Honest Work

Mark Krikorian has this post at the Corner on the Republican candidates weakness on immigration. Read the whole thing.

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.

The idea that there is work that Americans won't do is un-American, and it's been painful to watch Republican leaders embrace it. The Democrats, who seem to be running because they're pretty (except for Senator Clinton, who's running because she isn't pretty) are just as bad.

It's hard to believe, but we stand a very good chance of having to choose between two people for President who both think there's no real reason not to flout the nation's laws on immigration, and who both believe that the nation is made up of elitist snobs who prefer not to let themselves or their children get dirty whilst making a living. I am afraid that may ultimately be very destabilizing for both our security and our character.