Freedom Folks: Reason # 2,564,721 Why I'm No Longer A Republican!

Source: NRO

Mark Krikorian reports on some remarks Karl Rove is alleged to have made at an elite haircuts luncheon yesterday...

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.

And remember, this is the guy who was considered one of the most influential people in the Republican Party.

Said it before, I'll say it again...

Feel the pride!

***UPDATE***

Noted supporter of illegal immigration, John J. Miller responds (Vdare take down on Mr. Miller here.)...

Re: Not Our Kind of People [John J. Miller]

Mark: I have no idea what Karl Rove said yesterday, but I do think that you need to do better than reference an unnamed source before you start throwing around words such as "obscene" and suggest that we're now on the path to a "master-servant society" or Saudi tyranny or whatever. A fuller quote, in context, might be helpful, too. More important, though, is the fact that your own statement actually undercuts your argument: Nobody aspires to have their children spend a lifetime performing manual labor. This is very possibly the precise point that Rove meant to communicate. To say it is in no way to demean the virtue of hard work, and I think it's a pretty big jump to suggest that this is what Rove was doing, especially without better evidence.

And yet what he does manage to get across here is his approval of a, dare I say it, a "Brown" servile class? Cuz yeah, that's an American value!