RUSH: John in Los Angeles. I’m glad you waited. You’re next on Open Line Friday. Hi. John, you there?
CALLER: The topic I wanted to discuss was something you left off on yesterday which was the Swift Company immigration raid. It is such a farce, and I say that because I have personal knowledge of major company in the Los Angeles County area that I’ve written ICE about. I’ve written to Chertoff and have gotten response, and they do nothing.
RUSH: Wait, what’s the farce about it? What’s the farce?
CALLER: The farce is, if they really want to crack down on illegal immigration at these plants, why not go to a place that has the number two, at the very at least, number of illegal immigrants working, and that’s Los Angeles. You have not heard of a crackdown in any major city where illegal immigrants are, especially in Los Angeles — in California, period!
RUSH: Well, that is an interesting point. So you think it’s all of all a bunch of BS. I’m looking here. I’ve got a so many immigration stories in the fact now, I can’t believe it.
CALLER: (chuckles)
RUSH: I’m going in to try to find them now. The stories are amazing. Look at this: “UN Agencies Warn of Impending North Korea Food Crisis.” They’ve had a food crisis in North Korea for 25 or 30 years! Anyway, hang with me here.
CALLER: Okay, and then, Rush, when you look at the type of companies that they’re cracking down on, they’re nothing.
RUSH: Hey, hey, hey! Swift is the number two beef and pork packer and producer in the country. That’s not nothing.
CALLER: I know. But I’m saying in terms of the world. For example, I have personal experience of say Johnson & Johnson, one of their companies, that employee and have employed…
RUSH: Okay, so I get you. Your point is they could do these raids every day and clean them all out, these companies, if they really wanted to? This was just for show?
CALLER: There you go.
RUSH: That’s what you think?
CALLER: Like I said, it’s all from personal experience, and/or knowledge, okay? So they could do that, but they don’t want to. That’s when I say, and —
RUSH: Look it, we have had — I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve told this story. I forget. It’s in Georgia, some onion farm or some such thing, and a couple of other states, too, I think actually another meat packer in Ohio, or maybe it’s Nebraska. Yeah, it was Nebraska, and I forget, it wasn’t Swift. I forget which one it was. Now, this goes back to before there was ICE. This was INS days, Immigration and Naturalization Service. These guys would do these raids, and the owners of the company after the raids would call their respective senators, and the senators would call the head of Immigration and Naturalization, and he was told, “Look, I don’t know what you think you’re doing. If you want to hold this job and if you want to be able to put your kids through college, you’re going to cancel these raids. I am not going to have my constituents this upset at me. You can’t do these raids at this time of the year. This is crucial.”
This is right before the harvest, or right before whatever it was, and the INS guy then ends up being threatened by senators in two different states representing their constituents, and so what’s he going to do? Obviously he’s going to back down a little bit and not make it as public what these raids have all been about. Look it, as everybody knows, when you start talking about illegal immigration, there’s a sizable population, percentage of the population that doesn’t want to do anything about it. One of the groups in the sizable “I don’t want to do anything about it” population is business. They love the cheap labor, and they’ve put forth the notion that it’s “jobs Americans won’t do.” We sort of put the myth to that yesterday, because one of these Swift plants knew that the raid was going to happen, and before the raid they increased wages, benefits and bonuses because you’re going to have to replace these workers.
In some places they lost a thousand works; they’re going to have to replace them if they’re going to keep their productivity up, and they hired, as the story said, “a number of Caucasians” to replace the illegal immigrants, the Hispanics, who had been thrown out in the raid. So it’s not that Americans won’t do the job. It’s that Americans won’t do the job at entry-level, uneducated wage levels, which the companies knew, which it seems to me Swift knew because they had to raise their wages in order refill these jobs or fill these jobs vacated by the raid — and there were lots of people lined up to take the jobs as well. There’s a good number of people that want nothing to do with changing illegal immigration the way it is. They benefit from it. They don’t consider it to be a problem in any way, shape, manner, or form.
There’s a bunch of people, particularly in Arizona, J.D. Hayworth — of course there’s a little being misreported about his loss, and another candidate. The pro-immigration, the pro-illegals, or the pro-amnesty crowd, whatever you want to call them, are spinning these elections, trying to say, “Look at what happened to candidates in border states who ran on a very heavy platform of fixing illegal immigration: they got beat,” and in some cases, you could make the case persuasively to future candidates that this is a losing issue, despite the cacophony and the rage from people in the country who are upset about it. People that ran for office with that as their primary plank in the platform, some of them got shellacked. Not all of them, but all it takes is one or two for the opponents to point at, “See? See? The country is not that upset about this! It’s being totally manufactured,” and so forth, and it’s just going to create more and more doubt and a little a little fear on the part of future candidates to make it a big issue, because it didn’t seem to be that big a one in this last campaign, certainly not one that propelled proponents of getting something done on border security to victory. Brief time-out here. Thanks for the call, John. We’ll be back and continue in uno momento.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: (story) “A week after the largest ever US crackdown of illegal immigrants in the workplace, Hispanic leaders called yesterday for an end to such raids, saying immigration reform in Congress should be completed first. ‘This is the time to take action because families are being destroyed,’ said Rosa Rosales, president of the League of United Latin-American Citizens. She and others at a news conference called on federal officials to end the raids, saying the roundups harm people who are simply trying to support their families.” Well, most everybody is trying to support their family. There are some exceptions out there. Does that give you an exemption from the law?