Let the Little Brown People Do It

Lovely of Karl Rove to admit what the immigration "guest worker" policy is all about; importing Latin workers to turn the US into a Banana Republic-style oligarchy. I always assumed the agenda was something like this, but I'm still astounded to hear it in plain English. As per National Review's The Corner:

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."

Slaves. That's what we're after. Non-citizens. Sub-humans to do our icky manual labor. Make no mistake. Bush's proposal stems from a racist, classist, exploitive agenda.

It will probably be the last time you'll ever hear me saying this but this NRO column is spot the fuck on.

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.

There is much more paleo-conservative, Republican cloth coat brandishing, economic elitism undermining, straight up wisdom at NRO. Read it.