From the Easy Chair

Immigration

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 169-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161DL209

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161DL209, Immigration, from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[ Rushdoony ] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 321, September 9, 1994.

This evening in our first session Douglas Murray, Otto Scott, Mark Rushdoony and I will discuss immigration.

Now we are a country of immigrants, except for the American Indians who came over centuries earlier, apparently from Asia, most of the inhabitants of the United States are immigrants who came in the early 1600s to the present. The problem, of course, is that now we have a great deal of illegal immigration. We have immigration laws that no longer follow the older pattern and concentrate on European countries. We allow many, many peoples in who have nothing in common with us, who are Moslems or members of other religions and it appears that there is an effort to break the Christian heritage and character of the United States.

Immigration has always marked this country. We were approximately three million peoples at the time of George Washington and we are now in the neighborhood, probably over 250 million.

Now the nature if immigration has changed dramatically since the days of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and especially since World War II. I come from an immigrant family. My parents and all our relatives arrived during World War I or in the early 20s.

Now at that time the immigration pattern was very, very difficult in terms of what we today call immigration standards, because you had to meet strict health standards. You had to be someone who was coming here to work or if you were not capable of working you were going to be a member of a family that would promise to support you.

My father and mother and my aunt and uncle came over in 1916, no 15, 1915, November. I was born the following April. Now in the early 20s my father and uncle brought over various relatives. One of them, my oldest aunt’s husband, when he reached Ellis Island was, when the physical examination took place, shown to be ill with tuberculosis. My father and uncle were immediately contacted. They had to go to a federal office and swear that they would not allow him to become a ward of the state in any form or to receive any kind of benefit from any level of state government. Of course, they had no intention of him being a ward of the state and they swore out the statement and my aunt and her husband and my cousin, the only survival... survivor of several children, were able to come.

Now it is quite common place for immigrants to come and to go on welfare the very day of their arrival. I think all four of us know someone locally who came. There is no record that he came legally. And the same day he arrived he was taken down to get welfare. As a result, the country is changing. It is changing because we have a different kind of immigrant. And, as a result, there are many who are seriously questioning our immigration policies.

[ Murray ] Well, there is a lot of animosity currently, particularly in Florida and California, aimed at illegal immigration because it is placing enormous strains at a time when California is running around a 15 to 20 billion dollar deficit. And people are asking themselves what are they paying taxes for? People who own property in... in California now no longer receive direct benefits for police and fire protection. The money goes that is collected in property taxes, goes to the state of California and the state of California doles it out as they fit. So there is no direct relationship between the willingness to pay property taxes and the direct benefits from those taxes, plus people have lost local control. The county governments have become almost a ... just a bunch of bookkeepers. They just dole out... dole out the money. And so a lot of people are particularly property owners are becoming very concerned over the immigration issue. It seems that the U S government has thrown its hands in the air, so to speak, and people in previous, in relatively recent years are just flooding over the border in waves. It is.... it is no longer... you can’t really call it immigration. You have to call it an invasion. I don’t think there is any other country in the world other than in a time of war where there is a lot of thousands, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of displaced persons trying to avoid a war where we have had this many people go over a border for purely economic reasons.

There is no war going on in ... in Mexico, for instance. And it is... there is a considerable amount of economic, new economic activity going on in Mexico, both in agriculture as well as manufacturing. And, frankly, it baffles me as to why there is such a flood of immigration. If Mexico is doing so well economically from NAFTA and so forth, why are all of these people fleeing over the border? And I can understand the Cuban people wanting to get out from under Castro’s thumb, but I think a lot of the drive there is a combination of longing to see relatives that ... as well as the economic impetus. But it is ... it is obviously got our government over a barrel. They don’t know what to do about it. And I think they are waiting, like they do on everything else, for a crisis to arise or until people demand a particular course of action.

We don’t seem to have anybody in the government anymore that can come up with a... a coherent program without the public beating down the door and telling them what to do. Increasingly we get questionnaires now from elected officials. It has become almost a joke where they ask for input, but they don’t ask for input from the public until 90 days before the election, an upcoming election. Until that, they simply ignore the problem.

[ Scott ] Well, of course, this country from the beginning has accepted more foreign people than any other country in the world. With all the bitter and sarcastic propaganda against the WASPs they are the only ones who announced from the beginning that they would accept everybody and who did. No other country accepts, legally, the number of people today that the United States legally accepts. We accept almost... we accept roughly 750,000 and that doesn’t include extra quotas for reasons of compassion or whatever. But whenever there is a mention of protecting our borders against this illegal flood, we immediately get a bunch of nonsense or ... or a great expostulations, let me say, about we are all children of immigrants and we are all come form other countries and it is our duty to take other people in. Anything else is racial, narrow minded, bigoted and so forth.

I occupy a very unique position, because my father was not a citizen and never wanted to be and wasn’t. He came to this country on a foreign passport. He worked here for about 20 odd years. He didn’t care from the United States. He thought it was a prejudiced and bigoted country and also a women’s country and he went back to South America. From then on he visited, but he... to become an American citizen was not something he wanted. And there are people who do not want to be Americans.

My mother’s family, on the other hand, was here before the War of Independence. So I am on both sides of the fence. And we did quite well in the 19th century. Immigrants were beneficial. They were needed. We had a great expanse. We still have a great expanse of territory. Cities and industries were created to help... with the help of immigrants that could not have been created without them. You might say that immigration was what made the United States great in the 19th century and the early part of the 20th.

And I have a book called The Collapse of Complex Societies. Now every civilization that has ever been created has collapsed and in most cases has left no trace, a few stones, ruins. So the idea that modern civilization is a permanent thing is an illusion. It has to be maintained and if it isn’t maintained it can collapse. And if it continues a successful formula to the point where it becomes a detriment, it is bound to collapse. What worked in the 19th century, and let us say, up until World War I is not working now, because the flood that is coming into these borders do not come because they like America or because they want to be Americans. In great measure they come because they want to get what they can and the government is bleeding the majority to support the others.

Now this is a formula for not just simply decay. It is a formula for failure, because it couldn’t occur if the government had not lost control of the situation. And this is not a time to discuss these things in racial or ethnic terms, because this country long ago proved that it is racially and ethically and ethnically better than any other on the face of the earth without exception. It has been more tolerant than any other single country.

[ M Rushdoony ] Well, when I was high school... I can remember in high school the ... being taught economics and, of course, we were told then that immigrants are not threat to American jobs because immigrants tend to come willing to accept low paying jobs. And the examples given were the Irish and how they cut out a niche for themselves in certain industries and the Chinese were willing to take extremely low paying and difficult work, that others weren’t particularly inclined to take and that they carved out a niche in society and... and built up to the ... and... and made a contribution in the more prestigious areas.

When people criticize immigration today they are usually not criticizing people who come here from ... from any area. They are usually criticizing those that come here not to find employment and not to work, but they usually people from Mexico. But the problem... and the problem with the people from Mexico is that they are not coming here for jobs. They are coming here to get a free ride, especially on the health care. And they are doing this because the federal government is inviting them, literally, with public service announcements. They are broadcasting it over... I know it is being done by California. I don’t know whether it is California and the United States joint public service announcements, but they are announcing on Mexican radio and television what is available in the United States. We are advertising... advertising what is available in the United States as far as free health care. This is free health care which is not available to most tax payers.

[ Scott ] You mean immigrants get more health care than citizens?

[ M Rushdoony ] Yes. To the tune of billions. They cannot deny it. Even to the point of major surgery such as heart transplants. They... in {?} there was a case and it was only publicized because the man was later found to not to be a resident. He said he was living in San Diego. In fact, they found he was living in Tijuana and he was admitted to a hospital and he waited in the hospital for five months until he got a heart transplant. It was only later that he was proven that he was not.

This is the problem most people have. Californians have lived with people from Mexico coming north to work for generations. California has had a Hispanic element since before there were Europeans in California. It has never bothered Californians. The criticism is that we are paying to bring in the worst of someone else’s society who are coming here for the express purpose of getting something for free.

[ Murray ] Well the women...

[ M Rushdoony ] And very often, then, they... they move back, because some of these are middle class people.

[ Murray ] The women come over here to have their babies because their babies are automatically become American citizens when they are born and they get the best health care ... much better than they could possibly get in Mexico.

[ M Rushdoony ] The people are really coming because they want jobs. It means there is... there is... they are... they are... there is a character there, that I am willing to work and I am willing to work at a low paying job. Those are the kinds of people that can be incorporated into a society, but that values character. And that is why the Vietnamese, despite their some gang activity, but the Vietnamese on the whole have produced some very outstanding people, good, hardworking small businessmen, outstanding students, because there is a discipline and a character in the people.

[ Murray ] Oh, all of the Orientals, I think you could say, generally that.

[ Rushdoony ] I... I think, perhaps, the Japanese and the Koreans have had the best record.

[ M Rushdoony ] Anybody who comes assuming I am going to get something free from this culture, you are going to have a hard time getting anything of value from that individual. And you are going to have a hard time imparting any character traits and work habits in... in their children.

[ Murray ] It is interesting. When I lived in San Francisco, I used to spend a lot of time in Chinatown. And there was actually great animosity between the Chinese that had been here for two or three generations and the ones that had just come over from Hong Kong who were Communist or... or at least on the Socialist side. And they had no use for them, absolutely no use for them.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes, that is true. I know that myself. In the 30s and early 40s I was a youth worker at the Chinese Presbyterian Church in San Francisco. Some years after I left I returned and the... oh, I think early 70s. And it was because they had a particular problem and wanted to set up some kind of school as against the public schools.

Well, what I learned was that they were very distrustful of the new people. The new people were not legal immigrants. They were often connected with the tribe gangs in China and Hong Kong and the Far East and they were amoral and ready to work for the Chinese Communist government so they were very afraid of the new element.

[ Murray ] What was... used to tickle me was that at Saint Mary’s Square there in Chinatown...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] These young, very young Chinese kids just over here, would be demonstrating and making all kinds of racket and noise and carrying signs around and the very elderly Chinese would very quietly move in and start doing their exercises right in the middle of the bunch of them, just totally ignoring them as if they weren’t there to try to disrupt the thing without being very overt about it.

[ Scott ] I think it is very interesting that the first effort to restrict immigration in a overall sense was in, I believe, around 1921. Although the... they were very strict before that. You had to have a clean police record. You had to be healthy. You had to have a job. You had to have a skill of some sort or you had to have relatives who were responsible. But in 1921 on the basis of the most recent census, they tried to restrict immigration proportionately to the proportions of the population, so many from each European country according to the proportion of their descendants here. And that made sense, because it would not disrupt society and it was attacked viciously by the liberal press as prejudicial and racial. And this as interesting because it was almost to say that the critics wanted to change the racial composition of the country in the name of anti racism.

However, the system lasted until 1965 and then without any vote of the people, without any discussion with the people, without any discussion at all asking for what the people thought, in other words, in the period of collapse of democracy, when Congress was beginning to pass laws without paying any attention to what the public wanted or approved, they changed the immigration law, not only to expand the number of areas that were acceptable, but also all the relatives of the people who were accepted, no matter where they were in the world nor how many of them there were. This was led, this was led by Senator Ted Kennedy.

One of the effects, by the way, was to restrict the number of Irish that were allowed in the country. So you have a lot of illegal Irish in Boston today. And illegal other Europeans because the quota cut back on white Europeans and expanded for blacks, for Hispanics and for Orientals.

Now I have never seen an interview with the senator on the results or what he had to say about his role or what he promised at the time, because the promise was announced at the time that this would not lead to a great increase in immigration. And the promise as a lie.

[ Rushdoony ] One of the things that is rarely discussed or considered is what it took to be an immigrant in those days. It was not easy to get in. You had to be of proven character and of good health and you could not come to get on benefits.

Well, consider what it meant to come here from anything but an English speaking country. First of all, besides going to the bottom of the social scale as an immigrant, you would no matter how well educated in the old country, be an outsider in your language. You would speak broken English. This would immediately demote you socially. It meant that you had to accept the poorest jobs to start your life in this country. So you had to be ready to start at the bottom no matter how ambitious you were. And you had to have a pioneering spirit. And that was very important.

I can illustrate that with my uncle who accompanied my father. My father came over as an ... he had been a professor and a minister in the old country and he was given a job as an editor of an Armenia paper and in it took on a church.

My uncle in the old country had been a very wealthy and successful man. He was silk merchant, dealer in silks from all over Asia. He had a considerable wealth, a large house in the suburbs with servants. People would laugh at the fact, when they came to California from the East to visit and to see him that he had calloused hands and that he was a dirt farmer and loved it, because they said he was something of a dude in the old country. His hands were always soft, well manicured. He never did any physical labor.

Now with this business contacts in Asia and in the Mediterranean world, he could have settled anywhere. And he could have continued his business, very successfully. But it never was a serious consideration for him. Why? Because America meant something to him. He was an Armenian in an Islamic country. The United States meant Christian freedom.

So he choose to come here and it was a difficult step. First he began as a manual laborer in New York City. And not speaking English they would play all kinds of tricks on him, ask him to go and ask the secretary something and teach him the English which would be a bit risqué and the secretary who know what they were like would laugh and say, “You don’t mean that. Don’t let them play tricks on you.”

It was not easy, in other words, but he loved it, because he was a free man here.

Now that is the way a very considerable number of immigrants were in those days.

[ Scott ] Well, you know, their descendants don't seem to understand that. When you go into a different culture you are bound not to be on the top.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] You don’t belong on the top.

[ Rushdoony ] No.

[ Scott ] ... when you can’t speak the language. And yet we hear now complaints now about the descendants of immigrants about the difficulties of their forbearers as though this was something unique to this culture.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. And the demand for multi lingualism even in the schools.

To get back to my uncle I merely hinted at the kind of pranks that were played on him. If those things happened today all kinds of complaints would be filed with one commission after another about violations and human rights and human dignity and so on. My uncle never saw it that way. He belonged to another generation. He would tell stories about what happened and double up in laughter no matter how many times he told it. Those were things were just a part of life as far as he was concerned. What was important to him was that here he had freedom, freedom as a Christian. On top of that, you could be successful in any sphere of life. A farmer here was not a peasant. And as a farmer he became quite wealthy, very successful. He could vacation where he chose. He could have whatever he wanted.

Now that is what this country meant to him. He knew that life is full of problems and people who are not the kindest people of all. That didn’t bother him. The essentials were that this was a Christian country. It was truly a land of opportunity. And it disgusts me, saddens me and angers me that today Americans of all kinds of backgrounds whine and complain about trivia.

[ Murray ] I was going to comment on that. Really people in this country have never seen adversity. I mean adversity is not having your welfare check arrive on the date that you expect it. The way people measure adversity in this country is nothing compared to what people went through just to get here.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] That emigrated here. And the adversity many people saw before they even came over here. So by the time they got here if they didn’t have a sense of humor, if they weren’t able to let it roll off their back they weren’t going to survive. People in this country whine and complain about the tiniest little things and it is totally out of scale with what people had to go through to get here.

[ Scott ] Well, there is another element. Your uncle came to a Christian country.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And we now have people who deny that this is a Christian country and who are very angry that there are Christians here when their forbearers arrived. It is as though they think their forbearers came here expecting to find some other religion, because I hear the term... I heard the term in New York more than once and it was very difficult to hear that Christian.... the Christian religion is offensive. Now it takes an awful lot of nerve for somebody to tell you that your religion is offensive. And yet we hear this on all sides.

[ Rushdoony ] During the 30s when I was a student, one of my pet hates was John Steinbeck. John Steinbeck’s book The Grapes of Wrath dealt with the Okies and Arkies who migrated to California to work in the farm fields. And Steinbeck portrayed the peoples of California as viciously as he could.

Now I was in high school when those Okies and Arkies arrived. They were all over that area ad I would have to say they were treated very well. Here and there, especially in southern California where they first landed when they crossed the border and were in great numbers, people were overwhelmed by the numbers of them and there were a few incidents. But for the most part in the Imperial Valley, the {?} valley, the San Joaquin Valley, they were treated as fellow Christians.

My uncle had bought farms as he had prospered even in the face of the Depression. So what he did was to open up those houses to some of these Okies just in return for a little bit of help from hem, not much. And he didn’t often exact that. He treated them as he would have liked to have been treated. And there was a great deal of friendship between the families that he housed and himself and the rest of us. That was not unusual.

I saw it all over the area. I recall—and I... this is a little incident, a rather humorous one to me, which I have never forgotten. There was this very elderly Armenian who had arrived in the late teens and was in his 60s at the time that the Okies arrived. And he was in a park one day with his family and relatives and a lot of other people of all kinds of groups around. And somebody made a crack about Okies and he immediately came to their defense. He said, “They have got to be superior people,” in his broke English. He said, “I have been here 15, 16 years and I don’t speak English as good as those Okies who have come from another country.”

Everybody laughed, but, of course, they felt rebuked, too.

Now there was a great deal of that. Neither Steinbeck nor ... who was it? Carey Mc Williams?

[ Scott ] Carey Mc Williams, The Factories in the Field.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Any of these people chose to see anything but evil.

[ Scott ] Well, they were Communists. When Steinbeck went to San Francisco, I found out later, not very long later, either, a few years later, that the Communist part of San Francisco which was very influential...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ...took him in two. They had committees to take him around and to pump him full of this nonsense and to show him how badly people were treated. You know, there is a difference between being poor and being badly treated.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Which a lot of people today don't seem to understand. Poverty is poverty and there is a lot of things worse than poverty.

In any event they didn’t think that his portrayal was strong enough against the owners, against the farm cooperative and so forth. And you recall they made a movie out of it.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And Henry Fonda played the part of the young fellow with the Jokes family or whoever they were. And ... and had a Jesus speech in it. Wherever there is a person being beaten by the police, I will be there. And so forth. It was a mockery of Jesus.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Talking about whenever the believers are collected in my name, I will be there. It was a fantastic piece of propaganda. And they were very busy in that... in the 30s. They used the Okies as an... as an example of the pitiless nature of Capitalism, as though Capitalism blew the top soil off their farms. And we have had a ... a long series in the United States since World War I, I would say, and even before, but not to the extent that it was later, of expert propaganda from high places in this country to depict this as one of the lower levels of Dante’s Inferno and yet the whole world presses to come in.

[ Rushdoony ] I was rather amused in a grim way about 10 to 15 years ago. A savage attack was launched for a brief time in the media against this very, very wealthy land owner in Curran County who owns thousands upon thousands of acres. Somehow he was a scoundrel and abusive of labor and so on. All of which, of course, is manufactured, because he was a very successful man. The fact that none of them knew, but which I knew is that the man came here as an Okie with nothing but the clothes in his back.

[ Scott ] that is interesting.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] I was... I was going to interject the Okies entered, you know, they disappeared during the war years.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And I also went to work in the industries and... and... and by the end of he war they were on their feet, all of them. And somebody commented to me about that time on how well they had integrated. And I ... I was speechless.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, I recall often visiting someone who asked Dorothy and me over for dinner at one of the outstanding mansions in San Marino, a house worth millions. And it was owned by a man who had come into the state as a poor Okie on one of these Model Ts that had ...

[ Scott ] Everything on the top.

[ Rushdoony ] Everything on the top that they could get on it. No, that side is never reported and none of our liberals who have ever considered writing a book on the Okies then and now.

[ Scott ] Oh, no, no. They don’t like books on successes.

[ Rushdoony ] No.

[ Scott ] You know that my most recent business book on the coal industry was turned down in New York because they said, “We don’t print those kind of books anymore.” It was about a successful coal company.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] Arch Minerals?

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Murray ] They are a good stock pick right now.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, immigration has made this country great. It has given it a strength that very few others have. It has meant a kind of cross fertilization also...

[ Scott ] That is true.

[ Rushdoony ] Racially. You probably recall that Thomas Sole called attention to the fact that the Jews who came from Poland had a high percentage of mentally retarded family members.

[ Scott ] Too much intermarriage.

[ Rushdoony ] Too much intermarriage because they had been confined to a small village for generations.

[ Scott ] Right.

[ Rushdoony ] Within a generation or two after coming here all that disappeared.

[ Scott ] This is...

[ Rushdoony ] And they became wealthy and successful.

[ Scott ] It was interesting that he pointed out that the original wave of Jews from central Europe were not educated.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] They went to work. They were enterprising in a commercial sense. They would open up a little grocery store or a tailor shop or this or that and the other thing. It was their children that they sent to school.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] In my school days and at the university in the 30s, the two best students were usually Japanese and Jewish.

[ Scott ] Interesting.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] I had great interchanges with Jewish boys when I went to school in New York and the on and off periods that I was there, because I could trade books with them. They were very literature. And not as tied up in totally tied up in sport as the other boys. However, I don’t think that is true today. They are no longer comprise a literary sector. Commercial, yes, but literary no.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, what has happened is that a generation has risen since the war which has indulged its children and destroyed them in one group after another.

[ Scott ] That is very well said. It is true. But going into the immigration again, we are not getting the high level of immigrants...

[ Rushdoony ] No.

[ Scott ] ...that we had. The ... and when money becomes the determinate in a society the culture falls apart. Once you have... open the gates to is corruption. People sell themselves for money. The whole moral character of the country is different. I remember my Irish grandparents. I still call them Irish because they were Irish descent. And my ... one of my grandmothers did come from Ireland. They were poor, but able to support themselves adequately. They didn't feel poor. They didn’t think poor. There was a decent working class in this country. I notice now that the working class of the United States has dropped totally out of our literature excepting in the sense of grotesques, monsters.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, one of the worst aspects of our situation today I believe is that we have created a false picture of the United States. The United States was seen as the land of opportunity the world over, the land of freedom, the land where Christianity was free to mold the culture.

Now the people who come tend to see the greatness of this country in its Welfarism. No other country in the world gives the benefits this country does.

[ Scott ] Or the license.

[ Rushdoony ] Or the license. So they are equating the greatness of this country with the present socialistic, welfaristic culture.

[ Murray ] Don’t forget there is another important element of communication. It has only been since the early 60s that you had television...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] ...programs syndicated all over that world in virtually every country that has television.

[ Rushdoony ] So...

[ Murray ] They are... they are getting a visual picture of what it looks like here, or what the... or what Hollywood, how Hollywood portrays us here.

[ Scott ] It doesn't portray us very well.

[ Rushdoony ] No.

[ Murray ] No.

[ Rushdoony ] It does to portray us as a working people and as a Christian people. It does not portray us as a friendly and neighborly people. It is a country of continual violence, continual profligacy. It does not portray the thrift which is still basic to the middle class in this country.

[ Scott ] Well, do you suppose if a TV camera was here to photograph us and tape us sitting in this kitchen table with this little linoleum cover and we are all in our shirt sleeves and the microphone is at the middle of the table and this room that it would represent a typical American gathering to most people who only know us from television?

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] But it would to most Americans.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, consider this fact. I think I referred to it at some time in the past year. From the early days of television until not too many years ago, perhaps the most successful television program in the history of television was Jack Webb.

[ Scott ] Oh, yes.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And Dragnet.

[ Rushdoony ] Dragnet. Now Dragnet never had any violence.

[ Scott ] That is true.

[ Rushdoony ] Guns were not pulled or fired, maybe once or twice in all of what was it 15, 16 years.

Everything was a matter of investigative work and intelligence. It had almost no action.

Now can you imagine that in terms of today’s television? Diametrically opposite. It showed policemen who were law abiding and respectful of the rights of people who did their job efficiently, who did not use profanity, guns, violence, high speed chases or anything.

[ Murray ] And they were courteous when they addressed women. They were courteous to members of the public that they were talking to.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Well, one of the ... one of the fall outs here is the at the police are portrayed as having no limits. And the citizens as having no rights. And I have just wrote down here 1965 when this new immigration law, if you want to call it that, went in, that was 29 years ago. That is a generation. And in 60.... the 60s were... succeeded the 50s. They succeeded Mr. Eisenhower, General Eisenhower who left office in 19... early 1953. The 60s opened the gates to all of this.

[ Rushdoony ] Left office in 1953?

[ Scott ] Yeah, well, he... he was elected... no, I am sorry.

[ Rushdoony ] No, no. He was...

[ Scott ] It was... It was 1960 that he left office.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And 1961 technically, because in January in came Mr. Kennedy. So this was only a few years after the gates were opened by that new generation which has actually transformed the United States in a single generation into something that is foreign to almost all of us.

[ M Rushdoony ] Well there is... there is... there is one good aspect of all of this. Washington’s policy regarding... you are talking about immigration and it is as it affects the southwestern states, their encouragement of Latin Americans to come here for medical benefits and free care. Pete Wilson is a liberal Republican who has been a very unpopular governor largely because of financial problems that California has had ongoing budge problems. And the last few years people have been saying he is very beatable for governor. Well, he has picked up a new ploy and that is that government shouldn’t be mandating these immigration policies unless they are willing to pay for them. This same argument is being picked up in other states which is Virginia, not always the same reason. I think Virginia is more of an education...

[ Murray ] Florida.

[ M Rushdoony ] And Florida. They have a... a various problems.

[ Rushdoony ] Very serious in Florida and California.

[ M Rushdoony ] Colorado... Colorado, I am not sure what the circumstances of their recently passed legislation requiring the federal government to prove constitutional authority for requests for action by the states or appropriation by the state if there were federal demands to act... to require that they constitutionally prove why they have the authority to... to demand that of the states. And this new states rights movement and they are not afraid to use the terms states rights. They are invoking the 10th Commandment, even as the Supreme Court won’t abide by it.

They are asking other states to... to declare that they intend to abide by the 10th Amendment and intend to hold the federal government accountable. So in California it has come about because of immigration, but it is something that is moving.

[ Scott ] That is true.

[ M Rushdoony ] And it is encouraging that it is being talked about by governors and at governor’s conferences.

[ Scott ] That is true, because what has happened to us as a country is that we are being governed by laws that we did not pass, that we had no voice in seeing enacted. Regulations by the agencies are what govern us, not the Constitution. We have been deprived of everything that is supposed to be democracy except a vote, which only comes along once in a while. We have no control over the rules that govern us. This is a collapse of all the promises that our government made to the people and the inability to protect our borders is deliberate. They have opened the borders deliberately because they don't care what the people think about it. So what you are talking about is that grass roots... somebody called it the grass roots rebellion or something.

It is...

[ Murray ] Sage brush rebellion.

[ Scott ] Sage brush. It is just beginning. It is just beginning. No government can continue to flout all the people forever, without paying a penalty.

[ M Rushdoony ] What I started to say is Pete Wilson who as a couple of years ago saying he is going to be easy to beat in 94, I haven't hear polls lately and I wonder if that is because he is doing all right. He is getting... he seems to be getting a lot of credibility with people when he is complaining about federal immigration policies, because ...

[ Murray ] Right now.

[ M Rushdoony ] ... that is a very big thing here in California. The people are tired of paying the bill for these illegals’ medical care and education and other expenses.

[ Murray ] Right now he is running 50-50 with Kathleen Brown. And that is way ahead of where he thought he was going to be.

[ M Rushdoony ] Right.

[ Scott ] Kathleen Brown’s only claim to fame is being the brother of Jerry Brown and I don’t think that is much to brag about.

[ Rushdoony ] She is ...

[ M Rushdoony ] Did you see the commercial with when she has her family and the background and Jerry and her dad Pat are still alive, I believe...

[ Scott ] Oh, yes.

[ M Rushdoony ] Neither of them are in the picture.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. They are a liability now. So ...

[ Scott ] Are they?

[ Rushdoony ] So the family picture stressed the mother, everyone except the father and brother, the two ex governors.

[ Murray ] I... I haven't heard anyone refer to her as sister moon beam yet.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, our time is up. Thank you all for listening. And God bless you.

[ Voice ] Authorized by the Chalcedon Foundation. Archived by the Mount Olive Tape Library. Digitized by ChristRules.com.