In his Christian Science Monitor commentary titled “The kind of change America doesn’t like”

Pat Holt wrote:

“If all the illegal immigrants employed in the US were suddenly removed the American economy would crash.”

The economy would not crash. Illegal immigrants are concentrated in four areas—corporate agriculture, hotel and restaurant services, construction, and day labor. While there would be some businesses, particularly in corporate agriculture, whose economics would change significantly, even that category would only be wounded and would continue operating.

At worst some businesses would trade hands-+but probably not as dramatically as the Midwest Farm Crisis of the 1980’s. There are legal Americans capable of doing all these jobs, although it would raise the average wage of the lowest 10% of American workers, by at least 7.4% an hour according to Prof. Borjas of Harvard University.

Is it worth paying a few cents more for a Big Mac to end slave labor, and dramatically reduce America’s underclass?

New technologies and investments are ultimately needed to move the US back to a high wage, high productivity economy.

Developing those will take time. But the clock for those technologies and investments won’t start ticking until we reverse the current trend to indentured servitude in the form of guest workers and illegal alien employees.

Furthermore, there is little need to remove illegal immigrants from the US suddenly. These folks didn’t arrive in the US suddenly. We don’t have the structure in place to identify and deport them.

Given the decision to have an immigration policy, whatever it is, that is legally enforced, we as Americans would then need to and can easily create an orderly process whereby the flow of illegal immigrants is reversed, the flow of legal immigrants reduce and within 2 to 4 years there are no more illegal immigrants working in the US.

Helping the former illegal immigrants return to good jobs will be harder particularly for the majority who come from Mexico.

Whatever happens, existing laws should start being enforced. Illegal alien workers should routinely be deported when discovered. Employers should be arrested and convicted and made to pay the existing fines of $20,000 per illegal alien employed. The IRS and Social Security Administration should within a few weeks start notifying employers of employees using false identification–and crack down on employers paying employees under the table.

It will be a struggle to re-establish the border on a basis that doesn’t generate hatred towards the American public from Mexico and Central America. New laws are obviously needed. Laws that can realistically be enforced and that include the resources needed to actually do the job.

We can even hope for a measure of justice. Those wealthy and powerful individuals and firms in the US and Mexico that have profited from illegal immigration have also passed enormous costs on to the public. Their wealth should be used to help set things right for both American and Hispanic workers. The politicians that have sold their office in the service of corporate greed should have their actions brought to the voters’ attention and bear the full brunt of justice as well.

We at VDARE.COM are naturally delighted that so many Establishment Right figures are finally speaking up about immigration. But you’ve got to watch them. A reader who is a veteran Rush Limbaugh student reports that Limbaugh was obviously rattled yesterday by a woman caller who challenged him on what to do about the illegals who are already here - and who would be not directly impacted by the border fence he is now advocating. Limbaugh accused her of being a “seminar caller” - a liberal plant. When she persisted, he finally conceded:

RUSH: Nobody is talking about deporting these people…Obviously. That’s the whole point. We’re not even talking about immigration [deportation] here. We’re talking about people that want jobs. There has to be a serious attempt with these twelve– Using your hypothetical, we’ve got the border shut, and the number of illegals that succeed in getting past is a trickle and not enough to worry about. What do we do? We have to assimilate them. We have to require them to acculturate, and that’s not hard to do, and we identify who they are and we let them stay and if they claim they’re here because they want to become Americans we give them the chance to do that, but we don’t put them at the head of the line, we don’t run them ahead of people playing by the rules. But the key to it is closing the border.

…i.e. no deportation.

Of course, this would be a disaster. Under current law, these 12 [or 20] million] would then be able to sponsor endless chain-migration of relatives. Conversely, there are many ways to cause the illegal population to self-deport, basically by removing government subsidies, taxing remittances and so on. In fact, Limbaugh could even have pointed out that a defended border would probably reduce the illegal presence, because many illegals commute back and forth, and might well elect to stay home.

As I’ve said before, there are immense unseen pressures on MSM figures to toe the immigration enthusiast line, and we should applaud any who show signs of courage. But, as also illustrated by the case of NRO’s recent stealth capitulation on legal immigration reform, we can’t put our trust in them.

Limbaugh transcript here.