It’s About Jobs, Not Immigration and Assimilation

RUSH: Anderson in Orlando, Florida, you’re next, sir. Great to have you with us.

CALLER: Blessed dittos from the heart of Florida, Rush.

RUSH: Thank you, sir.

CALLER: If they’re polling these people and finding out that individually they’re all happy, they must be including some illegal immigrants in that. But the reason I called is I’m in the construction business here in Florida, and the people that work, the illegals that come here, I talk to them, and for one thing I’ve got to disagree with some of your callers. Some of these guys aren’t lowly paid. They’re making 15$ an hour, sometimes they make money by the job, so they’re making upwards of 20-something an hour. And when I talk to them, they’re sending at least half of their money, sometimes more, back to Mexico. And I asked them about it, and it’s not to support their families back there so much, it’s to put it into savings so they can move back there and be one of the rich people in Mexico when they go home. And I just don’t hear anybody talking about the fact that a lot of these people that are here don’t want to stay here, don’t want to become citizens.

RUSH: Well, forgive me, because you may not be hearing a lot of people saying it, but I, El Rushbo, have said it, in this way. I have said everybody’s missing the boat on this anyway because it’s not an immigration issue. Everybody is looking at this in the context of immigration, but it’s not an immigration issue. This is simply a bunch of people coming here for work. The idea that many of them don’t want citizenship and will go home after they’ve amassed some wealth here, probably true. Doesn’t surprise me that some of them are not crazy about getting citizenship. Why would they want to go through the hassle if they’re going to be made to play by the rules and so forth when it’s not necessary in order to seek the primary benefit that they’ve come here for, and that’s a job.

We’re missing the boat on this in terms of the language and in terms of the way we’re debating it and trying to set up policy on it. I’ll tell you something that is just typical of Washington. Here we have a massive immigration reform bill debate going. We don’t need any new laws. We’ve got more laws in this country than you can shake a stick at. We’ve got more laws than anybody in this country could possibly know. It is absurd. We had Simpson-Mazzoli in ’86. Every 20 years we’ve got to come up and reform immigration. That means we’ve got to fix something that we screwed up 20 years ago. If you just used existing laws on the books in so many of these issues you wouldn’t need all this rigmarole and gobbledygook.

One of the things, along with all the other things, that bothers me about this is this silly notion that we can’t solve these problems without government doing something and issuing some proclamation from on high. That’s always been a big bugaboo of mine that people look to government. Now, in this case, it makes more sense to do that than anything else because this is something the government is specifically charged with under terms of the Constitution, and that’s border security, and there isn’t any. Well, it’s not accurate to say there isn’t any, but it’s not being taken seriously. Immigration is when people come here to become Americans, and they go through a process, and they start out small, and they work their way up. It’s the story of how people became successful in this country and established family legacies and so forth, a lot of people, not just recently, but from the founding days of the country. That’s not what’s happening here. Real immigrants come here, learn the language, they assimilate, they acculturate, they seek to become part of the distinct American culture that exists here. That’s not what’s happening with all of this. And for otherwise bright people to look at this and just consider it an immigration issue is to miss the point of what’s really going on.

So, if you’re not willing or if you’re unable to accurately define the problem before you set out to solve it, then you’re not going to solve the problem. You’re going to window dress it or you’re going to paper it over or you’re going to take action that’s designed to mollify people for a while and punt it, only to have to come back and fix it later. Classic example of that? The Gang of 14 when it comes to judicial nominations. Because at some point the Democrats are going to filibuster a judge again, and this whole thing is going to have to be dealt with at some point, but they punted it with the Gang of 14. This is punting the issue. What they’re doing here is punting the issue while making it worse, because they don’t really understand what this is about. It’s the job market being flooded, it’s not about immigration, as our last caller’s story indicates.

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