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Dec. 30, 2005 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:22
December 30, 2005, Friday, Hour #3
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Welcome back to the Rush Limbaugh program here on the EIB network, the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies, marking the last broadcast day of 2005, a remarkable year.
In both broadcast terms and in real terms, uh the ability of Rush Limbaugh to reach out and touch the biggest radio audience in the history of radio with an with uh with truth.
An alternative to the infantile liberalism of the uh mainstream press.
It has been a remarkable, again, another remarkable year uh for this broadcast and for Rush, and it's a pleasure and privilege to sit in for him here in the waning hours.
What we've been talking about are those stories of two thousand five and this open line Friday segment that uh, you know, you thought were underreported, badly reported, misreported, not reported at all, or the ones that were reported that we ought to remember.
And then, of course, I'd like you to look ahead to two thousand six, who've given you a couple of my uh my uh projections of what might happen in two thousand six.
Uh in the next segment, I want to uh get into a conversation with Congressman Tom Tancredo, Republican of Colorado, who has been a thorn in George Bush's side on the issue of immigration, because he has been the catalyst for a growing resentment among Americans in general and Republicans in particular of the Bush administration's insistence on a war on terror, properly so, uh insistence on security within our borders and outside of our borders, but leaving the another leaving the back door open.
It's as if we put uh bars on the windows and a security system in, and we hired a a guard uh at the front door, and then we left the back door open uh in the House.
I it just uh doesn't make a lot of sense to a lot of people, particularly those of us who live close to the border and watch it every day.
But uh the the Tom Tancredo has um practically become persona non grata in the uh White House as a result of his outspokenness on this issue and is now contemplating running for president himself on uh on this issue, reminiscent of uh people who was a congressman who ran against uh Dick Nixon in uh 1972, uh saying we're not winning the war in uh in Vietnam and we ought to be winning it.
And um in any event, that uh uh seems to be recurring in the Republican Party now as someone is taking the position, Tom Tancrato is taking the position that border security is an important part of our overall security, and it's uh George Bush's blind spot, and it shouldn't be.
So we'll get to that later in this hour.
Uh Joseph in Quincy, Illinois, next on the Rush program.
Joseph, welcome.
Hi, thank you.
I've a longtime listener and a first time caller.
Thank you, sir.
Uh nice to be on the program.
Uh I was just uh foolishly listening to the infantile liberal ABC news broadcast and listening to a poor substitute for Peter Jennings.
And he was reporting on the most recent election in Iraq, and he just made the little liberal jibe about the surprising turnout.
Right.
He left me cursing at the screen, even though I've been a pastor for sixty-one years.
And uh he uh I was saying who in the world was surprised except the liberal and the democrats who always are jibing at it.
But uh I wasn't surprised at the turnout.
People love freedom.
Exactly.
The terrorists were probably surprised.
The editorial board of the New York Times was surprised.
Uh ABC uh uh NBC, ABC, uh CBI But look, the the fact is that Bush's premise in Iraq is exactly correct.
Right.
The Iraqis, no less than any other human being on this planet, yearn for freedom for a better life for their kids.
They know it's gonna happen through freedom and not through oppression.
They know it's gonna happen through free markets and not through socialism.
They've had enough examples all over the world of uh free enterprise beating uh socialism uh all over the map in terms of providing a better life for average people in those countries.
And I just went through uh the definition of poor in the United States in a pre in the previous hour and how many things poor people have in this country.
It's ridiculous.
Uh so I I'm with you, and I think uh Joseph that uh the only people surprised were those who were were hoping for the worst.
And and I don't think we want leadership from people who are hoping for the worst.
Anything to uh take a uh jibe at President Bush and what he's doing.
Exactly.
Joseph, thank you.
Yeah, they haven't gotten over the fact, and and most Democrats will tell if they're activists in their parties, and I talk to them all the time, will after a while, they will get down to the fact that they believe George Bush is an illegitimate president as a result of the Bush Gore thing in Florida in two thousand.
They've never gotten over that.
That's why I think we need this intervention.
We need these two guys from the Arab League, the Canadian diplomat and the European uh professor, who are now hard at work at getting the SUNY's over, you know, the hump of uh they're they're there.
They're a reconciliation committee trying to get over the hump of the fact that Sunnis no longer dominate in Iraq.
They are, despite the fact that they have run the country, the government, uh, the economy for the last 45 years, uh, and they feel themselves to be the natural rulers of Iraq.
Uh they aren't.
Uh they've had a democratic uh election, three of them in 2005, and they lost.
Now they're gonna have representation in the Parliament.
They're going to have ministries uh apportioned to them, but they are not going to dominate Iraq as they did through Saddam Hussein.
Now they have to have counseling to get through this, much as Democrats now need counseling in our own country to get over these emotional scars that apparently exist from all those years ago.
Here's uh Bill in Hendersonville.
Bill, welcome to the Rush program.
Hey, Roger.
Happy New Year.
Happy New Year to you, sir.
One of the most dramatically underreported stories is the toughness of the Bush Justice Department on Corporate Crime.
I uh recently came across, I don't know why it if it had not been underreported, I would have known this, but fellow by the name of James Comey was brought to uh the Justice Department by uh John Ashcroft.
He's gone to work and is has to his credit in just over a year, I guess back into the spring of 2004.
Five hundred corporate fraud convictions and sixty corporate CEOs.
And that and as we know, from Martha Stewart all the way to the Enron guys, people are doing time.
Yep.
Additionally, it's had the ripple effect of causing a lot of corporations that were perhaps overstating or stating uh in a in a non-conventional way what their earnings were.
It's cleaning up retirement uh funds, it's cleaning up corporate statements about profit.
It's got the stock market on an even keel, and I don't know why uh this modest president of ours doesn't take some credit.
You know, he he hardly ever does.
He figures the facts will speak for themselves, and they don't in politics.
But, you know, I I kind of agree with what you're saying, although a lot of this stuff is overzealousness.
Uh Spitzer in New York is an overzealous politically uh minded uh prosecutor that's gone way too far on some of his stuff.
Uh Martha Stewart going to jail was a travesty.
Uh the the whole Libby thing has been overdone.
But you're right.
When it comes to the corporate mismanagement folks and getting after some of these overpromised pension funds, that's long overdue, because otherwise the taxpayers will have to be uh on the hook for uh Delphi and uh on the hook for uh the airlines uh overpromised uh union pensions to find benefit pensions.
We we uh we can't afford it.
And uh the amount of those that's going to the federal government through default is not a good sign for the future in our economy.
However, having said that, I wish Bush would also take a step further.
And to have the Justice Department involved in the same kind of fraud and misrepresentation and overpromised and underfunded pension accounts, which is occurring in every public agency in this country, starting with the city of San Diego, which is almost two billion dollars underwater for sm for a city pension fund.
This is big money, two billion dollars underwater for their pension promises, overpromised and underfunded, as a consequence of which the new uh mayor, uh Jerry Sanders and the city council are now sitting here wondering how they're gonna come up with uh the money for this.
So I just uh I just think that that's right uh that uh Bush has consistently as a as opposed to his caricature of being a tool of big business, has gone after miscreants in big business.
I wish he would extend it to the privileged public sector, where the same kind of miscrantism uh goes unnoticed, in fact, awarded, and uh and they get uh goodbye lunches and and gold uh medals and uh and they march off uh with their gold-plated pensions, making more in some in some cases in retirement than they do uh while in public service, which has got to stop.
All right.
I have to stop too, because what I want to get is Congressman Tom Tancredo on here, calling us from Denver, the Colorado Republican Congressman on the subject of border security right after this.
Welcome back to the Rush Limbaugh program.
Roger Hedgecock filling in for Rush from KOGO Radio here in San Diego, California, and uh taking your calls on this last broadcast day of the 2005 year, catching up with Congressman Tom Tancredo, Republican from Colorado, calling us in from Denver.
Congressman, welcome to the program.
Good morning, Roger.
It's good to hear your voice.
Thank you, sir.
Good to hear yours as well.
I uh I there's so much news about the border, and I think in in the press now, every day there are hundreds of articles.
Communities all across this country are now experiencing what we in San Diego and in the Southwest have been experiencing for some decades now.
And uh it seems to me this issue is really bubbling to the fore.
Can you give us the status report?
Where are we on border security?
Well, we have passed um a bill right before we came home from for Christmas break, and we passed a bill that I think is a very significant and important step forward.
It is certainly not perfect, and we have a lot of things left to do.
But what's amazing to me, Roger, is that um what we see you remember how uh every single time uh especially the New York Times or Post or any of the other uh newspapers that we like to reference when um we do this uh wrote about this issue, they always say an issue dividing the Republican Party.
Yeah.
Well, uh this bill passed with uh overwhelming Republican support, uh I think two hundred and I think we lost maybe eight or fifty maybe maybe twelve Republicans out of the two hundred and twenty some that we have, and with uh, you know, a significant thirty-five or more Democrats, if I remember correctly.
And one of the amendments, by the way, that was the most controversial uh one provision I should say that was the most controversial, that is the building of what the of what the Wall Street Journal yesterday called the Tancredo Wall, which I has a ring to it as far as I said.
Yes, it does.
Yes, I I I think it does.
Yeah.
And anyway, it it building the fence, um, which is part of the bill, that uh there were something like 49 Democrats voting for that.
I'm gonna tell you that this is now a an issue dividing the Democratic Party, far more than it's dividing ours.
Um and that as the result of all these communities that you, as you have said, that have um been experiencing what San Diego has experienced for a long time.
As a result of them now being in the fray, you're seeing support ma being manifest in the House, uh and now our our task will be to get that same thing going over in the Senate, which is going to be a tough one.
There's no two ways about that.
I I will tell you the truth.
Some of the Republicans voted for this bill because they wanted the cover that the bill would provide them, but we're hoping against you know, hoping hoping against hope that in fact the the Senate will kill it or just never take it up.
So um we've that's our next step.
But the fact that we passed it and passed it with the kind of majority that we did is truly significant.
What would the bill do?
Well, um lots of things.
Let's start with the construction of 700 miles of fence.
The fence gonna actually work?
Now, this is not the fence.
This is not a fence like you know, your fence that separates you and your neighbor.
Uh uh it is a fence that is fifteen feet high, curved at the top, separated from another fence, a metal fence, by a road, the road patrothed by the border patrol.
It's it is the model of the one you have down there.
It's the extension of the one you guys have down there.
And of course, it has worked down there, as you know.
That both sides of the border, where that 14 miles of fence now exists, say this is the greatest thing since apple butter.
The the Mexican side said, you know, no more trafficking through our our community, no more shootouts, no more drug tr uh transactions.
We it's and on our side you you can see, I mean uh property values are going up, my God.
On that side of the border, it's got to be uh the first time that's happened uh in a long, long time on any any any border community.
So it it is a good thing.
It can work, but it will do.
I mean, it's certainly not perfect, and there are a lot of other things you have to apply.
You have to apply a lot of technological and other human resources, but we can begin to secure the border, and that's the important step we're taking here.
Congressman Tom Tancredo with us.
Now, Tom, the the the bill uh the the the real unanswered question for me is yes, we can secure our border if we continue to apply these resources.
We've proven that here, as you say, here in San Diego, because we have drastically lowered the at the busiest border crossing in the world, by the way, we have drastically lowered the amount the number of of illegal uh crossings.
But in terms of the eleven million, fifteen million, twenty million, whatever the number is of people illegally in this country from wherever in this world, and they are from all over, the the issue is what do we do about those people?
Okay.
Well um the bill does establish a time frame.
It's a it's too long, but it says that when the within the next two years that every business in the United States has to begin using this social security check system.
And that the i in order for people you know I mean in order for the people that you have on board to remain on board in your business you have to check their social security number against the the Social Security data bank to make sure it is in fact legitimate.
And if we the the real answer to your question, Roger, is you you must go after employers.
You must enforce the law that says employers cannot hire people who are here illegally.
Now we we take one tiny step in that direction with the with the mandate that the Social Security check system become a um it it it will be it will become mandated I put it that way it is now a voluntary system.
And there is it is in it is in place and it's important for people to say it's in place today.
An employ an employer today with an application in front of him can uh contact the Social Security administration through a way they they've got uh to to define whether or not the name and the Social Security number being presented actually match up.
And the remarkable thing is the IRS says that last year over nine million W twos were filed by employers that had what the IRS called quote no known taxpayer unquote.
In other words they were fake numbers.
That's right.
And so if we if you can do this, if you uh end up preventing um employers from from pro providing jobs to people who are here illegally, you begin to address the issue of the eleven to thirteen to twenty million, however many people there are here illegally, because of course large numbers huge numbers will return home.
The the fact is if you're here without a job and if we can prevent you from obtaining some social service benefits that'll keep you here forever, then you go home because frankly there's nothing else to do.
And those that don't go home we have to deport because that is the law and if we don't like the law then we change the law but we stop ignoring the law.
Tom San Credo now Tom let me let me but let me briefly though get to this the other side says there are lots of other sides to this thing but there is another side to that issue that with regard to those who are here already that there has to be some kind of recognition that you can't just have them all fired and they drift back to wherever they came from because they're doing significant work we would have a labor shortage with five percent unemployment.
They're doing a lot of work at uh at a wage that Americans don't want to do they're doing a lot of dirty work that Americans don't want to do they're cleaning up New Orleans they're picking strawberries they're doing whatever.
Now we know they're doing a lot of things that Americans would do and I don't want to make this uh stark but there are a percentage of those people that this economy needs to continue to grow.
Do you accept that argument?
I will I will say that there are some sectors of the economy, some areas primarily in in agriculture but So what do you do if you have those needs and we don't have a sufficient uh mechanism now of green cards or whatever that would allow flexibility so that those labor that labor can be used on a seasonal basis can be used for limited time.
What would you say I would say that a guest worker plan can be implemented then but it is a very restricted one and it would only happen after it and from my point of view anyway, Roger, it should only happen after you have secured the borders and after you have aggressively begun to pursue the people who are presently hiring people who are here illegally enforcing the law internally.
When you get that under control, when you get the present situation under control, you can start talking about a guest worker program for specific areas and it has to be itself very, very carefully regulated.
You know, we would be the first country in the world.
If it worked, if we implemented such a plan and it worked, we would be the first country in the world to ever have a working guest worker plan because most of them have failed miserably all over the world.
So we have to be very careful about it.
No family can come in.
You cannot bring people in and allow them to bring in their family.
You cannot allow people to take a job that where America is available for that and and therefore a data bank can be established from which an employer has to draw first in order to access the illegal I mean excuse me the legal guest worker program.
All right now Tom let me let me just hold you right there because we're going to take a break.
People you have heard Tom Tancredo talking about the border security when Tom hold on we're going to have callers with their reaction after this one of the under underreported issues of two thousand five welcome back to the Rush Show.
Roger Hedgecock filling in here one of the underreported issues of two thousand five the border but it is exploding now.
I can't do a search of the internet on any given day and not find forty or fifty stories from all kinds of newspapers large and small across all kinds of states that until recently didn't even know what I was talking about when I talked about illegal immigration.
It is a remarkable how demographics have driven and and movement of people uh illegally across this land have driven the awareness of this story.
So that Tom Tancredo, a congressman Republican congressman from Denver from Colorado, is uh who has started out as another voice in the wilderness some years ago is now uh uh suddenly leading after being kind of a pariah in his own party leading the charge on legislation that would actually give us uh security on our borders so Tom I want to thank you for that leadership I appreciate it.
It is my pleasure to have played some role in this, and I must tell you that it is, I guarantee you that what I'm going to tell you is true, and that is that we, I may have been the most visible member of Congress on this issue recently, but the only reason we have been able to make it to the point where we are in this process is because of talk radio.
And I mean that.
Talk radio is the mechanism, it is the megaphone.
that certainly I I I think I did over a thousand shows last year.
Wow.
Yeah and um and I mean big and small every place that asked me to come on I I certainly did and talked about the issue and it you're what you are doing in that in environment is you're talking to America to Middle America you're talking to people who truly will make their voices heard and and once once they I mean I think once people realize that what they feel, what they believe is not an aberration.
It's not something strange and weird that you might be saying oh gosh why is it that I'm getting so concerned about so many illegal aliens in this country.
Maybe they're I'm just really a racist at heart.
Once you realize that don't you know you're not a racist it's got nothing to do with race.
It's got everything to do with where this country is going, whether or not we're going to be able to be secure and the whole concept of of the the issue of ma uh of uh I call it the cult of multiculturalism, these are legitimate issues.
They should not be avoided that certainly the discussion of them, the debate of them should not be avoided because we are fearful of the epithets that people throw at us.
And I think once people hear that other folks out there feel exactly the same way they get it they get you know they feel more secure in the position they take and they say next time they see that congressman or congresswoman from their district they say hey what are you going to do?
Right before we came back from break and right before we pass that bill Roger we went into a conference and that's just it's a you know when all the Republicans go downstairs and meet and say oh boy we got this really big issue coming up here and how we and there's a big debate about whether we should proceed and then some people stood up and said I don't think we should deal with this because um it is too hot.
Let's just let it simmer let we we've got too many you know f uh factions of the party that are that are upset about it.
And I mean person after person stood up and said I can't go home for Christmas break if we don't do something here.
Wow.
Yeah and and I guarantee you it's because people around this country they went to the town meetings they used the email they use their ability to communicate and said I've had it.
I have fed up with this don't give me the fact don't Give me this, we can't do anything about it.
You know, we've got eleven million people here, we're gonna have to just give them amnesty.
Don't even use the word, don't even think twice about giving anybody amnesty.
You know, we want these people out of our country if they're not here legally, and we want a legal, safe process for people to come into this country.
And I'm telling you, people, you know, it's the old thing about feeling the heat and seeing the light.
All right, Tom Tancredo, Republican Congressman from uh Colorado and uh talking border security.
Let's get some callers in here, Tom Steve in Louisville, Kentucky is next on the Rush program.
Hi, Steve.
Hello, Roger, diddos to you and the Congressman.
Thank you.
I have a question for the Congressman, and that is uh are you uh Congressman, are you familiar with the guest worker programs and the uh Arab uh Gulf Coast countries like Kuwait and Qatar and United Arab Emirates.
Um you're not talking about the the program, the visa program that we have with those countries.
You're talking about their internal guest worker programs.
Uh yes, I actually just got back from an assignment, uh a private company uh job in in Kuwait, and uh a lot of the uh guest workers are brought in from the Philippines and yes, yes, I know that is true.
Are you uh if you're familiar with this, I'm only familiar with the fact that they do it.
I'm not familiar with the mechanism.
Well, I think it works great.
It's very well controlled, uh the visas are controlled, the people are you know, they're earning a a little bit of money.
And they're actually not taxed either.
I see.
Now have you considered this uh allowing folks to come in from Mexico and allowing tax exemptions, they're gonna do a good job, not commit crime, um and go home with money in their pocket.
Uh what is the purpose of the tax exemption?
What is what benefit do you achieve from that?
Well, it serves the it serves the fact that a person like myself or my wife can actually bring someone to help out do manual labor around the house or whatever, even a company can do this.
And and this person is actually not being a burden on the community.
And then also my spouse and myself, we can go out and work, make big money, pay our taxes, and probably pay a lot more taxes than this third country national could ever do.
And I I must admit I I don't see the rationale for um not taxing someone who is here as a guest worker.
I um uh nonetheless nonetheless, Tom, and I agree with you on that point, but his point is an interesting one.
There are countries that do have successful guest worker programs.
Yeah, but um it's gonna be a lot easier for for Kuwait to establish a guest worker program, especially bringing in Filipinos.
Because the distinction is clear.
I mean, you can be aware of where these people are and when they need to return and all that sort of thing.
It's uh a lot easier to do it with a small country like that, although I am more than willing to look at where it has happened, as I say, to the best of my knowledge, in any major industrialized country in the world, uh Germany, uh for instance, it comes to mind always, of course, where they tried uh desperately to um create a guest worker program with the Turks.
Um it certainly failed.
But it it part of the failure is a result of the fact that the government really didn't want to pursue it.
Do you know what I mean?
Yep.
It was the fact that Well, but Tom, let me let me roll you back though to the fifties and sixties.
Uh the Brasero program.
The Barcero program, the Eisenhower administration put it in.
It seemed to work very well in the Southwest to have seasonal surges of workers, so the peaches got picked and the strawberries and all the rest of it.
And and our agricultural uh business boomed out here.
Absolutely, but a totally different environment from the standpoint of the fact that you you did not have it and at that time, among other differences, you did not have the fact that Mexico was was trying desperately to aid and abet illegal entrance into this country.
Mexico doesn't want a guest worker program.
They simply want open borders.
And they want the ability to move large numbers of their own population, and they're not the only country, but they're a significant player, of course.
They want to move as many people as they can into this country for the purpose of having a source of revenue for their own country.
That is the remittances.
Twenty billion dollars now represents the largest single source of income for the country of Mexico.
They therefore and other countries, you know, grouped together, um there are seven nations in the world that have that make that ten percent of their GDP is made up of remittances coming from their nationals working in the United States.
What happens is that you get this block developing, you know, that that works very hard to make sure open borders, that that you have open borders, and that to even encourage the illegal immigration of their own people.
It is y you need the cooperation of the countries with whom whom you are dealing, and we especially need the cooperation of Mexico.
And what do we get from Mexico?
We get Vincente Fox.
I mean, again, I I don't know what the Spanish word is for HUTSPA, but believe me, he's got it in spades.
All right, Tom Tancredo with us from uh the House of Representatives, Republican Congressman from Colorado.
Tom, I want to get as many calls in here as possible why I'm interrupting.
I'm sorry about that.
Let me get David in Santa Monica in here.
David, go ahead.
Hi, you two, uh uh Congressman Tancredo, it's great to talk to you.
I actually wanted to call your office.
I want to mention something.
I'm the only one here today.
I know you're here, they feel great.
I want to I wanted to mention one thing.
I had I have one question, then I had another question, one comment was that Vicente Fox and is is in Mexico basically they're living under European Spanish colonial rule, still the remnants of that.
Vicente Fox is interested in getting one segment of his population out of the country, and that segment are the uh the oppressed indigenous population and the mestizos at the lower end of the stratus.
They have no desire to share any of the wealth at the top.
And secondarily, I was wondering if you and your plan has have incorporated the idea of asking Vicente Fox to pay for the health care costs and the schooling of the families that come over illegally to our country.
Oh, absolutely.
In fact, w we have attempted, and there are people, you know, there's a guy by the name of Robert Vasquez who's running for Congress in Idaho.
Great guy.
He's gonna be an open seat there.
Butch Otter is leaving, and he he was a he's a county commissioner in Idaho.
This guy sent a bill to Vincente Fox, uh or to the Mexican government for a million two hundred thousand dollars for the costs of the uh of that his county has incurred as a result of illegal immigration.
Now, needless to say, the bill is uh is not been paid, maybe the checks in the mail, but the reality is uh we can only do it sort of um uh you know uh tongue-in-cheek way he does it.
But it was interesting though, too, when we had the Proposition 187 debate in California in the nineties, and the vote was overwhelming not to allow people illegally in the country to access uh medical care facilities uh which were being overrun uh to schools and etcetera.
Uh and it was thrown out by a federal judge.
The the most ironic part of all of that is that the very same rule is in effect in Mexico.
If you are illegally in Mexico, you get booted out.
There's no lawyer, no due process, no uh no nothing.
I mean, you don't get health care.
Your kids don't go to Mexican schools, you don't get uh housing Section 8 housing assistance.
You don't get anything in Mexico if you're illegally there, you get the boot.
Every time I go down there and the the Mexican press, that they are very aggressive, let me tell you.
And and they come after me and they you know they're they yell out uh you're you're why are you so anti-Mex?
And I always say, what am I asking?
What am I asking my government to do that your government does not do?
Amen to that.
Let me take a break.
Tom Tancredo, Republican Congressman from Colorado, and more on the border after this.
Roger Hedgecock in for Rush Limbaugh back uh best of rush coming up on Monday.
Rush himself kicking off the two thousand six year on next Tuesday.
Right now, uh Congressman Tom Tancredo from the House of Representatives, Republican from Colorado with us on the phone, a leader of the uh border security uh wing, which started out as a very lonely group of uh not very many.
And Roger, I have to I have to interrupt you for just a second because uh right after I said that I'm the only one in the office here, the whole board lit up and and I gotta tell people if they listen.
I can't answer your phone.
I'm the only one here, and I'm on the phone with Roger Hedgehack.
So if you're listening, you know, don't call keep calling, and then the whole board is lit up here.
I can see all the lines going, but I can't do anything about it.
And after I hang up, I'm going home.
So let's take some more calls here, and I appreciate your time today, Tom.
Here's Howard in uh Fallbrook here in San Diego County, Fallbrook, California.
Go ahead, Howard.
Well, good morning, Roger and uh multi-diddles from the conservative North County.
Thank you.
Uh the guest worker program has got to be an absolute must, and the sooner we get going on that, the better it's gonna be.
We d we have nobody to pick uh citrus and avocados up here uh without them.
I've been in uh agriculture both here and in Arizona since uh roughly nineteen sixty, and then in that entire length of time, I've seen one white man and one black man on a picking crew.
Everybody else is uh from south of the border, one of the countries, Mexico mainly.
And uh I can remember maybe uh fifteen years ago, one of the flower growers, one of the major flower growers over on the coast, uh, tried to get domestic help, and he went down to the uh uh unemployment service and told him he needed fifty workers the next morning at eight o'clock.
Well, he got uh roughly fifty by about uh ten o'clock, uh half of them were gone.
By noon, another quarter were gone, and nobody showed up the next day.
The work is just too doggone hard for uh most of the uh uh unemployed Americans.
I think Howard, to be fair, though, that story uh which I understand is pre-welfare reform where people had uh guaranteed incomes and didn't uh think about working.
They're thinking more about working these days.
Well, that that could be I don't remember all of the uh uh circumstances.
Well, let's get Tom's response, because your your point is well taken.
In fact, Tom, I I know for a fact there are growers of various kinds, uh, various product that uh simply cannot get their harvest totally in this year because of a lack of labor.
How do you respond to that?
Well, it it's interesting.
I mean, we we have eleven to thirteen million people in the country illegally, and yet the agricultural industry in in California says they they don't have enough people.
Well, because they're working in uh drywall and construction and restaurants and all the rest of it.
That's right.
And in a lot of those are we gonna are we saying that people Americans won't take those jobs I can't get an American to hang drywall?
I mean, that's a good paying job.
And if it's not a good enough paying job, then it needs to perhaps you know, then that's the market.
It the and I understand what the caller is saying, and I don't disagree that as I said, that there are certain industries and sectors of the economy that we need to pay attention to in terms of guest worker.
But I will say this that it's amazing what happens in in every business when when they are confronted with a labor shortage.
I mean, there are various ways in which you deal with it.
One is you say, okay, I'm gonna have to increase wages in order to attract more labor.
The other is you say, is there another way I can do this?
Is there any way possible that I can do this with fewer people, that is using uh technology to a larger extent, uh automating the enterprise.
I saw, and I have I observed uh not just uh on TV, but I've seen with my own eyes how how many people in the uh citrus industry, for instance, have developed these uh machines that essentially pick, they really just shake the trees, they they they have figured out ways to actually get the job done without using so many people.
Same thing happened right after the Brusera program ended.
The tomato growers said, if this program ends, we're completely out of business.
We cannot exist without this cheap labor.
Well, it ended.
What happened?
They invested in technology, they ended up being far more productive.
They can both harp they can both plant and harvest and do it with m machinery ten times better and cheaper than they did it with people.
So all I'm saying to you is that I I understand that there are these needs, but I also understand that it's amazing what happens in a dynamic dynamic economy when you start uh really putting the pressure on.
All right, Tom Tancreto, we appreciate your time today and your leadership on this issue.
We'll be holding their feet to the fire this spring uh again with our talk show host and our listeners coming back to Washington.
We'll be holding our community forums, and we appreciate your attendance at those as well.
Uh we'll be getting this story again in two thousand six will be one of the lead stories.
My prediction doesn't uh I'm not on a limb on this one, I don't think.
Uh Tom, I appreciate uh uh everything you do, my friend.
Thank you.
Happy New Year and happy Hanukkah to everybody out there.
Absolutely.
Happy New Year to you, Tom, for a healthy, happy and prosperous one as well.
We're gonna take a break on the Rush Show.
Roger Hedgecock in right after this.
Welcome back to the Rush Limbaugh program.
Roger Hitchcock filling in for Rush, the most listened to fill in talk show host in the history of the world, and uh Rush will be back next Tuesday.
Monday is the best of rush program from page thirty of the personal memoirs of the of U.S. Grant, U.S. Grant, President of the United States following the Civil War, which he helped to win, wrote in his memoirs, quote, and it applies today.
Experience proves that the man who obstructs a war in which his nation is engaged, no matter whether right or wrong, occupies no enviable place in life or history.
He says the history of the defeated rebel will be honorable compared with that of the northern man who aided him by conspiring against his government while being protected by it.
Ladies and gentlemen, it isn't the first time that a beleaguered wartime president has had to face uh pessimism and dissension to persevere and win a war.
It's for us to support him.
That's the story of two thousand five.
You will make the story of two thousand six.
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