Appearing on this Boxing Day edition of the Today show to plug tonight's airing of "In the Shadow of the American Dream," the latest in the “Tom Brokaw Reports” series, the former Nightly News anchor offered a variety of views on the subject of illegal immigration straight out of the amnesty-crowd playbook.
View video here.
Annotated excerpts:
- "It's not going to work to send everybody back."
Why not? And if sending illegals home isn't the solution, how about drying up the jobs here so they will have their own motivation to return home?
- "I don't think you can build the highest wall in the world and it will stop them from coming."
Really? How much would it cost to build, say, a high-tech, 20-foot tall/20-foot deep fence along the border, and how much of the illegal immigration would it stop? I'm guessing a lot.
- "They're filling jobs that Americans don't want to fill anymore."
Ah, the classic formulation. But says who, and at what wages?
- "You can't get high school kids to earn $14-16 to dig ditches and carry bricks and do the hard work. They don't want to do it. They'd rather be at their computer or work in fast food stores."
Really? High school kids won't work for $16/hour and would rather flip burgers for half that? Data please, Tom.
- "The other part of it is, we can't do this alone. Mexico has to play a big part of this. And Mexico is not much interested because these illegal immigrants across America are sending back an estimated $8 billion a year. So it's going to take, I think, the good efforts of all parties to get this resolved and Mexico has to be a big piece of that."
Except you just said - and history proves - that Mexico doesn't want to solve the problem. Which makes it our problem. To quote Mark Steyn, this sounds like a job for America, alone.
UPDATE: In claiming that Mexican immigrants remit $8 billion/year to Mexico, Brokaw understates the figure by a factor of three, according to this recent WaPo article. H/T to FReeper TomGuy.
Contact Mark at mark@gunhill.net
