real path.  Think of it as a legal route or whatever.  Because he says, isn’t this the objective anyway? Isn’t the reason we’re arguing about this ’cause we need this low-skilled labor to do work Americans won’t do, and we are tying ourselves up in knots? So let’s just get together with Mexico and admit that Mexico and the U.S. wants low-skill Mexicans to be able to come to the United States and work.  So let’s just say that we’re gonna make that legal!  It is kind of like saying that we are going to outlaw fraud by declaring it legal. 

Then he writes, “‘When I hear “Secure the border,” I think that’s great, but it’s not the solution,’ said Carlos Gutierrez, who was commerce secretary under President George W. Bush. ‘We need laws that enable us to get the immigrant workers we need for the economy to work and do it in a legal way that doesn’t require employers to resort to a black market.'” So Eduardo Porter is quoting Carlos Gutierrez in the second part there.  He says, “This might sound like a giveaway to employers seeking to undercut American workers with cheap foreign labor.

“Neither major party presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton or Mr. Trump, is very likely to embrace the approach in the homestretch of the presidential campaign. And yet it deserves a hearing. In more than half a century, it is the only strategy that has worked.” So this… By the way, if this is the stated opinion of somebody at the New York Times editorial board, I guarantee you this thinking reflects establishment thinking and elite thinking. 

We want those low-skill workers here.  Republicans want ’em here because cheap labor; the Democrats want ’em here for voter registration.  So that’s what we’re really talking about here and they’re saying (summarized): We’ve been sidetracked by all this other stuff.  It’s really a specific group of people everybody’s talking about: Low-skilled Mexicans.  That’s who we want!  We need to carve out a path that makes it legal for those people to come here and be hired. 

And that is what, I dare say, any other Republican nominee would have agreed to. 

The Republicans are on board with amnesty as it is in certain ways. 

This would be right up their alley. 

So this is the simplification of a very complicated issue, and this is called immigration reform, but it’s not.  It’s not immigration reform.  It’s what Daniel Patrick Moynihan used as his example of defining deviancy down.  It’s when you figure out you can’t stop something you don’t like from happening, you just legalize it and say it’s normal, and you give up.  So if you can’t stop people robbing 7-Eleven stores you stop making it a crime and call it progress. 

Defining deviancy down.  In this case, if we can’t come to an agreement as Americans on what to do about illegal immigration, well, let’s just pick out the people we’re talking about here and make ’em legal and we’ll call it reform.  And it isn’t.  It’s giving up.  It’s caving in.  Actually caving in or giving up’s the wrong way because the people advocating this, it’s exactly what they want.  We’d actually have to say this is them winning. 

But my point is, this is exactly the stuff going on out there, the reason Trump has millions and millions and millions of people supporting him.  This country’s being given away.  It’s about lawlessness.  It’s about illegality.  It’s about that kind of behavior being rewarded.  That’s not how we were raised.  That’s not how we were taught to behave.  It’s not what we were taught to honor.  And when all of this has a quantifiable-negative impact on people who already live here, it can’t be justified in any way, shape, manner, or form. 

So then we’re left to the analysts trying to tell us what’s behind this.  And they will tell us, “They actually think it’ll work, Rush,” just like the current spin on the Obamacare premiums rising, “But, Rush, you’re wrong about the fact that they just want a single payer path.  You’re wrong about this being a designed failure.  These people really thought this would work.”  I don’t subscribe to that because I have, when we come back, some sound bites from Obama himself explaining what the whole game is all about here.