Redstate

Unless the Senator goes back on his pledge and runs again.

he's a man of principle.  

I disagree strongly with that principle and so should any self-proclaimed supporter of free markets.  But he's honest.

a supporter of free markets.  Have I missed something?

WRT illegal immigrants.

"Dey took ur jawbs" and all that.  Oh, and they're gonna destroy our culture, I guess that's not really a free market issue as much, just a plain stupid one that flies in the face of 200 and thirty years of history.

I'm not saying the solution is simple, just that simplistic solutions from both sides should be ignored.

One of my first stories on the front page was on free markets and immigration.    The basic economics is

Although positive-sum gains is accepted readily by conservatives with respect to trade and finance, the logically extension to labor is often forgotten. If there is a demand for labor and a willing supply of labor and the government prevents the participants from exchanging their services, the market is less efficient and both sides lose.

Do elaborate.

I think i'll just let it hang out there alone.

Do you mean:

1.  That our culture is whatever culture exists within the political borders of the United States, such that whatever is possessed by whoever is here becomes ours?
   
2.  That immigration has not been an engine of cultural change that might, from the perspective of the people who were here before any given wave of immigrants arrived, have been undesirable and destructive?
   
3.  Diversity (pauses to retch) is our strength?

The "No Irish need apply" signs look pretty foolish now, don't they?

If it's an english language issue for you then s/Irish/Italian/ above.  

Like I said, I'll let it hang out there alone with 230 years of american history.  

"Dey took ur jawbs?"...and who the heck are you, to denigrate as stupid individuals whose accents and education may differ from your own?  

You've just displayed exactly the type of supercilious, elitist attitude driving the immigration backlash - the perception that the needs of American citizens in the lower middle and lower economic classes will be sacrificed, obstensibly for 'principle', but in reality to provide cheap labor for inefficient industries, and toilet scrubbers for snobs like you.

Gaelic was mostly dead by the time the Irish arrived here. They were almost overwhelmingly English speakers.

than simple fear-mongering.

A percentage of the illegals remit some portion of their earnings back to family at home, I don't know what the percentage is, but it must be a fairly large, as it forms a major source of Mexican foreign exchange next to Pemex.

If those jobs were held by Americans that money would stay here, for the benefit of American individuals and families. Personally I feel a greater obligation to my fellow citizens than I do to Mexicans or Salvadoreans or whatever.

I do not for a minute believe the argument that these people are doing jobs Americans won't do. They are doing jobs that Americans won't do at the wages that are offered. And because there is an endless conveyor belt delivering a fresh supply of people who will work for whatever they can get the wages need never get any better.

I accept that its likely to cost more to live in America if the illegals go away. But those jobs would be filled by my fellow citizens, and a rising tide lifts all boats. The rising costs would be offset by a commensurate rise in the overall standard of living of our people.

Let the Mexican government do their job and figure out how to help their people, it is not the job of the United States Senate.

------------

the English saw to that by outlawing Gaelic in Irish schools and commerce :-)

is fine, as far as it goes, but assumes that economic efficiency is the end sought by government policy.  Economic efficiency is important as a means toward the goal of raising the standard of living of Americans.  If efficiency was, in itself, the end to be sought, our nations economic development would have been quite different (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Report_on_Manufactures).

The protection of domestic manufacturing did not have as its goal "efficiency."  It would have been more efficient (globally) if our comparative advantage at providing raw materials was coupled with Europe's comparative advantage in manufacturing.  To say that our government has never created "frictions" that worked counter to economic efficiency, and that those frictions did not help our country, would be a mistake.

I find Gaelic one of the more awful European languages, right up there with German. Its loss would not strike me as a tragedy.

"If it's an english language issue for you, then s/Irish/Italian above."

And screw them if they can't take a joke.  

You're sounding a lot like the union officials I was talking to at the MA state democratic convention last year.  Just saying.

I remembered the "No Irish need apply" signs, anticipated the response that mexicans don't all speak english like the Irish did, and then posited that you could apply the same message to Italian immigrants in the same time period or any other group of non-english speaking immigrants thorughout american history that turned out just fine.

Deliberate misconstruction doesn't make for much of a debate.

Personally I try not to watch rubbish masquerading as insightful commentary.

Its two guys who have a license to talk dirty and pretend they have something meaningful to say that cannot be said any other way.

I take it you support raising taxes on the rich and more subsidies for the poor, since you're such a champion?

But very well, then.  

If you want to argue that the Irish have assimilated after 160 years, fine.  If you wish to compress that whole period into an instant, and gloss over the numerous difficulties associated with Irish immigration in the middle and late 19th centuries, I must cry foul.  It should also be pointed out that the assimilation of previous waves of immigrants arguably owed a great deal to circumstances that no longer obtain.  Just chalking it up to some magical "American exceptionalism" is lazy, verging on deceptive.  Finally, there is little in American history to suggest that we can successfully combine members of different racial groups into a harmonious whole.  We haven't done it so far, nor have the British, the French, or, most significantly, our neighbors to the south.  Indeed, it is persistent racial inequality in Latin America that is largely responsible for the flood of immigrants from the region coming to the United States.  The folks emigrating from Mexico mostly don't look like Vicente Fox or Carlos Salinas.  They're mestizos and Indians from a country where, just as in our own, wealth and power tend to be inversely related to the darkness of one's skin.  This is despite a history, from the very first contacts between Spaniards and Indians, of quite often deliberate intermarriage, in contrast to the rigid racial separation characteristic of the British colonies in America.  

In other words, we haven't solved our own race problem, for less than 14% of our people, yet now we're supposed to be able to solve Latin America's, too.  We'd better hope we can, and that Latino educational, political, and economic outcomes can be raised quite rapidly to the level of whites.  If we can not do so very quickly, the United States will, given the magnitude of Hispanic immigration, face the same sort of unenviable situation shared by Mexico, Bolivia, Brazil, etc., in which a visible, mostly white minority controls the economy and government, with all the potential for explosive conflict that that entails.  Good luck with your sociology experiment, though on what basis it should have been undertaken with a fairly high-functioning, if imperfect, country is rather unclear.

"worked out just fine" mean?  From the perspective of the present, you mean?  Do I really need to point out the logical problems inherent to that sort of chronological compression?  From the perspective of the present, the Visigothic invasion of Aquitaine "worked out just fine" too.  If you were a fifth century colonus, your perspective might be a bit differet, but I suppose that's all just carping.

I've made a similar observation before but confined to the economic side. But it is an excellent point that the illegals simply "don't look like Vicente Fox et al."

Part of the reason for this movement is the disparity, throughout Latin America, between the few, basically European-decendant, who have the power and the money, and the many, basically native-decendant, who have little to nothing of money or power. This is a product of the practices of Spanish colonialism.

But are we going to pass a law to stop the tides?  These people want to live here and anecdotally, most hispanic people I've met are really, really hard workers who are trying to make a living.  I have no problem with that.  Yeah, there's gonna be some cultural shift, but I really don't think it'll be anything we can't handle.  I am an American Exceptionalist.  If you supported the Iraq war, you are too.  At the very least, putting together a modern SS to go house to house in major cities looking for illegal immigrants is repugnant to me.

For the record, my idea for the immigration problem is

1.  A wall.
   
   
2.  Some form of partial amnesty and path to citizenship for those already here.  I'm open to debate on the particulars.
   
   
3.  Increased -legal- immigration, focusing on those with job skills and degrees.

All three or none at all.

Unless you've been for a higher minimum wage and more of a welfare state all along, I think you're just donning some convienent clothing at the last second.

You'll forgive me, after the last 6 years, for scoffing at the idea that conservatives are now all of a sudden hugely concerned about protecting the working poor with legislation.

minimum wages or welfare or protecting the working poor? I was observing that one of the proximate causes of the migration is the rotten socio-political-economic imbalance in Latin America. A very few have everything and everyone else has nothing. And those in power have kept it, and intend to keep it, that way for centuries.

I fail to see what that has to do with the minimum wage in the US or welfare or anything else. The socio-political-economic situation in this country is absolutely nothing like Latin America.

to keep low-end wages higher by restricting the supply of low-end labor.  Mostly out of sympathy for our fellow man and all that, which I agree with.

I'd posit that a better solution would be to legalize the immigration that's happening through a combination of better enforcement to keep it manageable and a path to citizenship for many of those already here.  Then the minimum wage would apply to all.  If we're going to tamper with the market for humanitarian reasons, as we should, let's be explicit about it.

It's "whistling past the graveyard."  And yes, we could stop the tide.  We could make this country very inhospitable to illegal immigrants, if we chose to, without forming a modern-day SS to do it.  Having done that, we could attempt a national debate over who, precisely, we want to have come live among us.  That is a conversation that is currently rendered moot by mass illegal immigration.  As to American Exceptionalism, and supporting the Iraq War, I no longer believe in the former, and daily repent of my past support for the latter.  With respect to immigration, American exceptionalism is more myth than fact.  What's exceptional isn't true, and what's true isn't exceptional.  

But again, you're not addressing the nub of what I wrote, which is that we have not solved the problem of racial inequality, and that the associated political problems will be much worse in a country where the racial majority is relatively poor and disenfranchised, than it has been in historically overwhelmingly white America, where it was a relatively small minority that was poor and disenfranchised.  Political disputes and socioeconomic inequalities - and quite frequently any kind of disputes - take on an entirely different and more vicious character when the lines of conflict intersect with ethnic and racial difference.  

We may avoid that fate, but the early returns from our demographic transformation, in which Hispanics lag whites in nearly every measure of wealth, academic achievement, and political participation, don't bode well.  If the children of today's immigrants don't move quickly into the middle class, and it is hard to believe they will, given the cited deficits, they are going to be even angrier than their parents who've been marching the past few weeks.  But I guess the solution then will be to displace them with some other group of immigrants who will do the jobs those newly-minted Americans don't want to do anymore.  There are lots of poor people in the world, and not all of them have moved to America yet.  

It seems to me, and I think to most reasonable people, that importing several million low skilled workers in an explicit effort to drive down the cost of low skilled labor is in fact "tamper[ing] with the market", albeit for non-humanitarian reasons.

In general, your depiction of the GOP as activly hostile to poor Americans seems to be drawn directly from the left-wing playbook.

If you are one of us; we don't need people like you.

If you are not one of us; stop projecting your lefty fantasies onto us.

I'm usually dismissive of racial issues when it comes to non-black immigrants because asians and south asians do so well here that I figure it's only fallout from our past history.

This view does not address immigrants who come here with racial baggage of their own WRT white people so it has a blind spot and thank you for illuminating that.  

However, are you suggesting, in the absence of discriminatory laws and policies, that hispanics will do worse than a whiter immigrant group would have because of their race?  I reject that premise.  

Basically someone has taken your side of this debate (probably with less eloquence) every time we've had a wave of immigration and every single time I'm glad they didn't get mcuh traction.  That doesn't mean you're wrong this time around, just that it's likely worth taking on a level of cultural unrest if the upside is bringing in a lot of very motivated workers and a 2nd generation with their parents smacking them upside the head if they don't do well enough in school to have it better than they had it.  Pronoun soup there but you get my point.  Maybe I'm just an incorrigible optimist, for example, I still think the Iraq war will turn out ok for our money.  But I think the most open society in the world can handle 12 million immigrants.

to which you replied. Perhaps elsewhere, but not here.

In any event I have argued that eliminating the low wage conveyor belt and removing the incentive for employers would force them to raise the wages to a point where American would take the jobs. I think this is a far better solution than the continual depression of wages made possible by the endless flow of people willing to work for low wages.

Employment of Americans in these jobs has the advantage that their incomes would stay in this country rather than flowing overseas. Depending on the income level it may also be result in some tax revenue but I don't see that as a factor as large as simply keeping the income in our economy rather sending to Mexico's.

I also favor a free market approach to wages over a mandated minimum wage. Wages should rise and fall according to the supply of labor, not because some Congressman is looking for a few votes from labor unions.

My immigration preferences would be:

• border security through construction of a significant barrier; this is both an immigration and security issue to me. For the ones who still come, no more capture and release, its capture and removal the first time, jail after that.
  
• serious employment enforcement; hire illegals you go to jail regardless of whether you are a CEO or a homeowner. If there are no jobs the reason for illegal border crossing is significantly reduced, and I contend many who are here will go home without work opportunities.
  
• major restructuring of the immigration system to improve work and resident visas with an emphasis on skilled workers.
  
• serious discussion of a non-citizenship-path guest worker program. I think a guest worker program flies in the face of my belief about employing Americans first regardless of the cost but I'm open to being convinced about the need for a restricted program.
  
• no amnesty; you do not get to move up in the line by evading deportation the longest, you broke the law go home.

Basically someone has taken your side of this debate (probably with less eloquence) every time we've had a wave of immigration and every single time I'm glad they didn't get mcuh traction.

What baleful consequences do you think would have followed if they had gotten traction?

But I think the most open society in the world can handle 12 million immigrants.

Why do you desire the US to have "the most open society in the world"?

Is an open society really any different from an open mind? In other words, is it anything other than a polite euphemism for an absence of a society?

I'm trying to see the difference between your position and liberalism. It's not readily appearent.

Or even more accurately, complete lack of active compassion.  Why couldn't we just abolish taxes on the poor if we had so many tax cuts?  I've never lived off of minimum wage (aside from spending money in HS / college), but I've done the math and it's not pretty.

And that's why I don't buy arguments on the poor's behalf coming from conservatives... I may be wrong.

You make a good point about importing several million low-end workers does change the market, however the hand of gov't is conspicuously not involved here.  Market forces are driving the immigration.

Lastly, you're aware that one can be for a realistic budget and hence against Bush, but not be a "lefty fantasizer"?  I get modded down on dkos all the time.  Yelling "lefty" or "liberal" is not thinking, and as a matter of fact liberal used to be a pretty nice word until you guys ruined it by shrieking so much.  Admittedly, the 68 hippies have their fair share of the blame as well.

Why couldn't we just abolish taxes on the poor if we had so many tax cuts?

we have. The last round of tax cuts moved another large chunk of low income wage earners below the line.

How do you define "the poor." The asinine "poverty level" is a construct bureaucrats. I can eliminate poverty in this country tomorrow; just give me the power to declare the "poverty line" and poof it goes away.

Why couldn't we just abolish taxes on the poor if we had so many tax cuts?

We have essentially abolished taxes on the poor with all the tax cuts. I don't know what math you have done, but you might want to take a look at what portion of the tax burden is paid by different percentiles of the income earners. The "poor" have a free ride. In fact, they are being subsidised by the higher earners.

Creating a larger and larger class of tax consuming poor is not in the best interests of the country. It is of course in the best interests of individual employers. But the state is supposed to look out for the best interests of society as a whole.

And that's why I don't buy arguments on the poor's behalf coming from conservatives... I may be wrong.

Gee, ya think?

the hand of gov't is conspicuously not involved here.  Market forces are driving the immigration.

Well, thats true, in one sense. Government is not involved. The thing is that they are supposed to be. They are ignoring the law and thus creating the problem. If a few employers of illegal aliens were shown on TV being arrested, handcuffed, and jailed, then the equation would change drastically.

Market forces can never be disentangled from government action.

as a matter of fact liberal used to be a pretty nice word until you guys ruined it by shrieking so much

Classical liberalim led directly to modern liberalism. The underlying problems have always been present in its ideology. It's adherents believe in nothing more sacred than the almighty buck. I just don't see why they should impose their own morality on the rest of us. :)

I'm usually dismissive of racial issues when it comes to non-black immigrants because asians and south asians do so well here that I figure it's only fallout from our past history.

Immigrants come here with their own histories.  Look at Irish-American enmity toward Britain well into the third generation and beyond.  Or the persistence of the Mafia, that unfortunate Italian import of a century ago.  

They also come not just with racial baggage, but in the case of most Latin Americans, a degree of anti-American baggage, and in the case of Mexicans, specific historic grievances which could, and in the hands of the right demagogue, probably will, become grist for the radical mill.

Basically someone has taken your side of this debate (probably with less eloquence) every time we've had a wave of immigration and every single time I'm glad they didn't get mcuh traction.

They got enough traction in the 1920s, in the wake of the first Red Scare, to drastically reduce immigration.  Secondly, as I never get tired of saying, circumstances in the US have changed a great deal since the 19th century.

That doesn't mean you're wrong this time around, just that it's likely worth taking on a level of cultural unrest

How much unrest?  Quantity has a quality all its own.

and a 2nd generation with their parents smacking them upside the head if they don't do well enough in school to have it better than they had it.

I'd feel a lot better if there were much evidence this was actually happening.  Even in the 19th century, assimilation took time, and that was without a welfare state, affirmative action, and mass immigration from a bordering country with historic grudges against our own.

..think or speak in terms of cliches.  What I do support is the free market, undistorted by industries that (in many cases) cynically use illegal labor to evade minimum wage and job safety laws; and (in all cases) use illegal labor to resist market forces pressing upward on wages and/or for increased efficiency.  The net effect of massive illegal immigration is to allow these industries to fatten their bottom lines at the expense of lower skilled American citizens, who would otherwise take those jobs at real market compensation.

We can increase the number of H-2B (unskilled) visas from 75K to 400K to compensate for the demand in labor.  It's a good thing for our country that Latinos do not have a welfare mentality and almost all are hard workers.  I have always been in the Bush-Rove crowd on this.

We had an employment problem in this country.  We are, however, at full employment --thanks in part to the Bush tax cuts that created this economic boom.  Since we don't have an employment problem and in fact need more workers (both skilled and unskilled) those who have demogogued the issue like (understandably) Lou Dobbs and (worrysomely) Rush Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham --have sounded downright silly.

The official unemployment statistic, termed the "U-3" number,  does not include individuals whose unemployment compensation has run out, or who have given up looking for work.  There are an estimated 5 million "chronically unemployed", who do not show up in the official statistics.

Further, there are other measures of unemployment taken by the federal government.  The "U-6" number, which uses the most expansive modern criteria, has unemployment running at currently running at about 8.4%.

(See http://www.underreported.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=
article&sid=1092) if you'd like more background.

So, ElCapitan, its important not to let yourself get snowed.  We don't have full employment - far from it.  Low skilled individuals are being are robbed of opportunities to lift themselves out of that situation, by the hordes of illegals willing to work in substandard conditions for depressed wages.

ElCapitan,

The direct Bureau of Labor Statistics page is actually at:

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t12.htm

Sorry for the cut/paste error,

has never meant everybody has a job.  Rather it is an unemployment level which is approached asymptotically which is to say never quite reached.  Different economic models have different values of both U-3 and U-6 representing full employment.  I don't think we are quite there but we are close.  

Nit picking about U3 vs U6 under current conditions is sophistry

I must respectfully disagree with your assessment that Rush is acting as a demagogue on this issue.  In my humble opinion he is appraoching it from a law and order perspective with respects to calling illegal immigration what it is; illegal.  From a price/supply/demamd perspective, he seems to suggest that there are wage levels at which there will be no shortage of legal, domestic labor supply.  He has been skeptical that such wage levels will do a great deal of damage to the affected industries.

One of his primary points is that we risk becoming dependent on a permanent underclass to satisfy our cheap labor addiction, something he sees as being antithetical to the American dream.

I don't presume to speak for Rush but that is my interpretation of what I have heard. (I'll grant that I haven't heard all he  has to say on the subject since I, like Rummy, have a day job)

I'll agree with you that the two college grads in the group you cite (Dobbs and sadly Ingram) have been a bit demagogic.

Kent, I completely agree that 'full employment has never meant everybody has a job' - in fact, I never stated otherwise.  But there's a huge difference between unattainable perfection and where we are now.  As for your characterization of U3 vs U6 as "nit picking" and "sophistry" - the current U3 number is 5.1%.  The U6 number is 9.0%. That's a heck of a nit. And for pure sophistry, its pretty tough to beat the U3 model.  What's the logic behind not counting as unemployed individuals whose UI benefits have run out, or who want and are able to work, but have stopped looking due to lack of success?

So you didn't claim full employment means everybody has a job.  My point was simply that if there is a U3 number which has traditionally been used to represent full employment (somewhere between 4 and 5%) then there is a corresponding U6 number which represents that point as well.  There will always be a higher U6 to compare to U3, U3 has always been the "official" number because it looks better.

Claiming we are not at or near full employment because U6 is higher that U3 is sophistry because there will always be a difference between the two numbers.  

You bring up a good point though, it is important to look at the underlying assumptions in any government reported statistic whether they reference unemployment, the budget or trade deficit, spending rate increases or dereases (e.g. baseline budgeting) I happen to believe that U6 includes a lot of people who are simply unemployable as well as people who have left the labor force (to raise a family, to start a business etc.)

In looking at the statistics its amazing to see what percent of the total are represented by teenagers.  Reduce or get rid of the minimum wage and we will be at full employment in a heartbeat.

I'm a 24/7 member and a huge fan of his.  From the law and order perspective his arguments have been fine but from the "welfare state" perspective his arguments have been tremendously strained.  He claimed that those who would receive "amnesty" (in his words) or "punitive path to citizenship" (in mine) would be more reliant on the welfare state than others.  Statistics, however, have shown otherwise.  The law and order argument is fine.  The welfare argument is strained as is the "we're creating Democrat voters" argument.  Last time I checked WE are the pro-life party.  If we play our cards right we'll be getting a majority of the latino vote in upcoming presidential elections.  

Perhaps I haven't heard as much of Rush as you lately ( I too am a big fan) or I'm just being reflexively defensive of him. I'll listen closer or more, I just like what he was sayin about a permanent underclass.

Regarding getting a majority of the Latino vote I like Bush's trend, but given the big protests lately I wouldn't discount the influence of LaRaza and LULAC which are left leaning.

Argument is correct.  Read this Linda Chavez article about how Hispanics are being transformed into the "quintessential American." [http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/chavez032206.asp]  Most are not caught up in this permanent underclass, and are, in fact, rising.  I don't know if you heard when a self proclaimed "Wall Street Journal" Republican ditto head called to disagree with Rush and Rush's defense was to call her an advocate of a permanent underclass.  Cubans in Florida have been quite successful AND are major Republican voters --not only because of Castro, but because of our ideals (low taxes, pro-life) and combined with the welcoming language and policies of the Florida GOP and Jeb Bush.  The Florida approach compared with the California approach exemplifies what the national GOP should and should not do with the issue.  Bush, McCain, Martinez, and Rove are all advocates of "the Florida approach."  Tancredo, Sensenbrenner, Peter King, and unfortunately George Allen (who I was a huge supporter of until his recent populist turn, exemplified by the UAE ports deal and illegal immigration) have taken to the "California approach."  If a substantial part of the GOP continues down this road it can cost the party dearly, and sacrifice our chances of our most important agenda: continuing a muscular and righteous foreign policy, overturning Roe vs. Wade, and keeping the Economy dominated by the private sector with policies of low taxes and limited regulations.

I believe, that capitalism creates upward mobility. Poor immigrants come to this country, see that there is hope to rise above their humble beginnings, and embrace the American dream. (How is that for a string of cliches?)

Cliches thought they be, the fact of the matter, is it is true!

One of the major problem with most of the third world nations is that there IS no middle class. South and Central American countries DO have a permanent underclass, with little or no hope of ever rising above that level.

Thank you for the link, I like Linda Chavez, and agree that the Hispanic community has been remarkable in its demonstration of resiliency and entrepreneurialism.  I wish more people had paid attention to how the Democrats maligned her prior to her withdrawing her name for consideration to be President Bush's first Secretary of Labor.

I did in fact hear the call you mentioned and don't think Rush was saying that the legal immigration of Hispanics would lead to a permanent underclass. I would not have agreed with him if I thought that was what he was asserting.  His comment was made, to an extent, out of exasperation that the caller kept asserting that our economy required, no demanded, low wage workers.  To paraphrase Rush, he then said that she was arguing for a permanent underclass to fill those low wage positions. I think he was using this to expose the logical fallacy in her argument. If our economy requires these low wages, then there is a risk of creating a permanent underclass to sustain it.  This brings me to my original comment in this thread about the price, supply and demand implications of Rush's argument.  If the affected industries can support increased wages and if we controlled the influx of illegal immigrants (see law and order argument) then market forces will control the wages and that will no longer be a reason to support illegal immigration.

This could very well be an argument about the differences between illegal and legal immigration.  The entrepreneurial success stories I read are normally associated with legal immigrants to this country.  

Thank you for the link, I like Linda Chavez, and agree that the Hispanic community has been remarkable in its demonstration of resiliency and entrepreneurialism.  I wish more people had paid attention to how the Democrats maligned her prior to her withdrawing her name for consideration to be President Bush's first Secretary of Labor.

I did in fact hear the call you mentioned and don't think Rush was saying that the legal immigration of Hispanics would lead to a permanent underclass. I would not have agreed with him if I thought that was what he was asserting.  His comment was made, to an extent, out of exasperation that the caller kept asserting that our economy required, no demanded, low wage workers.  To paraphrase Rush, he then said that she was arguing for a permanent underclass to fill those low wage positions. I think he was using this to expose the logical fallacy in her argument. If our economy requires these low wages, then there is a risk of creating a permanent underclass to sustain it.  This brings me to my original comment in this thread about the price, supply and demand implications of Rush's argument.  If the affected industries can support increased wages and if we controlled the influx of illegal immigrants (see law and order argument) then market forces will control the wages and that will no longer be a reason to support illegal immigration.

This could very well be an argument about the differences between illegal and legal immigration.  The entrepreneurial success stories I read are normally associated with legal immigrants to this country.