RUSH: A Washington Post story today: ‘Immigration Compromise Faces New Opposition — Proposal Stays Alive, But Foes Lie in Wait.’ What’s interesting about this Washington Post story is this little reference here on page two: ‘Supporters had expected opposition from both ends of the political spectrum. But they conceded they were taken aback by the furious response over the weekend, especially from conservatives, who declared that the legislation is nothing short of amnesty for lawbreakers.’ They were surprised? You would think by now that these people would have known. How many years have they been trying to ram this amnesty stuff down our throats, and they know what’s happened each time they’ve tried. Surprised at the level of support they got from — and read ‘talk radio’ on that, by the way. You see, we’re just a niche audience here. Nobody outside of you people has any idea what’s going on here, of course, is their line of rap. Anyway, they put the debate off, the vote off until after the Memorial Day recess. The longer this goes on, the longer the delay, the more the debate, the more people find out what’s in this, then of course the better we’ll all be. I’m going to tell you, folks, doing nothing is better than doing this. It is.
You’re going to hear the exact opposite from all of the so-called experts. ‘We gotta do a bill. We gotta do something. The status quo just won’t…’ yes, better than this. It’s really even a misnomer to call this immigration. This is not about immigration reform. This is not immigration. There’s no assimilation here. That’s not what this is. What this is, is an attempt to remake the United States culture and society as liberals envision it and would love it to be, and that is a culture and society that keeps them perpetually in power. That’s what this is. There’s a romantic attachment to the whole term ‘immigration.’ We are a nation of immigrants, goes the phrase, we are the melting pot, blah, blah, blah. I think the word immigration somehow does a little bit of a disservice here. Not a purposefully done thing. It’s just confusing to people. We’re not talking about immigration in a traditional sense that it has been discussed as a way to build this country.
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RUSH: Jim in Wall, New Jersey, thank you for waiting, sir. You’re next. I appreciate your patience.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. Thanks for taking my call.
RUSH: Yes, sir.
CALLER: I was listening to the flagship station in New York. The talk host this morning kind of intermingled the Iraq war and the immigration debate going on now in the context of it being polarizing. I see the Iraq war being polarizing among individuals when I travel throughout New Jersey and Pennsylvania, but the immigration issue only seems to be polarizing among the politicians, not necessarily the voters.
RUSH: That is an excellent observation. In fact, that leads me to something I’ve been wanting to talk about here for a couple days on all of this. It intensified with my reading some things last night and today about some of the name-calling that’s going on. I know that the Democrats are full of elites and people think they’re better than everybody else, snooty little arrogance, look down their nose at people. We got some of those people on our side, too. They’re conservatives and so forth, but they have this elitist air about them, too. One of the things that you can see from this illegal immigration debate is a clear gap between the self-anointed elites in the Republican Party and the conservative movement versus the grassroots. The grassroots are you and me. The self-anointed elites, they publish magazines, they appear on TV as pundits, they live and work in Washington, think tanks, and they’ve self-anointed themselves as elites. One of the things that really embarrasses them the most is to have you and I on their team. They are with the Democrats on this immigration business. I call ’em the open borders crowd. They fear nothing about it. They think it’s quite necessary. They fall back on this line that we’re a nation of immigrants, a great melting pot and so forth.
They delight in trying to distance themselves from rabble, from average Americans in the grassroots because you and I are not elite, and they are. They want to impress other elites. If the other elites are out there bashing us and trying to destroy talk radio, our elites are not going to defend us so much. They’re going to act embarrassed, too, because they don’t want to be identified because they don’t want the left to think they are rabble. They want the left’s elites to think that they, too, on the right, are elites. You can see the same thing goes on in the Democrat Party to a certain extent. Let me put aside the Democrat Party stuff for just a second here. We have all kinds of politicians out there insisting that they are the next Ronald Reagan. They invoke his name, they quote him, claim to have been his friend. But one thing that most of them do not have is Reagan’s connection with the grassroots, his connection and identification with the people generally. This is one of the things that’s sorely missing in the Republican presidential field right now. People are weighing in on them, they’re having opinions because they are the candidates, but Reagan was able to go over the heads of the media, and he connected with people, one on one.
Whether he’s speaking to 10,000, 20 million, 500 or whatever, Reagan was able to connect with people in that regard. There are few people on our side that have the ability to do that. Many of the Republican candidates today lack this. McCain, among others, comes to mind. They’re sort of a talk at us group, rather than a group that actually connects. For example, the base of the Republican Party, you, are being denigrated. And me. I’m in it. We’re being denigrated because of our position on immigration. We are knuckleheads, we’re closed-minded, we’re racists, all these days names are being thrown around. We’re yahoos, we are restrictionists, all these names are being bandied about, and they’re coming from people on our side, ostensibly, on our side. Reagan would never do that. Reagan didn’t trash his own grassroots, the people that elected him. Now, the people we’re talking about here are not elected, but they do want you to buy their magazines and they do want you to buy their reports and contribute to their think tanks, and they do want you to vote for them for president and so forth. Reagan never once put down his own side. Reagan never tried to distance himself from his own side.
Now, people have forgotten this. The 1986 Simpson-Mazzoli bill, which is what led to this, that we are fighting now, it was intense. Reagan didn’t diminish his detractors or speak down to them. He had them. Reagan was openly calling Simpson-Mazzoli amnesty, and amnesty isn’t immigration. Amnesty is forgiveness of crimes. That’s what this is, and there’s no other way to talk about it, but it was just as intense then as it is now. You might not have remembered it because there was no alternative media in 1986. It hadn’t sprung up yet. But Reagan was not dismissive of his critics on his side. He tried to address their concerns. I’m not saying he was successful. Because there was like still strong opposition within the Republican Party and the conservative movement and there were people calling him a sellout back then, saying, ‘Oh, my gosh, this was horrible. How in the world could he do this? I thought we had elected a conservative,’ much the same kind of thing that’s being said about Bush. But one of the things about a great leader, one of the measures of a great leader is how he responds to his base, to his constituency, does he do it with respect.
What we’re seeing in too many elements of the so-called Republican elite is contempt for those who put ’em in office and keep ’em in office and buy their magazine subscriptions and buy their think tank reports, is contempt. You’re embarrassing them. You’re just making them look bad. This is such a simple issue, and you’re gumming up the works out there. This pseudo-intellectualism, which you would expect from big government liberals, claim to know what’s best on impose it on masses. What’s interesting about this, though, is that the open border Republicans are without strong substantive arguments. They cannot and will not address the important issues that have been raised in this argument, including on this show. This bill will kill Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid and they don’t answer this. The whole transfer of funds, the redistribution of wealth, is going to break the bank. You cannot bring this many poor people into the country as fast as this bill would, and once they’re here and legal, the courts have said they’re entitled to these benefits. You can’t put that many people on the benefit rolls and have the whole thing survive, unless you start confiscating taxes. Folks, this bill would make almost immediate the legalization of 12 million or 15, whatever it is. Then you multiply that by at least four relatives, so we’re talking at least 50 million people before the security provisions of the bill kick in.
Robert Rector and his gang at the Heritage Foundation have done some amazing work on this, and they’ve dispelled this notion that all these people are here doing work the American people won’t do. This immigration bill does nothing to force countries like Mexico to reform their policies so as to discourage more illegal immigration. In fact, we know where Mexico is on this. They’re ready to sue us if this bill is not passed. The fence cuts it in half, and the fence won’t even get built when all is said and done if this becomes law. I, frankly, don’t think this thing has a snowball’s chance just because of you, and that’s why the elites on both sides are upset. They want it done. They like legislation. They think it’s progress. They think when a bill gets done, signed by the president, why, we’re moving forward. Especially if they think they’ve been an influential part of getting it signed and moving it forward, makes ’em feel powerful. Makes ’em feel like the self-anointed elites that they are. Well, look, I could go on and on. We’ve talked about the details of the bill. Which is really not the point of what I’m trying to say here. There’s serious, serious issues here that go to the heart of the kind of country we are and want to be, and these are issues that touch on the well-being of our economy, our social welfare net, the school systems, health care system, our culture. There are organizations that lobby day in and day out against assimilation, against English as the official language.
This is not about immigration. This is about the American left with the support of certain Republican elites and conservative elites trying to remake this country in their own image, and to do that they’ve gotta tear down the traditions and institutions that define this country. The demographic shift that would take place under this bill would destroy the very foundation of the way this country was established, even with all the immigration, because there’s nothing in this about assimilation. So when these people start berating — and you asked the question out there, Jim, is it as polarizing as Iraq, it really isn’t. There are far more Americans who are up in arms about this than the elites and the Drive-By Media would have you believe. By the way, they keep saying, ‘Well, you know, our people, well, we’re a little bit surprised, we’re taken aback by the response here of conservatives and talk radio.’ You shouldn’t have been. ‘But we just have to get with them and teach them. They just don’t understand. We’ll take the time, tell them what this is really all about and how they’re misunderstanding it.’ So we’re a bunch of dupes, a bunch of idiots. We don’t really understand. We don’t have the ability, folks, you and I don’t have the intellectual capability to understand the real meaning here.
Well, all you have to tell us is, you want to sneak this in under the cover of darkness with no debate, and you’ve got Senator McCain saying, ‘We ought to have no extracurricular politics here,’ meaning we’re not going to have any debate, we’re not going to allow the people of this country to screw up this whole bill, right there, red flags point straight up. So when they berate and disparage those raise these issues — we’re talking about our country. All we want to do is preserve it, and make sure that it survives us so that children and grandchildren, people not conceived or born yet have the same opportunities and more that we all had, and it isn’t going to be the case if the American left ever wrests total control of this country away from conservatives. So when you and I and others are denounced and labeled by these elites on our side, while they at the same time claim that they’re Reaganites and they understand Reagan, they were a friend of Reagan and so forth, they haven’t the slightest clue because Reagan would never talk to his base or his constituency or his voters in the way that they are being talked to by the current crop. It’s not very many, folks. It’s just they get a lot of coverage because they’re on the same side of the issue with this as the liberal elites are.
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RUSH: Here’s a dirty little secret on this. I make this point when I go out and do the Rush to Excellence Tour. One of the things I assume when I sit down to do this program each and every day behind this, the Golden EIB Microphone, one of the things I assume is your intelligence, because I know I’m intelligent, and if you weren’t, you couldn’t keep up, and there are gobs and oodles and millions of you out there. I assume your intelligence. I do not think that you are rabble, that you’re uninformed, a bunch of idiots, mind-numbed robots, sponges, or sheep or what have you. I have a respect for you. This is what’s missing here from the elites. They have no such relationship with the average American, and they don’t want it. They want to be above everybody. They don’t want to be considered part of the hoi polloi. But the American people, you are smart and wise, despite what today’s politicians and elites say about you. You know that this is a very, very bad effort by your government, and you know that when government takes on something this big, those of you who have lived long enough and followed this, you know they botch it up.
This is the third attempt at this, maybe the fourth attempt at getting this right, and they end up making it worse every time they try. We’re the ones that have this figured out, and you ought not be denounced, you should be consulted and listened to. Why do you think the left is afraid of talk radio? The elites, including in the Republican Party and the conservative movements, hate talk radio. They don’t like it. On our side, too. Trust me on this, folks. I know this. You may not see evidence of it, but I know it. Hate may be too strong a word. They resent it. The elites on the left hate talk radio. The elites on the right resent it. That’s why they look down at talk radio. That’s why they bad mouth talk radio. They view you as rabble, uninformed mind numb robots being led around by a bunch of Svengalis. They like the power you give them when you support them, when you vote for them, when you buy their magazines and read their think tank reports and all that, if you watch their television shows. They really don’t like you very much. When things like this comes up, it becomes clear. Interestingly, it’s the leftists out there who understand the value of talk radio, and that’s why they want to destroy it. That’s why they push for unconstitutional laws to silence it, like the Fairness Doctrine and other things. It is why they’re out there smearing talk show hosts and trying to destroy their careers, because I’m going to tell you about the liberal elites, the thing they fear the most is an informed citizenry. They can’t oppose that. They can’t win in the arena of ideas. That’s why they have set themselves up with power insulated from elections: the judges, the bureaucracies, a lot of the academia world, the institutions of higher learning. They’ve had to insulate themselves from elections because they lose most of them nationally if they’re honest about who they are. They can’t stand critics, and they can’t stand people like me and other hosts who create informed masses of people. Now, I would think the elites on our side would be appreciative of us. No, they have their own little resentment of it, too.
Now, let me describe you and me. You and me, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me three times, and liberals make you an expert. Here is Ted Kennedy. Ted Kennedy is one of the elites. Ted Kennedy is regaled. Ted Kennedy is said to be the lion of the Senate, the greatest man ever to work in the Senate — well, in the top five. You know what I’m talking about. He just never, ever gets any criticism for anything. But Ted Kennedy was dead wrong 42 years ago, the Immigration and Nationality Act amendments in 1965. During debate on the Senate floor Kennedy said, ‘Our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually, and secondly the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset.’ That’s what he said, that’s what he promised, that’s what he guaranteed, and he was dead wrong. He was dead wrong again on immigration 27 years ago, the Immigration Rescue Act of 1980, designed to move foreign policy considerations from the formulation of our refugee laws. Instead it ended up laying the foundation for a massive bureaucracy that has sent phony asylum applications skyrocketing to over 100,000 a year. Get off the plane at JFK, claim asylum, you’re here. Thank you Ted Kennedy.
He was dead wrong 21 years ago, Immigration Reform and Control Act. This is Simpson-Mazzoli of 1986, provided amnesty, temporary status to all illegal aliens who had lived in the country continuously since before January 1st of 1982. The result, we went from three million problems to 12 million problems if not more. These are the people that claim you and I have no idea what we’re talking about, that they’re the experts, they’re the elites, and what they do behind closed doors, we don’t even have to intelligence to see it, because we couldn’t understand it, and this is what you and I know. They are the ones screwing all of this up, and they come out and they do it every so often with bigger and bigger legislation that is unmanageable and impossible, and I know as far as Ted Kennedy’s concerned this is not about immigration anyway, as we have discussed.
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RUSH: I want to say a couple more things here about talk radio. Of course, I have a selfish and vested interest in this. I find it fascinating, as I mentioned in the last hour, it’s the left in this country that has the greatest understanding of the value of talk radio. That’s why they want to destroy it. The Washington Post has a story today that all these people in Washington were stunned by the reaction from conservatives to the immigration bill, brought on by talk radio. Why? They know. They have known for I can’t tell you how long. The left knows, and that’s why they’re trying to destroy it. They fear the connection with the public that talk radio has. All the elites do, both sides of the aisle. So the left is trying to wipe us all out, some in the GOP wish to disparage or ignore us on talk radio, and that’s just because we make things uncomfortable for them, but I’ll tell you, there is no more democratic institution in this country than this forum, no more democratic institution than talk radio. There’s more dissemination of a wide variety of news. There’s more discussion about it here on this forum than they even have in Congress. People that host programs like this — there are exceptions, of course — but are intellectually honest, whether you agree with what’s said or not, then you will hear in the mainstream media any day of the week. So what this bill does, this immigration bill pits the people, you and me, against the elites. It pits the party establishment, now controlled by the elites, against the base, against the grassroots. It pits the self-anointed intellectuals against the base in the conservative movement.
Here’s the way I look at it. I wrote a book, and the first chapter of that book was ‘My Success is Not Determined by Who Wins Elections.’ You’re all asking me, ‘Well, how come you haven’t picked a presidential nominee?’ These people come and go, folks. Politicians come and go. But the rule of law and our economic system and our culture are greater than these temporary officeholders. It’s our job to protect them for all time, or America will cease to exist. And who’s going to protect it? You and me. We can’t really rely on a bunch of passing figures, passing public — well, you got some exceptions. Ted Kennedy’s been up there 43 years or what you have. But I mean you get my drift, these people come and go. But it’s up to us, the way we live our lives and the way we raise children and so forth to protect the traditions and institutions that make the country great, and that’s what this bill’s all about. It’s us versus the elites who think they know better how to do all this with legislation. The magic of legislation, going to create laws and somehow this is going to be miraculous in defining greatness for the country.
It’s always been the people who make this country work. Average, ordinary people accomplishing extraordinary things, that’s always been the simplest way to define what has made this country great. Average, ordinary people. I don’t mean that as a put-down. I mean anonymous people who are not seeking fame; people who are not doing what they’re doing to get noticed. People out there accomplishing extraordinary things, be it in the world of inventions, you name it, that is what has defined this country. Now look what we’re being told. We’re being told that the future greatness of this country is dependent on an ever increasingly large pool of uneducated cheap labor, and without that, we can’t move forward. Now, I don’t care what your education is, what your formal education is, you know damn well that that’s not the case because if it were the key to greatness in terms of a culture, society, or a country, then Mexico would be yipping at our heels and the Third World wouldn’t be the Third World. Cheap, uneducated labor, if that defined greatness in a country, why, we wouldn’t be who we are. And of course it’s absurd.
So why do they want to bring in all this cheap labor, why do they want to bring in cheap uneducated labor? Easier to control; easier to make dependent; easier to get their votes, pure and simple. I’m sorry, but all you gotta do is take a look at France to find out where this is headed.
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RUSH: We’ll go to Blaine, Washington, and talk to David. I appreciate your patience. Thank you for waiting.
CALLER: Thank you, Rush. Mega dittos from a 60-year-old veteran conservative radio broadcaster who can’t find work in the far-left state of Washington.
RUSH: Well, you know, that’s my fault because I’m on so many radio stations. I’ve taken 600 potential jobs out there. So really you should blame me and my success for this.
CALLER: Well, I’ll never blame you. I worship the ground you walk on. One of the things that most of you broadcasters are missing is the fact that I live on the most unsecured border in this country, and if this bill, this immigration bill has even a hint of passing, there’s going to be a flood of people from Canada that are going to jump the border and claim status in this country simply because of the fact that we don’t have the protections up here that we have on the southern border and that seems to be where everybody is focusing on, is just on the southern border. We’re going to face the same problems up here.
RUSH: Look, you’ve made this really tough. Now I’ve gotta address this. There’s a big difference between immigrants that come from the north and that come from the south. The people writing this bill couldn’t care less about the immigrants who come from Canada, they couldn’t care less. In fact, they don’t think there are going to be that many, they’re not even worried about it because there’s not going to be any border security on the south. You’re going to still be able to get in. It’s the cheap labor they want, the uneducated labor that they want. Those people that we’re looking for, the real targets of this, this is what the Democrats want. They’re looking at future voters and a number of other things, Republicans looking at cheap labor, they’re not going to take a boat to get up to Vancouver, come down from the northern border, they’re not going to have to. There is going to be very little border security in this if it happens. You’re right about the border up there being totally unprotected, but so is the one in the south for the most part.
CALLER: Well, Rush, just last week there were two illegal immigrants that were pulled off a Burlington northern train that was headed into the United States and both of these men were Hondurans and one of them had a criminal record longer than your leg. If it hadn’t been for the border patrol up here and the US Customs and Immigration people, these two never would have been caught.
RUSH: Yeah, that’s the same thing that happened with the millennium bomber that was trapped by an alert customs agent, either Seattle or Vancouver somewhere, somewhere around there.
CALLER: I think that if this immigration bill even has a hint of passing, that you’re going to see a flood of Koreans, east Indians, Ethiopians, Hondurans that are going to flood this border from the north.
RUSH: You know, and it’s puzzling, isn’t it, David, because our country is so rotten and so bad, the world hates us. Bush has destroyed our image in the world. There’s no respect left for the United States. How can what you say possibly be possible?
CALLER: Well, it’s possible because this border up here is so unsecured.
RUSH: No, but why do they even want to come here, David?
CALLER: Because it’s the best country in the world!
RUSH: No, you misunderstand. We are hated around the world. You listen to the Democratic Party and the American left, Bush has destroyed our reputation in the world, we’re hated and despised. I’m not worried about anybody wanting to get in here. This is just rampant paranoia.
CALLER: Oh, uh…
RUSH: (Laughing) Come on, laugh with me here, laugh with me. It’s my way of illustrating what a bunch of utter BS is being said about how horribly hated this country is. I appreciate your call. It’s a good point.