RUSH: Ben, Westerville, Ohio. Great to have you. Thank you very much for waiting, and welcome.

CALLER: Oh, thank you, Rush. It’s great to talk to you. I’m looking for a little clarification.

RUSH: Okay.

CALLER: You’ve said on numerous occasion that no immigration took place between — I don’t have the exact dates, but basically it was World War II and 1950-something, I think. My mother immigrated during that period of time as did my grandparents and as did all my aunts and uncles, and they weren’t the only ones on the boat going through Ellis Island, so I’m looking for a little clarification.

RUSH: Here’s the clarification. The first time I heard — and what I heard was, by the way, that between 1924 and 1965, the United States essentially shut down legal immigration for the purposes of assimilating the massive numbers of immigrants that had come in the late 1800s through Ellis Island, all the way through the early twenties. And I’d read that statistic three different times in three different Pat Buchanan columns.

So, you know, I trust Buchanan. I mean, Buchanan’s not making things up. I went to the U.S. government immigration website, and I wanted to see, ’cause I like you, I mean, I’ve known people that came into the country at that point, so I wanted to see what the numbers really were. And there’s a chart here, but I’m just gonna give you the numbers associated with the chart. It pretty much dovetails with what Buchanan said.

If you look at the numbers of immigrants prior to 1924 and after 1965, you find the chart is so small as to be statistically zero. Between 1921 and 1940, less than 50,000 people immigrated. As recently as 1920, it was six million. And you don’t get to two million immigrating to the country until 1961 to 1970. So there’s a lull in there of those years from basically 1930 to the mid-1960s where the numbers of immigrants were 50,000 per year, 75,000 per year, so some came in. But the numbers of legal immigrants were reduced drastically. So it wasn’t a flat-out zero, and it was not a total shutdown of the program, but it was severe.

CALLER: Okay.

RUSH: So essentially you’re right on that. Because if one comes in and I’m telling people nobody got in, that would mean you’re right and I’m wrong.

CALLER: I’m not looking for “I’m right and you’re wrong.” I’m just looking for clarification.

RUSH: Well, but a lot of people are looking for they’re right and I’m wrong. Not that you are. But I did want to find the numbers ’cause it shocked me. The first time I read it in Buchanan’s column, it shocked me. And the first time I didn’t look it up. Because the year 1965 made total sense because that’s the year Ted Kennedy began the effort to ramp up immigration, and that’s when illegal immigration started. These numbers, by the way, do not include illegal immigrants. The 50,000 a year in 1930 is legal.

I don’t know what illegal numbers are during those years ’cause we don’t even know what the real number today is, but you can see it here on the graph, on the chart that it just balloons in 1965 and starts climbing steadily. And that required the Simpson-Mazzoli Act of 1986 to grant amnesty to 1.9 million illegals. And we were told in ’86, Reagan was told when he signed the bill, “This is it. We grant these people amnesty and we’re gonna shut down the border and the illegal stuff is gonna stop,” and it was a flat-out lie as now everybody knows.

But we did drastically curtail legal immigration. I think my words actually were we essentially shut it down. And the numbers are, as I say on the chart, statistically so small that they don’t show up year to year. There were people getting in. But the reason for this was not discrimination or bias or anything else. It was to give these other arrivals time to assimilate into the American culture so that we were not inundated with numbers that we could not assimilate and acculturate.

I mean, there was a system to it. Legal immigration was legal immigration, and people that wanted to come to America wanted to become Americans. Well, that’s still true today, but there are a lot of illegal immigrants getting into the country who are not interested in becoming Americans, and their sponsors are not interested in becoming Americans because they don’t believe in America anyway, not the way you and I do. Such as this mayor in Oakland, California. She is going out of her way to warn illegal immigrants of when ICE deportation raids are, so that they can avoid them.

So you have an actual mayor of an American city in a sanctuary state and a sanctuary city working against law enforcement. She is breaking the law. She’s getting away with it. Which takes me to one of the ancillary pieces. I’m glad you called, Ben. Thanks very much. I ran into a piece by our old buddy Seton Motley published yesterday afternoon. I found it when I got home from work. And it’s nothing that we haven’t said before, but it’s really laid out well here.

The headline is: “We Believe The Constitution Applies Exclusively To Americans — And America.” And it doesn’t. In fact, it may just be the exact opposite. “We have a gi-normous problem with Big Government proponents trying to take away the Constitutional rights of United States citizens — while simultaneously trying to bestow them upon non-citizens.

“To wit: We currently are suffering a refreshed attempt by the Left … to substantially damage our Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. All the while, the Left continues pretending twenty-plus million illegal aliens have the full panoply of Constitutional protections.”

Isn’t it amazing that people here illegally are automatically granted every constitutional right that exists? When they’re not entitled to them. They’re not citizens. The Constitution does not apply to every human being in the world. But yet the left is attempting to grant constitutional rights to non-citizens every day while trying to curtail constitutional rights of citizens! And not just in the area of the Second Amendment. And that is the rub.

That is one of the primary reasons so many people are ticked off about illegal immigration in addition to the other justifiable reasons that people are mad about.