RUSH: We’re gonna start in Syracuse with Sister Mary Jo. Welcome to the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Hello, Rush. I’m a charter listener but first-time caller. I heard you back when I lived in Baton Rouge. That was one of the first stations that became part of your network.
RUSH: Baton Rouge. So you would have been part of… Well, that would have been in late 1988, then, yeah.
CALLER: Yeah. Well, I called because on Thursday you were talking about your different ideas of possible immigration reform that we don’t have to pass amnesty. By the way, the liberals are putting it —
RUSH: Ma’am, may I ask you a question?
CALLER: Sure.
RUSH: You’re identified as “Sister” Mary Jo. Are you a nun?
CALLER: Yes, I am.
RUSH: Okay. I just wanted to understand that. Fine.
CALLER: Yeah. I worked in Mexico for about 10 years operating an orphanage down there.
RUSH: Okay.
CALLER: Some of my boys are in the country legally and some are illegally. I noticed when I worked down there, the town that the orphanage was in was outside of Guadalajara, and about I’d say of the population… It was a small town. More than half of the people had spent time in the United States working here, and they didn’t want to live here permanently. They wanted to come here, raise some money, and go back and raise their families in Mexico.
Generally, they would really go for your idea about immigration where they could have a green card and come in and work as a migrant, you know, for periods of the year and go back because that’s what they were doing. They would come into the country and work for a while. Around Christmastime when the peso would make a jump, they would take all the money they’d saved up all year long, go back to Mexico and buy a piece of property.
They’d get married, and their wife would live with her family, and they would come back to the US, work for another year, go back to Mexico, put the first floor on their house. It always contained a garage and I always wondered why, but then I found out that what they would do is the wife would then move out from her family into the house. She would use the garage and open a little store.
RUSH: Did this keep families intact?
CALLER: It did. I mean, after each year, they would go back and they’d have another child, but after about three years, they had the house built, and he would stay in Mexico, raise the family. They’d live together, but now they had all that they wanted from the US, which is the wherewithal to get started in Mexico.
RUSH: Let me review for people who didn’t hear the call, the comment that you’re talking about, what it is you’re saying so they’ll understand it. Earlier this week, folks, there was a discussion held here on amnesty and immigration. We had a caller, a young woman, 25 years old, who runs a farm, her family has a farm in the Central Valley of California. She assured us that she was, her family, dyed-in-the-wool ideological conservatives, but they had a problem. They could only afford so much to pay people to pick their cops and do other work on the farm. And she said what we’ve heard a lot of people say, that there are certain jobs that she has on her farm Americans refuse to do.
And I said, “Well, there’s a reason for that. We’re paying people not to work in this country a decent amount. There’s no reason to take a 10 or 15 dollar an hour job if you’re being paid more than that not to work.”
The point that we eventually got to was, she was trying to suggest that we need to do something that would allow her to hire migrant workers because she needs the work done, but she can only afford so much for it, and Americans won’t do it. The discussion eventually turned on the fact that we don’t need to do blanket amnesty for 12 or 20 million people for this, that we could do what we used to do in this country, which was seasonal green card grants, seasonal migrant workers. I just threw it out, it’s not my idea, we used to do it in this country, in fact, as Sister Mary Jo has just said.
We would grant people seasonal, six-month, whatever the growing season needed to be, whatever the farm work, whatever needed to be done, grant a green card and they’d come in and leave. There was no pretense at becoming citizens. There was no pretense at voting. All it was was a job opportunity. And they would come to the country and do it and then leave when the work was completed. So Sister Mary Jo is calling here saying she’s been to Mexico and she knows people who would gladly accept this, correct?
CALLER: Yes. That’s true. Actually, I have two boys that I’m still contact with here in the states. One is illegally in the US and the other is legally. He has a visa. The one who has a visa does the back-and-forth route because it’s easy for him to get in and out of the country. The illegal one is here and doesn’t go back because he has to pay a coyote $500 to get him across the border every time he goes, so it’s not feasible for him to do that. So he would end up as one of these people wanting amnesty because he’s been living here now for a long time and put his roots down now in this country because he can’t go back.
RUSH: Right. Well, I’ll tell you where the whole thing ended up, folks. My belief is that both political parties, in seeking amnesty, are looking at voter registration. Because there are many other solutions to this problem that you could do that would cost much less and would have far less cultural and societal, legal impact on the country. For example, if the old saw, that there is work in America that native Americans won’t do, such as this kind of agricultural work, well, then give those farms some kind of a tax break, which allows them to keep more of the money they otherwise would send to government and use it to hire people that they can pay a little bit more than they can afford now, or the seasonal work.
We have a lot of seasonal workers. I think we already have over two million migrant workers in the country now, and statistically half of them are illegal, as Sister Mary Jo points out. The real point of this is there are real problems out there in the agricultural community and other businesses, and there are ways of solving the problem without blanket amnesty of 12 to 20, whatever the number is, millions of people, and totally bastardizing and corrupting US law, and essentially registering a whole bunch of new Democrats. We don’t have to do that to address the problem. So Sister Mary Jo, thank you for the call. I love personal experience.