[Rush] "Immigration" Bill Is an Attempt to Expand the Federal Government and Kill Conservatism

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Now, folks, as I say, I've got all this figured out, and when I told you this wasn't about immigration, I was right; and when I told you that what this is really all about is the Democrats wanting and needing some new victims, I was right; and when I said this was all about politicians, particularly Democrats wanting new voters, I was right. But I was not a hundred percent right. I was close. To sum this up -- very simply -- what this bill is, this is not an immigration bill. What is being done here is being done under the guise of immigration reform. What this is, is a huge attempt by certain politicians, mostly moderate and liberal Democrats and moderate Republicans, to expand the federal government, to increase the numbers of people in poverty in this country by importing them via this immigration bill, which will set up the need to expand the "social safety" net in this country, which will then empower those who believe in big government.

It is also designed to provide a free flow of cheap labor for businesses that want to access it, and with the few limits on legal immigration that this bill imposes, we're no longer talking just about Mexicans. We now can import workers from all over the world who want to come in for the purposes of achieving and accessing the American dream, and believe me, if certain American businesses want to get labor cheaper than what they have to pay Mexican immigrants, they want to get them from Ethiopia, they want to get them from Sudan, here's an opportunity to do it. It really is no more complicated than that. I mean, you cannot read this bill and conclude anything else. This bill is senseless.

This bill is absolutely worthless. The reason everybody is going nuts here is because there's no common sense in this bill when you look at it within the framework of immigration reform, and I'll tell you what else is going on. You guys in the House -- I don't know if you're able to listen right now because you're locked down. Well, some of you House members are not even in Washington. You've taken your recess early. I want you to listen to this very carefully because what's happening here. Listen to Dingy Harry. Grab audio sound bite #1 and this will set up what I'm going to warn you people in the House about.

REID: Dark clouds are forming on the horizon. Influential members of the House of Representatives and the Republican leadership are still pushing for the bill that they passed, a bill that makes felons out of millions of [illegal] immigrants and those who assist them, like a member of the clergy, a healthcare worker, social worker. RUSH: All right. Now, let me translate this for you. What's happening here, the Senate's passed their bill. Dingy Harry is warning members of the House there are dark clouds forming over the beautiful Senate amnesty horizon, and these evil House Republicans could ruin everyone's day, and if the House doesn't go along with this, and if the House doesn't accept this abomination of a piece of legislation called an immigration reform act, then what's going to happen is that conservatives, the moderates in the Republican Party and the liberals in the Democratic Party will blame conservatives for standing in the way and blocking immigration reform.

If they can't come to an agreement in the conference with the Senate, moderates are going to blame House conservatives for this failure. I think what's happening here, in addition to all that I've said, is that moderate Republicans are trying to destroy conservatives and conservatism. By moderate Republicans, let me give you some names: John McCain, Arlen Specter. We'd have to throw Senator Lindsey Graham in there now, and some of the Republicans in the administration, some of the Republicans in the White House. I think they have been steaming over the conservative wing taking over the Republican Party. The elites in the Republican Party we've heard from on this debate, and they are trashing all of you as a bunch of unsophisticated boobs.

Me, too, and I think there's a battle for the heart and soul of the Republican Party going on right now, and the conservatives who are largely the majority membership of that party are under assault. I think that it is perfectly clear, at least to me, that that's what's happening. You can look at this this way. Let me make it easy. We're back to 1976. This is Ronald Reagan versus Gerald Ford. This is Barry Goldwater versus Nelson Rockefeller. This is the compassionate conservative Republicans -- i.e., the moderates -- versus the conservatives. That's all tied into this. There's so many things being done here at once, and this whole immigration bill is simply a rubric to disguise the true intent.

RUSH: You Republicans in the House have to understand what's going on here. You are being targeted for destruction, and you are being targeted as the bad guys if you don't go along with what the Senate has done in this so-called immigration bill. There was a press conference yesterday that nobody covered. We even joined a number of website video units hoping to find coverage of it. It was a love fest. I don't have any audio of this for you yet. It was a love fest. Senators McCain, Hagel, Graham, Martinez and Specter, were backslapping and thanking Senators Kennedy, Reid, and Durbin, congratulating each other over what a great thing they'd done with this immigration bill, and McCain said this. He said, "The most important message, probably, is to those 11 million people who are out there living in the shadows without the protection of any of the laws of our society, millions of whom are being mistreated and not given, not receiving their God-given rights. To them we will provide a path to citizenship so you can come out of the shadows and educate yourselves and feed your families and become very profitable and very important members of our society." That is just patently absurd, folks. This bill -- I'm going to tell you, if you Republicans, if you lose in November, it's not going to be because of you, if you stand strong here.

If Republicans lose in November, it's going to be because of the moderates in the Senate and elsewhere in the House, and because of missteps taken by the administration, not because you stand up for your conservative principles. If you stand up for your conservative principles, that will not be why you lose. You are going to have to trust me on this. This is a huge gambit that's being tried here, and you guys, the conservatives in the House, are the targets. I'll tell you, I don't think that I can say this enough, folks. I don't think I can drill this into people's heads enough, because, you know, Lindsey Graham and McCain and so forth are actually spinning it this way.

They're actually out there saying that the conservatives don't want to be the reasons that we're standing in the way of progress and success here, and they're going to set you up for the blame if the Senate bill does not maintain itself or remain intact by saying if you don't sign on to moderate, unpopular things like this, that you will lose. It's just the exact opposite. This bill, this immigration bill was written by the open borders lobby, the La Raza-type groups. You can't read this and escape that conclusion. I mean, this bill includes all kinds of traps against enforcement. It confers all kinds of rights on illegal aliens. It's going to make it very, very hard to enforce any of this.

It was written by lawyers. I'm convinced this legislation has been written by lawyers who do this work day in and day out, who litigate on behalf of illegals and seek to change even the most arcane rules to their advantage. Let me cut through all of the noise here, folks, and just hit you right between the eyes. These senators do not want to control immigration. They want to expand it. They don't care whether it's illegal or legal immigration. What they did was vote in favor of changing our society so as to massively empower the federal government. The federal government will have far more control over wages than before. Entitlement programs are going to have to expand in order to accommodate all these new arrivals and their children. Taxes are going to have to go up in order to pay for all this.

Wealth will be redistributed from the middle class to a new class of poor that we are welcoming in here as Senator McCain has so excitedly said in his press conference yesterday. That is exactly what this is about. It's all being done under the rubric of immigration reform. What we're actually doing is importing poverty in order to enhance big government. It is precisely what is going on here. I cannot emphasize this enough. We went through all the details of this bill. You can't possibly assume from reading this that this is actually -- or conclude that this is -- about immigration. It just isn't, and I have been right about that from the get-go. The editors at National Review have a little editorial today on their website. The Senate wouldn't even vote down the earned income tax credit for illegal immigrants that bop in here as a result of this. So you watch what happens. If this bill remains as is, the impact on the legal system incalculable, the impact on the economy, on the bureaucracy, local and federal level public services, the entitlement crisis. It is a massive, massive pro-poverty bill. Bring in some people here in poverty; get a number of new victims. Our economy is doing well, and there are fewer and fewer victims, fewer and fewer people in poverty. We need this. It's the country club Republicans and the blue-bloods trying to take back the party from the conservatives.

Compassionate conservatism versus conservatism. Ford versus Reagan, Goldwater versus Rockefeller. I mean, this is where we are. I make no bones about it. The blue-blood country clubbers are trying to take back control of the party. They've been seething ever since Reagan was so dominant and so victorious and they really weren't happy with the Newt revolution. We've seen this just in the last three months in this immigration bill -- and, by the way, there was a last-minute change in the bill. It got ratified, and this exposes everything. Remember when the 370-mile fence on the border was proposed and suggested, the 500-mile vehicle barricade or blockade, Christopher Dodd said (summarized), "Wait a minute! Wait a minute! We can't do this without consultation with the government of Mexico."

Guess what ended up in the bill? Just that: "Consultations between the United States and Mexican authorities at the federal, state, and local levels concerning the construction of additional fencing and related border security structures along the United States-Mexico border shall be undertaken prior to commencing any new construction." Before we can build a fence we've got to consult with Vicente Fox and the state governors, whatever they're called in Mexico and the local people on their side of the border in order to solicit the views of affected communities in Mexico to lessen tensions and foster greater understanding and stronger cooperation on this and other important issues of mutual concern. The Dodd amendment was included in a manager's amendment offered by Senator Specter which included several additional amendments. It was adopted by the Senate. So even the fence will have to essentially get the approval after consultation with officials throughout government layers in Mexico! Believe me, folks, this is not an immigration bill, and it never was.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Our buddy Jim Ruttenberg with an analysis piece on the front page of the New York Times today: "Compassionate Conservatives Versus Angry Doctrinaire Hardliners -- The negotiations between the White House and Congress that will follow the Senate's passage on Thursday of an immigration bill could decide not just how the nation confronts illegal immigration but also what strain of conservatism the Republican Party carries into the midterm elections and beyond. Will it be the compassionate brand Mr. Bush considers crucial to the party's future, in this case by signaling support for a provision in the Senate bill that would give most illegal immigrants an opportunity to become legal?

"Or will it be the more doctrinaire variety embraced by much of Mr. Bush's party in the House, one that shuns anything that smacks of amnesty for illegal immigrants and seeks to criminalize them further?" So once again here's the New York Times -- and they're right on the money here portraying the anti-illegal immigration side as conservative hardliners, doctrinaire, cold-hearted, mean-spirited, cruel, bigoted sexist racist homophobes. I'm telling you that's how this is being set up and it's being done so with glee and the support of moderate Republicans everywhere. I cannot emphasize to you just how much resentment there has been for the longest time within the Republican Party for conservatives by the country club blue-blood set. I've shared stories with you of how I personally have encountered this.

Now, Dana Rohrabacher yesterday in the Washington Times had a piece called "The 'Shamnesty' Legislation," and he says, "This 'shamnesty' bill spells out the level of contempt the Senate has for middle-class Americans. This 'comprehensive' bill includes: In-state tuition for illegal aliens. Your kid has to pay full freight if they cross state lines, but the illegal alien who broke into the country doesn't. All temporary guest workers have to be paid the prevailing wage. American citizens do not have to be paid prevailing wage. All agricultural guest workers under this bill cannot be fired by their employers except for what the bill calls 'just cause.'

"However, American agricultural workers can be fired for any reason," and again in the agricultural business, just to give you an example, 24% of the jobs are held by illegal aliens, which means 76% are held by Americans, and yet we are told these are jobs Americans won't do. In the Senate bill, "Illegal aliens are made eligible for Social Security. Not only will they receive retirement benefits, but their children will receive survivor benefits should the parents pass away. This is at a time when we are trying to keep Social Security solvent for the next generation," and therein lies a huge key. The Capitol Building has been reopened after another lock down. That's the Capitol Building, not the Rayburn Building. No word on that, but the Capitol Building has been reopened after yet another lockdown.

"Taxpayer dollars to radical immigrant-rights groups so they can help illegal aliens adjust their status. Millions of your tax dollars will go to the same groups that organized those rallies where people who came here illegally waved foreign flags and thumbed their noses at our laws." Make no mistake, folks, this is the expansion of government on parade. This is the importation of new people in poverty necessitating an expansion of the safety net and expansion in tax rates to pay for it. Another transfer of wealth and an expansion of government in order to accomplish all this, thereby cementing even more dependency among these new arrivals.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT RUSH: It is farcical. This whole thing is a farce, folks. In fact I'm even a little embarrassed that I got caught up debating it on the merits. I saw it. My instincts were right on the money and I was making jokes about it, and it turns out my jokes were true when I said the Democratic Party is running out of victims, they need more victims. It's true! We're just importing victims here. We're importing victims that are going to be in poverty, and listen to McCain, listen to these people speak. These illegal aliens are being characterized as super citizens, folks. They do work that you won't do, you elitist, spoiled-rotten American legal.

You won't do what really needs to be done for this country. Oh, but we're going to be saved now by these super citizens crossing the border. They don't commit any crimes, they don't drain resources. They've been built up as super citizens, superior to you, and some, you know, downtrodden group wandering aimlessly through deserts, thunderstorms, hurricanes. I mean, the future, the backbone of America here is how they're being portrayed. Now, some of you I'm sure, and I will admit this, some of you listening to this, you've been listening to the whole program, you're listening to what I'm saying about it, and you're scratching your head saying I haven't heard this anywhere else.

I haven't heard this. My friends, as I have been saying a lot lately, "Don't doubt me. Don't doubt me." For three months I've been telling Brian that the audio in here was distorted and it was too hot. He said, "Nope, everything is cool." I went up to New York. I said, "Brian, it's working up here. There's something." He finally went in there, and he found we were six DB hot. Don't doubt me. I know one of the reasons that you're confused. Look, I have here the AP story contrasting what's in the Senate bill and what's in the House bill. You want to hear how they portray what's in the Senate bill?

"Allows illegal immigrants who have been in the country five years or more to remain, continue working, and eventually become legal permanent residents and citizens after paying at least $3,250 in fines and fees and back taxes and learning English." They don't tell you there's no enforcement mechanism here for any of this. They don't have to learn English. All they have to is enroll and say that they're going to go. There's no monitoring. If they never show up, doesn't matter. The 3,250 bucks? They have eight years to pay it. It doesn't tell you that. Uh, "requires illegal immigrants in the US between two and five years to go to a point of entry at the border and file an application to return." Anybody want to bet that the numbers that actually do this can be counted on both hands?

Because who's going to? What in the world's going to cause, "Okay, I've only been here two or three years, so where do I go? What's a port of entry?" You think they're going to stand up and identify themselves? (Raspberry.) There's no enforcement mechanism. "Orders deportation of illegal immigrants convicted of a felony or three misdemeanors no matter how long they have been in the United States." Once again, the law currently on the books is, if you're here illegally, you get deported. This is an improvement in the deal. Now you can stay here illegally, but if you get caught in the middle of a felony all you gotta do is go to La Raza or some immigrant lawyer and get this litigated.

The case will be thrown out, because nobody is going to want to mess with it because there's no interest in this bill in deporting anything or anybody. You go through this. I've got a whole bunch more things. You will not find in the AP list of highlights of what's in the Senate bill one word about the Social Security identity theft fraud that is endorsed and permitted. If an illegal alien has stolen a Social Security number, and has opened a bank account, gotten a job, a driver's license, any number of things, no biggie! No penalty! In fact, not only is there no penalty, why, Senator McCain has made it plain that as a compassionate society that person who has been paying taxes -- income taxes, other taxes -- will get all their benefits.

They will get all their Social Security benefits and their kids will get survivor benefits, after having stolen somebody's identity in order to do it. That's in the bill. You want to tell me this is an immigration bill? Don't insult my intelligence. It's nothing of the sort. You go out and steal somebody's identity. Steal somebody's credit card and find out what happens to you. You go say, hey, you know what? These illegals only have to pay back taxes for three of the five years! Can I not pay my taxes for like five years and only have to pay back three of them? You ask that for yourself, if you can do this. This is just farce. It is -- and, by the way, three of the four Democrats who voted against the bill up for reelection. The Republicans up for reelection voted against the bill. That will tell you what's really going on. They know where the American people are on this. END TRANSCRIPT

On the last, cold day of December in the dying year we count as 406, the river Rhine froze solid, providing the natural bridge that hundreds of thousands of hungry men, women, and children had been waiting for. They were the barbari-- to the Romans an undistinguished, matted mass of Others, not terrifying, just troublemakers, annoyances, things one would rather not have to deal with-- non-Romans. To themselves they were, presumably, something more, but as the illiterate leave few records, we can only surmise their opinion of themselves.

Neither the weary, disciplined Roman soldiers, ranked along the west bank, nor the anxious, helter-skelter tribes amassing on the east bank could have been giving much thought to their place in history. But this moment of slack, this relative calm before the pandemonium to follow, gives us the chance to study the actors on both sides of this river and to look backward on what has been and forward to what will be.

Europe, rising out of Lake Constance in the northern Alps, bending and bowing north, then northwest, till after 820 miles of travel it reaches the coast of continental Europe and empties into the North Sea just opposite the Thames estuary. Returning to our Alpine heights, we can spot another river, rising from a smaller lake just north of Constance and coursing east for more than twice the length of the Rhine till it spends itself in the Black Sea. This is the Danube, Europe's longest river (after the Volga). To the north and east of these two Alpine rivers live the barbarians. To the south and west lies Romania, in its time the vastest and most powerful empire in human history.

The omnipotence and immensity of this empire-embracing, as it did, "the whole of the civilized world"— are not the qualities that would strike us were we to soar above the Mediterranean on that fateful day. What we would discern is the very opposite of power-- fragility, specifically geographic fragility. "We live around a sea," the perspicacious Socrates had reminded his listeners, "like frogs around a pond." For all the splendor of Roman standard, the power of Roman boot, and the extent of Roman road, the entire empire hugs the Mediterranean like a child's village of sand, waiting to be swept into the sea. From fruitful Gaul and Britain in the north to the fertile Nile Valley in the south, from the rocky Iberian shore in the west to the parched coasts of Asia Minor, all provinces of the empire turn toward the great sea, toward Medi-Terra-neathe Sea of Middle Earth. And as they turn to the center of their world, they turn their back on all that lies behind them, beyond the Roman wall. They turn their back on the barbarians.

That Rome should ever fall was unthinkable to Romans: its foundations were unassailable, sturdily sunk in a storied past and steadily built on for eleven centuries and more. There was, of course, the prophecy. Someone, usually someone in his cups, could always be counted on to bring up that old saw: the Prophecy of the Twelve Eagles, each eagle representing a century, leaving us with-- stubby fingers counting out the decades in a puddle of wine-- only seventy years remaining! Give or take a decade! Predictable laughter at the silliness of the whole idea. But in seventy years exactly, the empire would be gone.

Eternal Rome, eleven centuries old, hardly foresaw its doom. But theories about its fall are very old indeed. Two dozen years after this Roman-barbarian encounter along the Rhine, Augustine of Hippo, second city of Roman Africa, will be lying on his deathbed, listening to the clamor of another wave of barbarians as they attack the walls of his city. He has barely finished the final pages of his great defense of Christianity-- The City of God-- written to contradict the Roman pagans who discerned behind the barbarian assaults the old gods of Rome, angry at being forsaken by Christian converts. (No, insists Augustine eloquently, it is not Christianity but vice-encumbered paganism that is bringing the empire down.) Nine centuries later, as impressive feats of Roman engineering and sculpture are being dug up all over Italy at the dawn of the Renaissance, the question of what became of the cultural giants who built these things will be on everyone's lips. Petrarch, the Tuscan poet and scholar who is rightly remembered as the father of Renaissance humanism, rediscovers the concept of a "fall," which, following Augustine's lead, he blames on the empire's internal faults. Machiavelli, writing a century and a half later in a less spiritual, more cynical time, will blame the barbarians.

..............

Clues to the character of the Roman blindness are present in the scene along the frozen Rhine. The legionnaires on the Roman bank know that they have the upper hand, and that they always will have. Even though some are only half-civilized recruits recently settled on this side of the river, they are now Romans, inheritors of nearly twelve centuries of civilization, husbandry, agriculture, viniculture, horticulture, cuisine, arts, literature, philosophy, law, politics, martial prowess-- and all the "gear and tackle and trim" that goes with these pursuits. The world has never known anything as deep, as lasting, or as extensive as Pax Romana, the peace and predictability of Roman civilization. Inspecting the Roman soldiers now, we note the quiet authority of their presence, the polish of their person, the appropriateness of their stance-- they are spiffy. More than this, there is an esthetic to each gesture and accoutrement. All details have been considered-- ad unguem, as they would say, to the fingertip, as a sculptor tests the smoothness and perfection of his finished marble. Their hair is cut with a thought to the shape of the head, they are clean-shaven to show off the resoluteness of the jawline, their dress-- from their impregnable but shapely breastplates to their easy-- movement skirts— is designed with the form and movement of the body in mind, and their hard physiques recall the proportions of Greek statuary. Even the food in the mess is prepared to be not only savory to the taste but attractive to the eye. Just now the architriclinus -- the chef -- is beginning to prepare the carrots: he slices each piece lengthwise, then lengthwise again, to achieve slender, elongated triangles.

We look out across the river to the barbarian hosts, who in the slanting, gray light of winter mass like figures in a nightmare. Their hair (both of head and face) is uncut, vilely dressed with oil, braided into abhorrent shapes. Their bodies are distorted by ornament and discolored by paint. Some of the men are huge and muscular to the point of deformity, their legs wrapped comically in the garments called braccae— breeches. There is no discipline among them: they bellow at each other and race about in chaos. They are dirty, and they stink. A crone in a filthy blanket stirs a cauldron, slicing roots and bits of rancid meat into the concoction from time to time. She slices a carrot crosswise up its shaft, so that the circular pieces she cuts off float like foolish yellow eyes on the surface of her brew.

This unequal portrait of the two forces would not only have been the Roman view: it could almost have been the German view as well (for the milling hosts are of Germanic origin, as are all the intruders of this period). To the Romans, the German tribes were riffraff; to the Germans, the Roman side of the river was the place to be. The nearest we can come to understanding this divide may be the southern border of the United States. There the spit-and-polish troops are immigration police; the hordes, the Mexicans, Haitians, and other dispossessed peoples seeking illegal entry. The barbarian migration was not perceived as a threat by Romans, simply because it was a migration-- a year-in, year-out, raggle-taggle migration-- and not an organized, armed assault. It had, in fact, been going on for centuries. The Gauls had been the first barbarian invaders, hundreds of years before, and now Gaul lay at peace. The verses of its poets and the products of its vineyards were twin fountains of Roman inspiration. The Gauls had become more Roman than the Romans themselves. Why could not the same thing happen to these Vandals, Alans, and Sueves, now working themselves to a fever pitch on the far side of the river?

When, at last, the hapless Germans make their charge across the bridge of ice, it is head-on, without forethought or strategy. With preposterous courage they teem across the Rhine in convulsive waves, their principal weapon their own desperation. We get a sense of their numbers, as well as their desperation, in a single casualty count: the Vandals alone are thought to have lost twenty thousand men (not counting women and children) at the crossing. Despite their discipline, the Romans cannot hold back the Germanic sea.

From one perspective, at least, the Romans were overwhelmed by numbers-- not just in this encounter but during centuries of migrations across the porous borders of the empire. Sometimes the barbarians came in waves, though seldom as big as this one. More often they came in trickles: as craftsmen who sought honest employment, as warriors who enlisted with the Roman legions, as tribal chieftains who paid for land, as marauders who burned and looted and sometimes raped and murdered.

The End of the World

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