The following panel closed this year's Restoration Weekend, Feb. 23-26, 2006, held at the Arizona Biltmore in Phoenix. -- The Editors.

Janet Levy:  In 2005, Opinion Dynamics did a survey and found that over 91% of the American public felt that illegal immigration was a serious problem. So this is a problem that really resonates with the American public at this particular point in time. I think we have maybe three or four major bills right now going through Congress about this issue. So it’s getting some attention.

To start off, we have a debate between two experts. I want to start off by asking a bunch of open-ended questions to kind of stimulate the discussion to get to think about for the debate. Then I’m going to provide, very briefly, a few statistics from the 2005 Census data. Then you’ll hear from each one of our experts and then we’ll take questions and start the debate process.

First, what do we mean by immigration? Does this mean anyone who shows up here? Do we want to differentiate between legal and illegal—or some people would say criminal—entry into the country? Should we fine tune the selection criteria and have quotas for immigrants? Do we get to chose who we want to immigrate to America? For example, do we want to limit Muslim immigration into the United States? Do we want to limit Hispanics?

Is immigrating to the United States a privilege? Or is it a right? Is our criteria based on merit or on ethnic quotas? Should we be supporting bilingual education or dual citizenship? Is the responsibility for assimilation incumbent on immigrants or the federal government? Is assimilation offensive, as some groups feel it is, or is it our rightful expectation as a sovereign nation?

Do we require that immigrants learn the language, pledge allegiance to the United States and become part of the fabric of America? Or do we cater to the language needs and the cultural sensitivities of immigrant groups? Do we insist upon fostering a shared sense of community and common mores? After all, immigrants are freely choosing to come here. If they want to live as Macedonians, of course, they can remain in Macedonia.

The emphasis for U.S. immigrants has always been on the American side of the hyphen in the past. Someone is an Italian-American, an Irish-American. Today it seems to be more on the ethnic attachment: I’m Chinese, I’m Korean.

Is the trend for immigrants to make significant progress the longer they live in the United States? Is that still valid? According to Harvard professor Samuel Huntington, in his latest book, Who We Are, educational levels, income and level of home ownership has actually declined for fourth-generation Mexican-Americans and two-thirds of third-generation Mexican-Americans speak only English.

Now, just a few facts and then we’ll get to our experts. According to the Census data—this is the March 2005 Current Population Survey—the foreign-born or immigrant population, both legal and illegal, reached a new record of more than thirty-five million in March of 2005. One in four immigrants are illegal. This is astounding. The interval from 2002 to 2005 was the highest five-year period of immigration ever in American history—ever. This is two and a half times the previous peak at the turn of the last century. We’re talking about 8 million people in that five-year interval, half of whom are estimated to be illegal. This doesn’t include data on prisons, nursing homes, and other kinds of facilities.

Of adult immigrants, 31% have not completed high school; this is three and a half times the native rate. Twenty-nine percent of immigrant-headed households use at least one major welfare program, compared to 18% for natives. The poverty rate for immigrants is almost 18-1/2% compared to 11.7% for natives. This represents a quarter of those who were in poverty in the United States. A third lack health insurance—two and a half times the native rate.

And finally in 2005, 10.3 million children, one-fifth of the school-age population were from immigrant families.

Let me tell you a little bit about our experts.

First, Tamar Jacoby is a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute who writes extensively on immigration and citizenship issues. She’s the author of two books: Someone Else’s House: America’s Unfinished Struggle for Integration and Reinventing the Melting Pot: the New Immigrants and What It Means to be American.

Her articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the National Review and many other publications. She’s worked with a number of Congressional offices in Washington and testified in Congress on immigration policy. Ms. Jacoby is a former senior writer and justice editor for Newsweek and has taught at Yale, Cooper Union, and the New School University.

Tamar Jacoby: Thank you so much, Janet, and thank all of you for being here this morning.

There’s kind of a nasty rumor going around in Washington that the Democrats are, whatever this gesture is, enjoying themselves and waiting to watch this spring as Republicans tear themselves to pieces over immigration in the Senate. Now, I’ve never actually heard a Democrat say that. I don’t think any or many of them think it and I actually don’t think it will happen.

But I’m glad to be here for a more constructive conversation within the Republican or conservative family about what we think about immigration. Because I think it is one of the most important issues facing us as a nation and indeed as a party or a movement.

I like the way that Janet has framed some of the questions. I think we as conservatives and Republicans do approach immigration as we approach any topic from a slightly different perspective than perhaps the public at large. Particularly on immigration, I think there are some questions that we want to ask and that we’ve brought to the debate that have changed the debate.

Question number 1: is this really in America’s interest? I think the debate used to be between people who talked a lot about the immigrant’s rights and about our relationship with Mexico and about all different kinds of things. But we didn’t ask squarely enough, “Is immigration in the United States’ interest?”

I also think, in previous years, the debate up to five years ago, let’s say, didn’t ask enough, “How does security fit into the equation?” I think you could add to that, “How does the rule of law fit into the equation?” I don’t think we can make immigration policy as a nation. I don’t think we as Republicans, conservatives, individuals can think about immigration as an issue without putting those questions squarely on the table. I think until five years ago and until this kind of became a debate in a way, until Republicans really entered the debate in a big way with President Bush, I don’t think those issues were as squarely on the table as they needed to be.

I don’t think we can have an immigration policy that doesn’t meet those three tests.

But of course, that’s only the beginning of the discussion. Those three criteria don’t tell you what our immigration policy is going to be. My basic point today, if I can sort of sum it up at the beginning, is that I think by and large immigration is good for the United States and I don’t think we face the kind of dire choice that’s often been posed. I think the dire choice that people think of is, it’s either immigration or security. It’s either immigration or legality and the rule of law. It’s either immigration or assimilation. It’s either immigration or fiscal control.

I don’t think any of those are an either/or choice and, in fact, I think we can have both in all the realms and, in fact, given the changing nature of the world, of our demography and of the shrinking international globalized world, I don’t think we can have either security or the rule of the law without facing up to the reality of immigration.

Now what do I mean by that? Why do I say that? Step back a minute and I’d like to talk about what I think is causing immigration today, causing the levels that we’re seeing, those high numbers that Janet talked about. Although just to put those high numbers in a little bit of perspective, proportionally the flow today is not as great as it was in the Ellis Island wave. I mean, think about it: we’re a much bigger country now than we were then. We had a much smaller population then. Proportionally, it’s not a bigger flow. It was a bigger flow then. Yes, absolute numbers are greater, but proportionally smaller.

Nevertheless, no one’s kidding themselves. We are having an historic flow now. But the point is, this is not, as I think some people who are skeptical of immigration were painting it, this is not really an experiment of kind of a “gee, let’s try it” out of the blue, voluntary experiment. This isn’t something where Senator Kennedy went to the faucet in 1965 and turned it on and we got the flow we’re getting. This was not that kind of a choice.

This is really a result of huge, tectonic shifts in the United States and abroad. Now they’re shifts that we can have some choice about and I’ll talk about that in a minute. But they’re not, it’s not just some, you know, we decided, let’s try this. What are these tectonic shifts?

Well the first and most important one is the demographic changes here in this country. I always say, when you need to understand immigration, there’s one set of numbers you need to know. And that is, in 1960, half of all American men dropped out of high school and went into the unskilled labor force. Half. Well, today, less than 10% do. That’s a huge chunk of the labor force that used to be willing to do the jobs that immigrants do now. I don’t know about you but I don’t know anyone working class or anything else who’s raising their kids to be a farm worker or a bus boy. Americans just don’t want to do that kind of work anymore.

I would argue, we’re lucky to have these people in countries next door who are willing to do that kind of work. Because, yes, we can automate a lot of jobs. We can outsource a lot of jobs. A lot of industries that need unskilled labor have gone abroad rather than take immigrants. But there are a lot of businesses that it’s not good for us to have gone abroad, starting with farming and going on through bus boys and all kinds of hotel workers and all kinds of things.

By the way, if we don’t, as businesses say, get that labor, the choice is hire those people or close. Agricultural, meat processing, everything that goes with agriculture, will move abroad if they can’t get those workers.

But the argument is not just economic. Economics are a lot of what’s driving it. But the point is, this isn’t just cheap labor for a bunch of greedy employers. This is labor that keeps businesses open and growing in America. My favorite story that illustrates this is the guy who owns the crab-picking business on the eastern shore of Maryland. He came to testify in Congress last year. He said, “Well, you know, I own this hundred-year-old business on the eastern shore of Maryland. I employee 300 people and our business basically keeps the town in business, because we pick the crabs and then the crabs get sold at the restaurants and then the tourists come and so everything from the gas station attendant and owner to the insurance company to the supermarket, you name it, is really based on our business.”

He said, “Well, I can’t keep my business open anymore unless I employ Mexicans because nobody else wants to pick that meat out of the crabs. It’s very hard manual labor. I hire 100 Anglo people to be the accountants and the managers and the packagers and all other kinds of things. But I couldn’t keep them employed if I didn’t have those 200 Mexicans to pick the crab out of the crab shells. And then of course the town depends on it too. The restaurant depends on the crab and the gas station depends on the restaurant. And so forth.”

That is true in a lot of places in America today: all kinds of farming, meat packing, not to mention cities that are dependent now on fast construction growth.

So we could say no to this but I think there’s an economic need. I think our economy would not be growing the way it is without these workers. I think a lot of Americans would not be having the jobs they have without these workers. It’s a small number of people who keep a much bigger pool of people employed.

But we could decide to say no. If we thought that the consequences weren’t worth it, we could decide to say no. I think the costs of saying no would extremely high. I think it would mean an electric fence and troops with guns on the border. I think it would mean a national ID card in the work place. I think it would mean, you know, road blocks on all our roads and raids on businesses. I think it would mean a kind of Draconian, Orwellian control to stop it. It’s kind of like when the Soviets tried to make the rivers flow the other way. They flowed from north to south and the Soviets tried to make them flow from south to north. We could do it. But I don’t think it would be worth the cost, either in money or in the kind of country we’d be.

The point is, if you look at what we’re doing now, we’re not saying no or yes. We’re saying “no, nudge, nudge, wink, wink, maybe, yes.” The point is, we have a policy where we keep the quotas low to keep one side happy and then we don’t enforce them to keep the other side happy, and that’s what’s really disastrous in this country. That’s what’s poisoning the situation now. Because we have a kind of market equilibrium where about a million and a half people are coming every year to work and they are not coming to get welfare. They don’t get welfare. The illegal immigrants certainly don’t get welfare and legal immigrants don’t get welfare for the first 5 or 10 years they’re here.

We have a market equilibrium of workers coming here, but our pipeline is much smaller than that quota, that number that meets our labor needs. So there’s a huge spillover, about a million and a half strong. The pipeline accommodates about a million legally, so half a million people who are coming to do jobs here are, by definition, illegal. That, of course, creates the problems that we all know: smugglers, illegality, whole industries that rely on international smuggling cartels to keep their businesses open. Schools and hospitals that aren’t prepared for the people who are coming. Inefficient tax flows so that those schools and hospitals don’t have the money they need to serve these people.

What I am trying to pose to you and to others in Washington is that we have a choice here. I think the current choice of being ostriches and having our heads in the sand makes no sense. We have the flow and we don’t deal with it. That’s makes no sense. I think the choice is really that kind of Orwellian clamp-down that I talked about or recognizing reality, changing the law so that it’s realistic and enforceable—after all, unrealistic law is pretty hard to enforce—then enforcing the heck out of it. Basically changing the nudge-nudge, wink-wink circumstance into a kind of honest, open, let’s recognize it and deal with it; let’s go from Prohibition to liquor licenses. Remember trying to enforce Prohibition? It didn’t work very well.

These are the three pillars of the reform package that I would argue everyone from the President to McCain to Cornyn is behind. More realistic laws and a worker program commensurate with our labor needs—that’s pillar number one. Pillar number two: enforce the heck out of that. That means border enforcement. That means work place enforcement. We’re not going to need things like raids and check points because we’re going to have more realistic law. We’re going to go from Prohibition to liquor licenses. Much easier to enforce, but we still do have to enforce it.

Then, of course, the tricky moral question: what do we do about the 11 million illegal immigrants already here? And nobody, especially not conservatives, wants to reward illegal behavior. Nobody does. Nobody’s proposing that. But for our sake as a nation, there are 11 million illegal people here. We’re not going to deport them. They’re probably not going to go home of their own accord, even if we make life miserable for them. At least all of them won’t.

So I think for our own sake, we ought to say, “Whoa, wait a minute, they’re here.” Recognize the reality and think of some way for them to pay their dues, jump through the necessary hoops, and meet out requirements. Get a kind of probation and come back onto the right side of the law.

I don’t think it’s hard to see the benefits of this. We’ll get rid of those illegal people all around us. It will be good for law and order. We’ll restore the rule of law in our towns and our work places. It’ll be good for security. I’ll never forget the border guard who said to me, it was here in Arizona, “If another 9/11 happens here in Arizona on my watch and it happened because I was so busy chasing your busboy or my gardener that I didn’t find the terrorists, I’ll never forgive myself.” Let’s take those workers off the table so the border guards can get back to really focusing on the bad guys.

They do pay taxes now but they’ll really pay their full freight in taxes. It will be good for local services because people will be able to plan. The tax revenues will be different, the flow of revenues will be different. We can take care of the local service problem. I think it will be good for our vales. Instead of having a two-tier society, where we have the legit workers and we have the underground workers, we’ll get back to the kind of democratic country we want to be.

In closing, I’d just like to touch on two more issues. One that Janet raised in the bulk of her last questions is assimilation. Despite the case I’ve made to you, if I thought that, in 20 years, Spanish was going to be an equal language to English, or if I thought Mexican authoritarian political values were going to dominate in this country, or Latino fatalism or whatever the fears are, I too would say, “Let’s forfeit the growth. Let’s forget it. Let’s have that Orwellian state that I talked about and make the choice ‘no.’”

But I’ve spent a lot of time looking at immigrant America and studying whether or not today’s immigrants are assimilating and they are assimilating as quickly, if not more quickly than the immigrants of a hundred years ago. If anything, they learn English faster. They come here having heard TV. They see that English is the way of the future. Their kids know that English is the way of the future. Sure, the older generation, the adults, have a hard time learning English. I don’t know when any of you last tried to learn English recently. I’ve tried and I have an Ivy League education and I have time to do it. It’s really hard as an adult. But the kids, the second generation, are 98%. According to every survey, they learn English. They want to learn English. Even if the schools are terrible. Even if the schools are still doing bilingual education which, I think most of us can agree, is a mistake. They learn it on the street or they learn it from TV. They understand that’s where their future is and they’re learning English.

There is a Mexican education gap but we’re talking about people. If you compare Mexican-Americans to their peers in schools, they don’t do as well. But if you compare them to other people whose parents were high school drop-outs, they do phenomenally well. It’s something we have to think about and worry about and figure out how to close that gap. They’re not getting to Harvard as fast as Asians or as Jews once did. But they are moving up. They’re not a permanent underclass. They’re a solid working class. Their intermarriage rates are though the roof, unlike any group we’ve ever seen; between a half and two-thirds by the time you get to the third generation. By the way, by the time you get to the third generation, only a third of Hispanics even speak Spanish anymore.

And they’re patriotic. Hispanics are serving and dying in disproportionate numbers in Iraq. So we can talk more about the assimilation numbers if you like. But the point is that I believe that we are creating and bringing in a solid patriotic family-oriented hard-working working class with, by the way, conservative values.

And that brings me really to my last point and it’s to raise the question, what kind of party do we want to be as Republicans? Do we want to be the party that builds the wall around America? I mean, Bob Dole campaigned on that slogan as a joke. He said, “Do we want to be the party that builds the wall around America?” And he didn’t even have to explain it. And this was Bob Dole, not, you know McCain or some liberal Republican. In those days, he didn’t even have to explain that that wasn’t what we want to be. It was obvious to people, including Republicans.

Ronald Reagan certainly understood that view, too, that the kind of party we want to be is a party that faces up to the reality of the world; that faces up to these tectonic shifts I’m talking about in this globalization, in this reality. A party that figures out a way to turn it to our advantage rather than hiding our head in the sand and pretending its not happening. A party that has enough confidence in our way of life and our values that we say these people are going to come here and become Americans the way immigrants always have. We may need to help them. We may need to provide some encouragement. But the confidence that our way of life is going prove appealing to them. As I see it every day among Mexican-Americans.

In closing, that’s the question I would like to pose. You know, a lot of people talk about, do we want to be a minority party forever going forward? I think if we turn out to be the anti-immigrant party we’ll think that, too. But obviously this is a choice that we want to make on the basis of values, as much as on the basis of interest, so to speak. I just don’t really see us as wanting to be the party that is partly responsible for ending the nation’s tradition as a nation of immigrants.

Levy: Our next expert is Doug McIntyre. When Doug came to L.A. from New York in 1985, he was a writer and producer. He wrote for Married with Children, WKRP in Cincinnati, Mike Hammer Private Eye and other programs. He had the opportunity to be a guest on a radio talk show and enjoyed it so much that he created a tape, sent to KABC, and was hired immediately. He’s been doing this ever since.

He has been researching, observing, and talking about illegal immigration for over two decades. In fact, his first topic on the radio was about the borders. At that point, it was a Southwest problem. Doug is currently the KABC morning talk show host from 5:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. He has appeared on Politically Incorrect, Hannity and Colmes, Dennis Miller and the O’Reilly Factor.

Doug McIntyre: Good morning. Thanks for being here.

I want to start with a quote. “In the last several years, millions of undocumented aliens have illegally immigrated to the United States. They’ve breached our nation’s immigration laws, displaced many American citizens from jobs, and placed an increased financial burden on many state and local governments.” That quote was given on given August 4, 1977. The author of that quote was President James Earl Carter in his message to Congress on illegal immigration.

If that was true in 1977, it is true exponentially so now and, of course, that’s pre-9/11 and doesn’t factor into those dangers. Well, I do broadcast from Los Angeles and have lived there for 20 years. Of course, here in Arizona, people are acutely aware of what the problem is. We are as well in California. Because, unlike Las Vegas, what happens in Los Angeles doesn’t stay there; it tends to go across the rest of the country.

Here are some recent Los Angeles headlines. “Between 2000 and 2003, the population of L.A. County went up by a million.” It’s like taking the entire city of Boston and its suburbs and laying it across L.A. County. “The illiteracy rate among L.A. County workers age 16 to 54 is a staggering 51%.” “The L.A. County healthcare system lost 14 major hospitals in the last 12 months alone, and we have that many more on the brink of insolvency and closing right now.”

While nearly every other major city in America has seen a steep decline in violent crime, in Los Angeles County, the murder rate is up. The L.A. Unified School District—which is many things, but “unified” isn’t one of them—is a disaster. Seventy-eight percent of the student body speaks Spanish and you’re as like to see bien venutos over the door as you are to see “welcome.”

The average price for a home countywide in Los Angeles, hit the half-million mark, in the San Fernando Valley, at $600,000. In Orange County, it’s $650,000 and rising. On our block alone, in our little cul-de-sac, a single family home now houses four families with 11 cars in the street. This is happening across all of Southern California.

The wages of working class Angelenos are going down at the very time costs for everything else is going up. What we are witnessing is a massive failure of government. But, unlike Hurricane Katrina, or rather, like Hurricane Katrina, the failure is at all levels. However, there’s a significant difference, because this is not a failure due to incompetence. This is one of the rarest of rare phenomena: what we are seeing here is like the mythical white buffalo: it is a government program that succeeds brilliantly because what’s happening is not happening by accident, it’s not happening as the law of unintended consequences, it’s happening by design.

Now we spend an inordinate amount of time talking about the radical left, it’s the reconqiusta Aslan crowd that doesn’t recognize the sovereignty of America, or doesn’t recognize the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, or doesn’t recognize the Gazden purchase. They believe this is stolen land. They have college professors who teach victimhood and separation and they refer to Alta California.

Well, they are very troubling and most of the trouble that they cause, frankly, is restricted to the local level. But, at the federal level, at the state level, the real problem is the corporatists who have tragically infested and taken over our party. You see, for the corporatists, it’s not a conspiracy—its’ a business model.

We have had a lot of discussion over the last number of years about outsourcing but outsourcing only works to a point. Then there’s insourcing and insourcing rarely gets talked about. You can’t outsource the bellhop of the Arizona Biltmore. You can’t outsource a hair cut. You can’t outsource the driveway paver. But you can insource millions of cheap laborers who will drive down the price of labor in America and that’s exactly what they’re doing and they’re doing it by design.

Now, as conservatives, we have always been leery of the United Nations and their blue helmets and one-world government. The reality is, the UN is so incompetent, they can’t even get the hookers sent to the right room. The UN is not a threat. They may be clog up good parking on the East Side of New York. Short of that, let them talk to each other; they’re virtually useless.

But you give me a CEO and a CFO with a solid business plan, lobbyists, and the capital to enact that plan and I’ll show you an efficient engine for achievement and that’s exactly what’s happening here.

It is not an accident. You just came from a panel on lobbyists. It’s not an accident that the chief lobbyists for an open border policy in this country are Wells Fargo Bank, Citicorp, Citigroup, Bank of America, the Hotel and Tourism Industry, the meat-packing industry, the poultry industry and on and on the list goes. These are major American industries that largely do their business here domestically.

Why do they want this? Well, the banking industry, to take them as a specific case, saw $20 billion in remittances being sent from the United States to Mexico, now ranking as one of the top two or three components of the Mexican economy, up there with tourism and oil and gas exports. They saw it going via Western Union and the U.S. Postal Service, and they said, like Tony Soprano, “Where’s our taste?”

So they went to their lobbyists and they got their taste—now $3,000 a day. It is

widely advertised in Los Angeles. I don’t know what they do here or where you live, but in L.A., it is widely advertised that $3,000 a day will be transferred from an American bank to Mexico with no questions asked.

Are we out of our minds in a post-9/11 world? This is God’s gift to terrorist cells that need funding. This is God’s gift to illegal drug cartels to launder their money.

Banks are now writing loans for illegal immigrants, in direct violation of the banking laws. A nation that does not have control of its borders is a nation in name only. That is exactly the point. That’s the objective of the multi-national corporation and the corporatists who have taken over our party.

The globalist business model views the nation-state as an impediment. In fact, they see the nation-state as a vestigial hold over. An archaic remnant of a bygone era. Things like language, law, history, art, tradition, and culture are impediments to the movement of goods and services. Their single mantra is stock price über ales. As long as the stock price is going up, it’s good. They have zero responsibility to the nation that enriched them.

I am a capitalist, not very good at it, but I’m a capitalist, and I absolutely believe that we have to be engaged in the world. I believe that we want to have communion with all corners of the world, both politically, culturally, and economically. But what we see right now is a business model that makes America reduced from a nation to a market. That’s how they see us—just one market amongst many.

And what happens, when America’s place as the largest market is taken over by, say, China, and when America’s interest collide with the interests of China, then the modern multinational decides to side with the biggest customer. This is what we have seen when we have an embargo against Cuba but we grant China most favored nation trading status on a permanent basis so they can roll 12% of their enormous GDP into arms, submarines, long-range bombers, and missiles.

It’s massively stupid. It’s massively short-sighted. You can put all the American flag lapel pins you want on your jacket and sit in the boardroom and make the decisions, but our corporations are selling out our country and they’re doing so with the full cooperation of the United States government. It’s a tragedy.

What we are practicing is Darwinian capitalism. As I said, I’m a capitalist. But by flooding the market with hundreds of thousands—in fact millions—of cheap laborers, what we are doing is kicking off the ladder of success the single most vulnerable group of Americans: the recent immigrants to America from all nations, including Mexico, and especially African-Americans.

Anecdotally speaking, and I don’t know why this is the case, but in Los Angeles, at one time, black construction workers specialized in the drywall trade. Over the last 20 years, $18-an-hour drywall jobs for black workers went to $15-an-hour jobs, then to $13-an-hour, and then vanished at any price.

We continue to have a push by Gil Cedillo in the State Legislature of California for a driver’s license bill, which should be called the Professional Driver’s Unemployment Act of 2006. Because if you give the dry cleaning truck to an illegal immigrant driver and they get in an accident, someone else is going to own the dry cleaning business. But if you legalize the illegal immigrant driver, then the company simply tells their current staff of drivers, “You work for less or you’re gone.” We’ve seen this replayed over and over and over and over again.

This seems like some kind of national madness, but in fact it’s true, that local level governments create sanctuary city policies all across their country. Los Angeles is a sanctuary city. What do I mean by that? Well, they accept the matricula consular cards. They use this as a legal form of ID so that Section 8 housing, subsidized housing, is handed out with no investigation, not even a question. It prohibits asking whether that subsidized housing is being given to somebody who is in the country illegally or not. It’s essentially as good as an American passport, to work and live within the United States.

How about this for genius thinking? On March 12, 2004, Mayor Jim Han, then of Los Angeles, announced that he had just signed an ordinance, that was passed unanimously by the L.A. City Council, to expand the matricula consular card concept to any nation on earth that wants to take us up on it, including Syria, including Libya, including Lebanon,  including Yemen, including Pakistan, and including our eternal friends, the Saudi Arabians.

We are told that this is good for us because, of course, we are the Ellis Island of the 21st century. We are told not to worry because they’ll be security vetting. However, the Chief of the Los Angeles Police Department told me, “We don’t do background checks on consular cards.” The consul general of Mexico told the L.A. County of Board of Supervisors, they don’t do background checks on consular cards, and the only constituency for consular cards are illegal immigrants, because we offer tourist visas, student visas, and work visas, and we have the most liberal policy at allowing people to immigrate to this country in the entire world. We allow nearly a million a people into this country legally. But we get in an additional 3-4 million illegally.

Now, I have in front of me the press release for a genius move enacted by the City of Los Angeles? The date? March 12, 2004. On March 11, 2004, Madrid was bombed by Moroccan nationals. The next day, the City Council and the Mayor of Los Angeles expand the consular card concept to any nation on earth. Everywhere you look at it, we are being subverted and the sovereignty of this country is being challenged.

Now I believe, as emphatically as Tamar and anybody else does, that immigration is a great blessing to this nation. My grandmother came from Ireland in 1914 and never saw her parents alive again. She scrubbed toilet bowls. She married a police officer. She had a wonderful life and she made it possible for me to be here. We venerate the honor of all immigrants.

But what we have here right now is essentially an erasing of the distinctions between America, and Central and South America. This is part of the free-trade cancer—that’s the word I use for it—that has infected this country. We have NAFTA and GAT deals. Soon we’ll have HAFTAs and you’ll have to go to another country to get a job.

The reality is, there are many, many Americans who are profiting and doing very well under this system. But this theory of free trade ignores the millions of Americans who once worked 40 hours who now work 20 hours sitting in a Wal-Mart store. What we are doing in effect, by destroying middle-class working jobs in this country, we’re turning middle America into a factory for socialist voters. Because when you’re a 49-year-old father of three and your factory has left and nothing’s coming in its place, you’re going vote for the politician who promises to give you national health insurance. You’re going to vote for the politician who offers to give you something. This is a disaster for us.

I’m not into conspiracy theories, but I do believe in business plans. I want to tell you about a story that everybody should know about, because it really brings this whole thing together, in my mind anyway.

The Republic of Mexico announced, in the middle of last year, that they were going to spend $2 billion to build a giant port and harbor facility on the Baja Peninsula. That’s fine: capital investment in Mexico. That’s what they should be doing, developing their economy.

But here’s where you see all of it come together. We grant Most Favored Nation trading status to China on a permanent basis. We outsource our manufacturing to China. The goods are manufactured in China, they’re shipped to a port in Mexico that gets to bypass our environmental protections, our OSHA rules and any other rules and regs, and then they’re put on trucks that, because of the NAFTA provision, can drive the goods from Mexico into the United States right to the Wal-Mart Store. Okay? That’s where we’re headed. Forty percent of the GDP of this country goes through the Port of Los Angeles. Well, they’re going to have some real competition, good non-union competition, just a few miles south, really, with none of the other rules and regs.

So you see the quality of life in America is constantly threatened and, when you talk about this and you talk about the responsibility of corporations in all of this, you’re branded as a “Communist,” as a knuckle-dragging union thug, as whatever—we know all the names. If you talk about this subject, period, you’re a xenophobe, you’re a racist, you’re a Republican. All these terrible words.

But let’s talk about racism just briefly. You couldn’t design a more racist policy than we currently have. What we have created is a class system in America where we’re raising a generation of kids who don’t know what it’s like to pull the ripcord on a Briggs & Stratton lawn mower engine because the Mexicans do that kind of work. Other people do that kind of work. This nauseating mantra that there are jobs that Americans aren’t willing to do is just that: nauseating. Americans aren’t stupid. They’re not going to do it for pennies on the dollar. But my grandfather worked at a shipyard, my grandmother scrubbed toilets, and I reject that categorically.

Naval Coding, Inc., in San Diego, had a contract to weld and paint the hulls of our warships. Half of their work force were illegal immigrants. Since when are Americans unwilling to weld the hulls of our own warships? It’s a nonsense argument but it’s repackaged and sold to us constantly.

You know, there’s a litany, a rule of the jungle says that a wounded animal is the most dangerous animal. A wounded politician is equally dangerous. That’s why the lobbyists who have got their hooks in, they’ve got a bar code on the heads of these politicians on this issue, and that’s why you don’t have an opposition party. There is no opposition party on this.

At one point in the 2004 Presidential election, President Bush’s campaign site said, “Bring them out of the shadows.” John Kerry’s website said, “Bring them out of the shadows.” The two-party system flamed out like a supernova and we’re living off of the vestigial light from a star system that isn’t there anymore. We got wound up on a lot of idiotic issues to point fingers at each other, to turn the vote out. Meanwhile, the two-party system is selling away the basic sovereignty of this country for the benefit of multinational corporations who don’t care what happens to America. 

I start speaking in tongues on this subject. Let me end by saying this. America is important to the world. America is a blessing to the world. America makes mistakes. America tries to correct its mistakes. America is not passé. America is not a market. Thank you.

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