Their Goal Here Is To Create Chaos by Using Immigration
April 11, 2006
BEGIN TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: All right, now, look, some of you people need to calm down out there. I've been reading the e-mails here at the top, and you think I'm missing the boat when I say, "This is not about illegal immigration." I'm talking to you about the reason that the Democratic Party has glommed onto this and who the organizers are and what their objective is. Of course it's about illegal immigration! It's a way to create chaos; it's a way to tear down the country, but it's primarily about getting them back in power. I am not diminishing the impact of illegal immigration on this. You should see the e-mails I got. "You're going off the reservation! You're being sucked into not believing what this is really about."
I'm not being sucked into anything. I am thinking independently here. I am not saying illegal immigration is not the problem. I'm saying it's simply the latest springboard, it's the latest vehicle. Two weeks I've been covering this. I'm just talking now about the motivations and the opportunity that illegal immigration presents. Ted Kennedy doesn't really care about these people the way he's speaking to them. He only cares about them as voters, and whatever harm illegal immigration en masse will do to the country is of no consequence to him. In fact, the more chaos the better. He can blame it all on the Republicans for their attitudes; he can blame the Republicans for creating this angry population group of people.
By the way, I've got an interesting note. We had the call from Weston in Philadelphia who said that the Democrats are trying to create the chaos, they want the case object to be created so that the people will eventually throw their hands up in despair and turn to some powerful state or figure to fix it, and a guy from Sikeston, which is about 30 miles south of where I grew up in Missouri, Cape Girardeau, he said, "With all due respect, the caller was wrong about states taking over responsibility given up by the federal government. He's ignoring history."
I don't think he meant states. I think he meant the state, the federal government, but the Greek and Roman empires were destroyed from within by the influx of non-Romans and non-Greeks and apathy about it at all. "The great civilizations in history crumbled by a failure of a strong leader to hold together the diverse culture's conqueror." Will Durant said that, and so if you wanted to apply that to this, you would have to say that there is no strong leader holding together the country, and so the great civilization is potentially crumbling because nobody has the guts to stop the evil conqueror. Now, nobody is saying that illegal immigration represents an evil conqueror. That would be Al-Qaeda, and Bush, of course, is rallying the country to that. But this does have its own implications.
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Immigration "solutions"
Apr 11, 2006
by Thomas Sowell ( bio | archive | contact )
Email to a friend Print this page Text size: A A Activists who are organizing mass marches and demonstrations in cities across America may well be congratulating themselves on the huge numbers of people they can get to turn out to protest efforts in Congress to reduce illegal immigration.
No doubt that will impress many in the media and intimidate many politicians. But how these marches will be seen by millions of other Americans is another question entirely.
The Mexican flags and the strident assertions of a right to violate American laws are a danger signal to this society, as they would be to any society.
The releasing of children from schools to take part in these marches and the support of the marchers' goals by some religious leaders demonstrate that this contempt for the laws of the land has spread well beyond immigrant communities.
For some, this is just another extension of their general anti-establishment attitudes and activities. They are ready to protest virtually anything at any time.
At the other end of the political spectrum are staid and sober representatives of business interests who simply want a continuing supply of cheap labor. They don't march, they lobby politicians.
Both liberals and free-market libertarians often see this as an abstract issue about poor people being hindered from moving to jobs by an arbitrary border drawn across the southwest desert.
Intellectuals' ability to think of people in the abstract is a dangerous talent in a world where people differ in all the ways that make them people. The cultures and surrounding circumstances of those people are crucial for understanding what they are likely to do and what the consequences are likely to be.
Some free-market advocates argue that the same principle which justifies free international trade in commodities should justify the free movement of people as well. But this ignores the fact that people have consequences that go far beyond the consequences of commodities.
Commodities are used up and vanish. People generate more people, who become a permanent and expanding part of the country's population and electorate.
It is an irreversible process -- and a potentially dangerous process, as Europeans have discovered with their "guest worker" programs that have brought in many Muslims who are fundamentally hostile to the culture and the people that welcomed them.
Unlike commodities, people in a welfare state have legal claims on other people's tax dollars and expensive services in schools and hospitals, not to mention the high cost of imprisoning many of them who commit crimes.
Immigrants in past centuries came here to become Americans, not to remain foreigners, much less to proclaim the rights of their homelands to reclaim American soil, as some of the Mexican activist groups have done.
In the wars that this country fought, immigrant groups were among the most patriotic volunteers, earning the respect of American citizens on the battlefield with their blood and their lives.
Today, immigrant spokesmen promote grievances, not gratitude, much less patriotism. Moreover, many native-born Americans also promote a sense of separatism and grievance and, through "multi-culturalism," strive to keep immigrants foreign and disaffected.
This is not to say that all or most of the illegal immigrants themselves share this anti-establishment or anti-American bias of many of their spokesmen or supporters. Most are probably here to make a buck and have little time for ideology.
Hispanic activists themselves recognize that many of the immigrants from Mexico -- legal or illegal -- would assimilate into American society in the absence of these activists' efforts to keep them a separate constituency. But these efforts are widespread and unrelenting, a fact that cannot be ignored.
Whatever is said or done in the immigration debate, no one should insult the American people's intelligence by talking or acting as if this is a question about the movement of abstract people across an abstract line.
What is likely to be done? A pretense of reducing illegal immigration and a reality of amnesty under some other name.