Karl Rove on why America Should Have Open Borders

Recently Karl Rove explained why the Bush administration is so keen on giving illegal immigrants work visas- so that no Americans will have to pick tomatoes or make beds. Basically, create a servant class that picks up after American citizens. America would become more like Saudi Arabia, where there are full citizens that enjoy rights and the best jobs, and a massive underclass that waits on them hand and foot with as few rights and for as little money as possible.

Of course, claiming to create servants for Americans doesn't explain what the Americans that already do those things for a living are going to do when illegal (well, legal) immigrants that are willing to work for well below minimum wage take their jobs.

One idea I haven't seen in the media as to why the Bush Admin might want to have open immigration- for big businesses' sake. Retailers, fast food restaurants, meat packing plants and pretty much every other business you can think of that staffs uneducated laborers would love open immigration. It would basically mark the end of minimum wage, because they could legally hire people willing to work for under it. Since immigrants aren't citizens, they wouldn't have any rights to fight for. It's a complete shunning of lower class Americans and people living near the poverty line. There would be outrage if they tried to lower minimum wage and make cheap labor more affordable. But this way, they won't even have to.

Everyone screams about cracking down on illegal immigrants and building huge gates to keep them out. Very little has been said about the businesses that keep them employed in the first place. If the law cracked down on businesses that hire these people (much easier to do), it wouldn't really matter if they could get across the border, because there wouldn't be any work for them once they got there.

Below is a great editorial against Rove's comments from none other than the National Review, William F. Buckley's ultra-conservative magazine. Never thought I'd agree with them about anything.


Not Our Kind of People [Mark Krikorian]

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.

02/09 11:40 AM National Review Online