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February 9, 2007
Border Disorder Explained At Last
Posted by Dave Blount at February 9, 2007 11:14 AM
Thank you Karl Rove, for finally explaining why our government refuses to perform its most basic responsibility by defending the border from foreign intrusion:
I don't want my 17-year-old son to have to pick tomatoes or make beds in Las Vegas.
NRO's Mark Krikorian offers an appropriate response:
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[…]
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.
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.
Yet the odds of our next President differing from Bush on immigration and border defense are virtually nil if any of the leading candidates in either party is elected.
Rove: Manual labor is beneath the elite.
On a tip from V the K.
