Freedom Folks: Guests or Gate Crashers?

Thomas Sowell (who rocks!) has an extraordinary piece up today.

Source: RCP

The Bush administration is pushing a program to legalize "guest workers." But what is a guest? Someone you have invited. People who force their way into your home without your permission are called gate crashers.

If truth-in-packaging laws applied to politics, the Bush guest worker program would have to be called a "gate-crasher worker" program. The President's proposal would solve the problem of illegal immigration by legalizing it after the fact.

This really sums up this entire debate. The truth is the other side has nothing but lies and evasions. Unfortunately the other side is also supported by big business, the media and our president. This helps in the application of lipstick to pig!

If Mexican journalists were flooding into the United States and taking jobs as reporters and editors at half the pay being earned by American reporters and editors, maybe people in the media would understand why the argument about "taking jobs that Americans don't want" is such nonsense.

Or how about "Soldiering is a job no American will do." Is it really a ridiculous point? Historically no. In fact this was the very reason Rome fell, outsourcing the military because they had become an economy not a nation. Barbarians at the gates folks.

Another variation on the same theme is that we "need" the millions of illegal aliens already in the United States. "Need" is another word that blithely ignores prices.

If jet planes were on sale for a thousand dollars each, I would probably "need" a couple of them -- an extra one to fly when the first one needed repair or maintenance. But since these planes cost millions of dollars, I don't even "need" one.

There is no fixed amount of "need," independently of prices, whether with planes or workers.

When I started in the restaurant business in the seventies there were very few, if any illegals. So what's changed exactly? We always had staff and to expand on that point a little bit, there are plenty of places in this country that have yet to enjoy the delights of colonization. They still have restaurants, right?

None of the rhetoric and sophistry that we hear about immigration deals with the plain and ugly reality: Politicians are afraid of losing the Hispanic vote and businesses want cheap labor.