Posted on 02/09/2007 11:45:59 AM PST by bondjamesbond
According to a congressman's wife who attended a Republican women's luncheon yesterday, Karl Rove explained the rationale behind the president's amnesty/open-borders proposal this way: "I don't want my 17-year-old son to have to pick tomatoes or make beds in Las Vegas."
There should be no need to explain why this is an obscene statement coming from a leader in the party that promotes the virtues of hard work, thrift, and sobriety, a party whose demi-god actually split fence rails as a young man, a party where "respectable Republican cloth coat" once actually meant something. But it does seem to be necessary to explain.
Rove's comment illustrates how the Bush-McCain-Giuliani-Hagel-Martinez-Brownback-Huckabee approach to immigration strikes at the very heart of self-government. It is precisely Rove's son (and my own, and those of the rest of us in the educated elite) who should work picking tomatoes or making beds, or washing restaurant dishes, or mowing lawns, especially when they're young, to help them develop some of the personal and civic virtues needed for self-government. It's not that I want my kids to make careers of picking tomatoes; Mexican farmworkers don't want that either. But we must inculcate in our children, especially those likely to go on to high-paying occupations, that there is no such thing as work that is beneath them.
As Tocqueville wrote: "In the United States professions are more or less laborious, more or less profitable; but they are never either high or low: every honest calling is honorable." The farther we move from that notion, the closer we come to the idea that the lawyer is somehow better than the parking-lot attendant, undercutting the very foundation of republican government.
This is why the president's "willing worker/willing employer" immigration extravaganza is morally wrong — it's not just that it will cost taxpayers untold billions, or that it will beggar our own blue-collar workers, or that it will compromise security, or that it will further dissolve our sovereignty. It would do all that, of course, but most importantly it would change the very nature of our society for the worse, creating whole occupations deemed to be unfit for respectable Americans, for which little brown people have to be imported from abroad. In other words, mass immigration, even now, is moving us toward an unequal, master-servant society.
To borrow from Lincoln, our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. When it comes to this, I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty — to Saudi Arabia, for instance.
or else we wouldn't have tomatoes.
OHHHH pluleeeeeese!! you don't know what you're taking about!!
How many illegals are there picking tomatoes in Europe? Australia? or Canada? The HIGHEST percentage of migrant labor is the US (Dept Labor stats) is 27% in agriculture...
SOOOOOOOOOOOO three quarters of all ag labor is American TODAY! If we weren't flooded with illegals we would have already invested in mechanized tomatoe harvesting! Illegal cheap labor suppresses wages AND innovation as well as capital investment. Are you really dumb enough to hire the illegal on the street corner to install a water heater? nice strawman argument.
The 5% unemployment is bogus and the computation has been rigged since the 80s... we have so many on welfare, there are plenty of home grown Americans that would do menial jobs if we didn't pay them to smoke crack and watch Oprah. They will all fill jobs went we quit subsidizing Sloth... just as when thousands show up for hiring fairs at a new Marriott.
Get real, for a change...
"According to a congressman's wife who attended a Republican women's luncheon yesterday"
ANONYMOUS SOURCE, UNCONFIRMED, UNVERIFIED = SMEAR
Looks like an attack on Rove to get conservatives upset with him.
People should have more sense than to just accept this as Gospel Truth, without questioning what is someone's agenda over this.
I can no longer remember the teacher, but in high school I had a teacher who worked in the summer packing cantaloupes. He actually made a lot because they worked such long hours and he got overtime.
Are you at all concerned about assimilation and who will be assimilating whom?
That’s right, so we should not allow guest workers. We don’t want slaves, we don’t want guests, and we do not support third world economies. They need to go home, stay at home, and work at home. If they don’t like it there (their home) then they need to change the system into a viable and functioning government instead of leaching off of us.
You are right, just check out Germany's experience with the Turks and other moslem guest workers the last forty years. Beyond that, the fact is, we don't have to tolerate illegals to gain workers. There are an ample supply of people who want to immigrate legally but can't either because of corrupt laws or incompetent bureaucrats or both. The hypocrisy of the Bush position is clear: open the legal gates to desirable legal immigrants and you will have all the workers you want, minus almost all of the downside of illegals. There is not one single valid economic argument in favor of illegals.
Karl Rove has a son? I guess all the morons claiming he is gay are going to apologize soon. /sarcasm
There is a big difference in working in your own garden, (which I agree is good for kids), and having to do it for a living. Like I said before, I wouldn't want my kids to have to do that. Hopefully I prepared them so that they will never have to do it.
B T T T
Well stated!
I would rather have Christian Mexicans who are still culturally Western, than the islamic hordes that are eating up Europe.
You won't get an argument from many here on the sentiment expressed but ... it's not what this is about.
This is about regulated v unregulated immigration. This is about illegal aliens and the DHs who foster and support them.
Yes. I think the son is a teenager. Probably why old Karl is going bald.
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2007/1/23/154628.shtml
The birthrate among Hispanic women in the U.S. is twice as high as the rest of the American population – and an increasing number of Hispanic children are born to unmarried mothers.
Hispanic women now have the highest unmarried birthrate in the country – more than three times that of whites and Asians, and almost 1 1/2 times that of black women, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
For every 1,000 unwed Hispanic women, 92 children were born in 2003, the latest year for which data are available. The rate for unmarried white women is 28 children per 1,000, for Asians it’s 22, and for black women, 66.
According to Heather Mac Donald, a senior fellow of the Manhattan Institute, 45 percent of all Hispanic births occur outside marriage, compared to 24 percent for whites.
And 51 percent of Hispanic women get pregnant at least once before age 20, compared with the national average of 35 percent for all teen girls, the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy reports.
Having a child out of wedlock, even for a teenager, is no longer a taboo in the Hispanic community, according to Mac Donald, who writes in the Dallas Morning News: "The most powerful Hispanic family value – the tight-knit extended family – facilitates unwed child rearing. Relatives often step in to make up for the absence of the baby’s father.”
But despite strong family support, unwed Hispanic mothers are coming to rely more and more on the welfare system. Hispanics now dominate the federal Women, Infants and Children free food program, with Hispanic enrollment soaring more than 25 percent from 1996 to 2002. Black enrollment fell 12 percent and white enrollment dipped 6.5 percent during the same period.
What is hard working, family-oriented, industrious, or Christian aout this?
If this statement is true, then it's disgusting and flies in the face of long-standing Republican beliefs.
More proof that the GOP is nothing but a bunch of country-clubbing elitists just like the Dims.
I like to think of it more as if she has to do it, she will be able to do it. If a child lives too soft a life growing up, they aren't going to be equipped to handle it when an unpleasant job comes their way.
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