-By Warner Todd Huston
Richard Nadler is someone I was not aware of until Saturday morning on October 13th, 2007. While attending the Conservative Leadership Conference, I was scheduled to interview former Congressman J.D. Hayworth and it just so happened that Mr. Nadler had just that morning gotten printed a response to J.D. Hayworth’s criticism of Nadler in the October 9th edition of the Wall Street Journal, which was in itself, a response to an October 2nd Journal piece by Nadler criticizing Hayworth. It was only by coincidence that both Nadler and Hayworth were attending the CLC. At length, I was asked by the CLC folks to interview both men to get their responses to each other over their current tet a tet, as well as get their take on the issues of the dy.
As to the men’s conflict, at issue was J.D.’s loss of his House seat, Nadler pinning it to Hayworth’s too harsh position over the immigration issue. Hayworth took great exception to Mr. Nadler’s claims of why he lost his House seat and a war of Journal articles had ensued.
As I said, I was not aware of Mr. Nadler, so after I was asked to interview him, I boned up on him via the Internet. I discovered Nadler to be concerned with minority voting and the attempt to drag that voting block over to the GOP. He is president of America’s Majority Foundation.
Nadler’s Foundation webpage describes themselves this way:
Americas Majority was founded to increase the constituency for conservative causes: free market economics, international anti-totalitarianism, and morals based on Jewish and Christian scriptures.
Now, since I had the opportunity to interview both Nadler and Hayworth, I asked both of them quite similar questions and, to me, they seem closer together in opinion than I think either of them even realize.
The audio of the Nadler interview can be downloaded by CLICKING HERE
The audio of the Hayworth interview can be downloaded by CLICKING HERE
To download a PDF document of the Wall Street Journal articles by both Nadler and Hayworth provided by Mr. Nadler, CLICK HERE
The transcript of my Hayworth interview can be seen HERE.
And, here is the transcript of my interview with Mr. Richard Nadler:
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CLC Interview with Warner Todd Huston interviewing Richard Nadler recorded by Avalon Podcasting at the Conservative Leadership Conference on October 13th, 2007.
WTH- Hi, my name is Warner Todd Huston with the Conservative Leadership Conference. Today we’re talking to Mr. Richard Nadler who is the president of America’s Majority Foundation, am I correct?
RN: Yes
WTH: Very good. Mr. Nadler, do you have any opening statements you’d like to make?
RN: Yes, basically the stance that the conservative movement has taken towards immigration is rather like a man who would slit his wrists and then run a victory lap as he bleeds out on the pavement. Unless we pay some attention to the moral and economic claims of illegal aliens we are going to lose the Hispanic vote which is the fastest growing vote in the United States and with it the presidency and any possibility of governing for the next 25 years.
WTH: Alright, thank you. You have been involved in a study of the immigration votes… issue connected with voting and a lot of candidates on the Republican side tried to make the border issue THE issue of their campaign and it wasn’t very successful for too many of them. Do you think that was a great mistake?
RN: Yes, it certainly was. The fact of the matter is, this is an issue that is very popular wherever there are no Hispanics. But the closer you get to the border the less popular it becomes and in fact there are nine Congressional districts on the border, these are very diverse in terms of ethnicity and in the sense, in terms of political partisanship. For instance five voted for Bush, four voted for Kerry in the last presidential cycle. The percentage of Hispanics varies a great deal, too. Only one of them has over 50%. Arizona eight has about eight or nine percent yet every single one of these districts has Congressmen, an elected Congressman who favors comprehensive immigration reform, by which I mean some combination of stricter border enforcement going forward, plus some form of guest worker program or earned legalization.
WTH: Very good. You wrote in a recent Wall Street Journal a letter to the editor something to the effect of, that young Americans of Hispanic parents would most likely not feel very warm to candidates who have sought to deport their parents. I believe that’s got to be true, I can’t see how they couldn’t?
RN: I was alluding specifically to the three point one million legal American citizen children of illegal parents, one or both, and you are obviously setting a time bomb in the community. But we’re not going to have to wait that long to get the political repercussions. We know from the last election cycle what it’s going to be. As rare as it is to have someone in Hispanic areas or heavily Hispanic areas advocate for deportation, there were basically three candidates, three Republican candidates, in Republican majority districts all of them who ran on either a deportationist or enforcement only platform and what my study documents basically is that in the Hispanic areas of those districts the switch was of twenty percent which is like minus twenty percent for Republicans, plus twenty percent for Democrats. It’s a forty percent shift, forty votes per hundred shift, in one election cycle and these were places where Republicans had been doing rather well. For instance, Arizona eight which includes Cochise County which is ground zero of the immigration problem, Jim Kolbe used to get about forty three percent of the Hispanic vote there. You can object to his immigration policy on many levels but when Randy Graff ran on a deportation platform that forty three percent went down to eighteen percent. Moreover, in Cochise County which is heavily Anglo, Graff didn’t even win that. Gabriel Giffords won it and she ran on basically the McCain/Bush platform regarding immigration reform.
One of the delusions that we have fostered among ourselves on the right is that Ronald Reagan’s amnesty of 1986 caused some form of horrendous distress on the border and there’s no doubt whatsoever that it caused problems. You know you have drug trafficking, you have gang violence, you have crimes of vandalism, especially right on the border, but the free labor market also resulted in an enormous wave of prosperity in the South West. You know, during the period of time from 1986 to 2005 the gross national product of the U.S. went up one hundred eighty four percent. In the heavily immigration… how would you put it… places where immigrants were coming in heavily along the border, California grew one hundred eighty five percent, New Mexico two hundred nine percent, Texas two hundred twenty nine percent, Arizona two hundred ninety one percent, Nevada four hundred forty six percent. All of these states also had growth in inflation adjusted, median household income, so one reason why the people on the border aren’t voting the scoundrels out who favor comprehensive immigration reform is quite simply they favor comprehensive immigration reform. They have problems with the border, they want strict enforcement, but they do not want mass deportations.
WTH: Well it seems to me it could almost be considered a moral issue in the fact that we had for so many years, I mean, you remember the stare decisis term that was so popular in talk with the Supreme Court issue before, well here is somewhat a case of that. We have millions upon millions of immigrants that had freely come across the border with no… none of the rules in force and then we are going to one day just suddenly say, “Oh, by the way we are enforcing these rules today and you all got to go now.” I mean, that, to me that seems almost an immoral act.
RN: I agree with you one hundred percent. Though I’ve got to tell you that it’s not very popular among our homeboys. But in effect you have had a break down of law over twenty five years involving vast sectors of the population, not just the immigrants themselves, not just the illegals but the people who employ them, the people who like them, who marry them, who sympathize with their plight, and also the people who voted the people in office who haven’t enforced the laws and so the moral hazard associated with the breakdown of the rule of law is now abruptly being foisted on this one group instead of being shared in order to reestablish a rule of law.
You know, I use the case of amnesty in American history, this is not the first or the most drastic case in which an amnesty has been proposed or enacted. At the end of the Civil War there were a couple million men under arms who had spent the last five years shooting at anything in a Union uniform and at that time president Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant made the decision we’re going to parole this entire army and we’re going to work as quickly as we can to reestablish citizenship for them. Now, at the time the press and the Union, some of our most staunch Unionists, some of our best Senators, Thaddeus Stevens for instance, Charles Sumner, great men in American history, were saying this is absolutely traitorous, this is impossible…
WTH: I believe they called it, uh, “waving the bloody shirt” in Congress.
RN: … Yeah, well, but it made sense as a rule of law argument. They said if you’re going to take people who have been traitors to this country and you’re going to forgive them for what they did how are you ever going to establish a rule of law? Well, cooler heads prevailed and it was understood that when you’ve had a lot of people breaking a lot of laws for a long time, you’ve gotta reset, you’ve gotta have a reset. And that’s what the amnesty basically was. It was… if we attempt to exact precise justice from you for being a traitor to the country we are going to perpetuate a state of conflict and violence that will go on and on and on, so no one criticizes Lincoln for that now.
WTH: I agree, and I am no open border advocate myself, I think…
RN: Nor am I.
WTH: …I think that Duncan Hunter has quite a few good points about his fence that he built in California and how it did successfully — to enough of a degree that it worked — keep people from crossing.
RN: Let me tell you something about Latinos and the fence, you can advocate for fence and not lose Latino votes, you can for worker ID and not lose…
WTH: Right, now that was the other question I had, is there a way for the GOP…
RN: Yes
WTH: … to advocate for a closed border, in essence, but still get the Latino vote?
RN: Yes, the thing that creeps out Hispanics en masse is when you talk about deporting, starving or persecuting massive numbers of people with whom they share a culture, sometimes family, and certainly media. It’s a failure of imagination on the right that we can’t understand this. It’s like whatever group you’re part of, if you’re a Catholic or if you’re a Jew, or if you’re a Free Mason, or if you’re a Shriner, or whatever you are, imagine how you would feel if suddenly one out of every three people in your group was being, you know, whisked away. Either told that they had to starve, or leave, or being physically deported… this is what resulted in the large loss of votes. There are Republicans and Democrats for that matter all over the border that have proposed all sorts of stringent border requirements. You can advocate for more border patrol, for more fence, for more electronic surveillance, for expedited deportation of people who do violent crimes, but you’ve got to have some form of guest worker or earned legalization status for those already here. You can’t say we’re going to starve them out and you can’t say we’re going to kick them out because that just loses votes en masse.
Now, let’s say that you personally can’t get past the rule of law argument, that you don’t have the moral qualms that we’ve expressed here on putting the full burden on the break down of law on this one group. None-the-less, you have to say to yourself what part of our agenda are we willing to sacrifice in order to deport the buss boy? Because we can reach a consensus in this country on border security going forward, that isn’t the problem, the sticking point is this matter of deportation and it will lose us votes en masse among the group that we’ve done increasingly well with over the last ten years. Dole was getting twenty one percent of that vote, Bush was getting forty percent. JEB Bush was getting over fifty percent, you know, John McCain was getting over seventy percent of that vote for heaven’s sakes. This is a group that has strong Christian beliefs, strong pro-life — much more so than whites… non-Hispanic whites I might add — a lot of entrepreneurship, lot of positive feeling toward school choice, a whole bunch of things in the Republican platform are a natural fit with this group, despite a comparatively low income. So, what my study found basically is if the results of the deportationist platform, either hard or soft deportation, were adopted by the Republican ticket in 2008 we will lose five states. We will simply, they will simply flip to Democrat all other things staying equal, which I think is an optimistic forecast of what may happen… and Nevada is one of them, I might add. New Mexico is another, Iowa is another, Florida is another and Colorado is the fifth.
WTH: Well, it seems to me one of the ways we really could — of course this is a long term solution not an immediate solution — but one of the ways that we can staunch this supposed, you know, loss to the GOP is to go back to teaching American exceptionalism in our schools. To teach, you know, what our principles really are to our children which I don’t think is happening in our schools today.
RN: Well, as a lot of the deportationists themselves say, Hispanics themselves favor English only. There’s no problem with Hispanics on teaching American history and civics and exceptionalism. The problem… there is one thing that will kill us here and it happens unfortunately to be where our homeboys have drawn the line. Which I, you know, I was talking to Chris the other day, Chris is a lovely guy I might add, Chris Simcox…
WTH: Simcox? Yeah.
RN: … and he was saying, he doesn’t even object to a guest worker program but the ones who are here have to leave because they’ve broken the law. Well, you’re going to send them out and you’re going to get a new batch in on the assumption that the ones who are here are morally decrepit? You know, and in the process you’re gonna lose five states, you’re going to lose the rest of your agenda, you’re not even going to establish the national security you want because you’re going to have eight years of Hillary… you now, at some point even if you don’t accept the moral reasoning or the economic reasoning for coming to a compromise on amnesty, you’ve gotta ask yourself how much of the rest of your agenda are you willing to sacrifice to deport the buss boy. That’s all it comes down to.
WTH: But certainly 9/11 has absolutely raised the issue that that border must be secured in some way?
RN: Oh, yeah, and I will say that it had that impact on me. I used to be pretty much an open borders guy and I recognize now that we can’t have a lot of people running around in this country who we don’t know who they are. That said, on a list of ninety things in the war against terrorism, controlling the Mexican border would be pretty near the bottom. And I’ll tell you why. There are roughly a million illegal crossings from Mexico to the United States every year, there are roughly a million legal crossings every day. Every day. Three hundred sixty five times as much from Mexico to the U.S. Shopping, people going back and forth to school, people going back and forth to jobs, ordinary commerce, continental commerce. You add the Canadian border, you add our ports of call, and you add our international airports scattered all over the country, you’ve got another million crossings a day, in other words this is a drop in the bucket. You know, Michelle Malkin has a popular book called “Invasion” and it has an appendix in which she gives an anatomy of fifty terrorists who are caught in the United States. Of those fifty, only one came in through the southern border, some crazy Jamaican guy who really didn’t have any professional connections.
Is it worrisome? Sure it’s worrisome. But the point is, why on earth is a trained terrorist, maybe from one of the Afghan camps, or the Pakistan Madrassas or whatever, wanting to do harm to the United States, why wouldn’t you get yourself a nice fake Saudi passport or something and tour the Grand Canyon and just miss your plane. Or why wouldn’t you get yourself a nice student visa to enter the nuclear program at MIT. In other words, they get in legally because there is so much more legal commerce than there is illegal. And the illegal is nothing, it does nothing… it’s a pain in the butt, you know, you’re paying two thousand five hundred bucks — that’s more than the airline ticket and the passport — to a coyote who’s a sleazy guy, you stick out like a sore thumb, and then you gotta tromp through a desert that kills about two hundred and fifty people a year… no professional terrorist in his right mind does that. So, it is a security issue but it’s very, very low on the list.
WTH: Well we’ve had recently the Texas Homeland Security Director I believe it was, came out claiming that they had stopped it seemed to me he said three hundred some terrorists…
RN: Ah, they’re getting, they’re getting, yeah they’re getting…
WTH: … coming through, coming across the border… terrorists…
RN: Now is that people from terrorist countries?
(crosstalk)
WTH: …that’s …now that’s… exactly, people coming from countries that support state sponsored terrorism. But these kind of numbers are shadowy, in these reports, I can’t really, I can’t really find these statistics anywhere that can prove these cases.
RN: The thing I would, the thing I would totally agree with is we do have to control the borders. That’s not really the question here. You know, you’ve got to, I believe we should put up the fence, I believe we should increase the number of border control, I’m all for perfecting — we haven’t done it yet — the electronic surveillance systems, we’re going to have to add more judges for expedited case review, and so one and so forth and ultimately, and I hate to say this, we’re going to have to have some kind of biometric ID for people coming across.
I hate to say it because one of the things conservatives are just absolutely schizo on is this matter of IDs…
WTH: Yeah, a national ID system.
RN: … if you’re familiar with Gresham’s Law from economics, quite simply the bad pushes out the good, and unless you, if you follow the ID argument all the way to the top of the food chain, you actually don’t need a US ID, you need a one world government ID…
WHT: Right, right.
RN: … because otherwise the professional goes around the top anyhow and gets his fake Pakistani ID and comes in… or his fake Irish ID or whatever.
But in terms of immigration, oh, totally useful. See, crime control will be much easier with comprehensive immigration reform. The Bush administration was laughed at for saying “people coming in out of the shadows,” but, no, there are 12 million people in this country in the shadows who won’t talk to the authorities because if they talk to the authorities they might get deported. If they have something like…
WTH: And that would impinge on any kind of crime.
RN: … yeah, yeah.
WTH: Not just immigration. Even if they saw a robbery they wouldn’t come forward.
RN: … Not just that, you’re hunting for a criminal who’s living in a heavily Mexican portion of Los Angeles, who are you going to talk to, who wants to talk to you? You know, you need, you need it both for purposes of tracing him and for being able to establish some kind of non-paranoid relationships with the community. So from the point of view of crime, as opposed to terror, I think that comprehensive reform would actually be an extremely positive step. Regarding terror I think it’s just sort of a wash. It is such a low… you know, you need to control the border, yes, but the bulk of serious terrorists are going to get in legally. There are many ways.
WTH: I’d like to go back to the issue of the student visas, I had written against student visas quite a while ago, about a year maybe a year and a half ago, and we just have a horrible tendency… well, I mean just recently the Bush administration had allowed ten thousand more people from the Saudis, and Irans and Iraqs of this world to come in on student visas and it just seems to me like we don’t need open borders if we are just giving them a ticket here, you know.
RN: (laughs) Well, as I said, Malkin…
WTH: What would you do, what would you suggest about the student visa thing?
RN: … the Malkin book had the fifty profiles of terrorists and whereas there was only one who had come across the Mexican border there were like, seventeen or eighteen who had done the student visas. And another thing is you overstay the visa or you marry an American girl or whatever and you get permanent resident status. Those definitely have to be tightened. I agree with you.
WTH: OK.
RN: It’s a much more, from a terror point of view, it’s a much more serious threat than these people who are tromping through the desert who are hoping to get a job in construction somewhere in Atlanta, you know?
WTH: Well, certainly the one aspect of this argument, the immigration argument, that too many conservatives forget about, I don’t know if it’s conveniently or just ignorantly, is the economic factor. I mean the reason these people come across the border more often than not is economic reasons and there are many big businesses that do well…
RN: Big and small, big and small.
WTH: … big and small, that do well for these economic factors.
RN: I’m not going to launch into my theoretical discourse on this, I’m going to tell you an anecdote instead. I was at a pro-life convention not long ago and a guy came up to me sort of shyly, he’d read something I’d done on immigration and he started telling me about his situation in business. And he has a small manufacturing and distribution business, basically they do Venetian blinds, and he was saying the price of product… I have a work force of about sixty, I’d say thirty of them, roughly half of them are Mexicans, they have some kind of papers but I know that a good portion of them are not legal. I have a lawyer hired and so on and I also have thirty American workers. The product I’m selling now sells for thirty percent less than it did ten years ago. There is competition from China, the prices have gone down on this, the processes are more efficient for making them. If I get rid of the illegals who I’ve hired to do the simpler stuff, the transport and so on I’m going to have to let my thirty American workers go as well and close down shop. You know people act as though a low priced wage sector in an economy is not part of the economy. No, it is part, it’s always been a part of our economy. And the traditional thing that has happened with your low blue collar or your agriculture labor is people work really hard at it, they save up enough so that their kids can do a little bit better, maybe get one of them in college or something and it’s the way that the American story has always gone.
The notion that, you know, J.D. Hayworth uses an argument from Schumpeter in his, he says we’re eliminating… we’re destroying capitalism by having a low wage wage sector because if we didn’t have cheap labor in some areas then there would be more creative destruction and more technological innovation … this is absolute nonsense, I wish Schumpeter were around to critique this. Your… the incentives are the same whether you’re in low, middle or high wage sectors in terms of doing things more efficiently, if you can do things more efficiently you save money. But there are certain fields, particularly agriculture where about thirty three percent of the labor is migrants who are either illegal or on the verge of becoming illegal by a stricter enforcement of visa requirements. You know, and the farmers there say, “hey if we can’t do it here we’re going to move our farming operations off shore.” If you can’t do things… if you can’t let the market set wages then who is going to set wages? And this is what set me off in this… I felt that my borders as a conservative were being violated by what I was hearing on right-wing talk radio. You know, I’d turn on the Laura Ingraham show, or Sean or any of my favorites and I’d hear these rants against employers about… I’d be hearing how a free labor market was going to universally depress wages. Well, that’s classical Marxism. That’s the iron law of wages, and it assumes a stagnant labor market because if you either review history or know economics you know it doesn’t work that way. You get prosperity out of a free labor market. You get a rising tide that lifts all boats.
And then I was hearing equivalents of the old comparable worth argument. It was like, instead of hiring Hosea to work in the fields you should hire Calvin out of the welfare office. Well, pardon me, we used to laugh at that kind of argument when Harriet Woods made it for the National Organization of Women, you know. We’d say why do I know better, or why do you know better than the employer who he wants to hire, you know. For all you know Hosea has been bringing in the harvest since he was nineteen, for all you know, Calvin was shooting crack at the welfare office last week. Come on. Let the employer make that decision, not, not government.
WTH: Well, one of the arguments that a lot of conservatives make is that by allowing this untrammeled immigration or illegal immigration is that we’re importing a permanent underclass that will never advance. Now, I live in an area in Chicago that has a lot of Hispanics and I, I can’t say that I see that, I see a somewhat unschooled, older Mexicans that have children who become just as American as anybody else. And those children don’t want to go back to Mexico even to visit more often than not because they feel to be American. You know, and they’re schooled, they have their schooling and they’re not stupid and… you know what I’m saying? So, it seems to me that argument doesn’t necessarily hold water. It does hold water maybe for the immediate future, but not for the long term. What do you think?
RN: I totally agree with you there. I think that Mexicans will make… I think they are making great Americans. And, again, the reason why I’m pessimistic about this trend on the right being reversed in the short term is we have too many shows and too many books that are doing too well off a sensational dramatization of the cultural problem. I mean you find some nutso junior college professor…
WTH: Your “Mexifornias” and what not.
RN: … in Utah who is talking about reinstituting Aztec blood sacrifice and everyone goes nuts. Excuse me that isn’t really what’s going on.
WTH: You’ve got your “Mexifornia” books…
RN: Yeah, right.
WTH: … and your LaRaza worries and things like that.
RN: Right, right. And these guys are nuts there’s no doubt..
WTH: Indeed.
RN: …but also I would say as someone who has dealt extensively in politics with both black and Hispanic areas, Hispanic politics is marked primarily by an indifference to politics. You know, Hispanics are five point eight percent of the U.S. electorate and fourteen point one percent of the populace. Obviously they’re not thinking too hard about imposing Aztec civilization.
WTH: Right, right. Well, I’d like to give you a minute for any closing statements if you like, before we wrap it up.
RN: Uh, yes, I would simply appeal to my fellow conservatives to try to achieve some kind of balance. There’s no need whatsoever to sacrifice the desire, in fact the need, for better border security, for the fence, for more agents, for expedited deportation for violent criminals. But do not make this the single guiding obsession of your life to the point that you sacrifice the Hispanic vote going onward. We did this with the black vote some time ago and now we start each election with basically a minus twelve point five percent, if we do this with Hispanics also we are not going to b able to govern for the next twenty five years.
WTH: All right, well, Mr. Richard Nadler I’d like to thank you for coming and thanks for attending the CLC and thanks for giving us a little bit of time today.
RN: Pleasure to be here.
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Warner Todd Huston’s thoughtful commentary, sometimes irreverent often historically based, is featured on many websites such as newsbusters.org, townhall.com, men’snewsdaily.com and americandaily.com among many, many others. Additionally, he has been a guest on several radio programs to discuss his opinion editorials and current events. He has also written for several history magazines and appears in the new book “Americans on Politics, Policy and Pop Culture” which can be purchased on amazon.com. He is also the owner and operator of publiusforum.com. Feel free to contact him with any comments or questions : EMAIL Warner Todd Huston
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