Civic virtue and Karl Rove's son

Once upon a time, I was a garbageman at a trailer park. It was not the kind of job that got teenage boys a lot of respect, or attention from girls. Twice a week, I'd spend a couple of hours collecting trash from the barrels behind house trailers, loading them into my pickup, and driving them to the town dump. This was a particularly challenging job in the hot months in south Louisiana -- which is to say, for much of the year -- because being beset by heat, humidity and the aroma of rotting melons, crawfish and other savories really has a way of keeping you humble.

I hated that job, but I'm glad I had it. My dad owned the land the park was on, and he could have paid somebody else to pick up the garbage, but why should he? I was a strapping boy, I had an old pick-up truck, and I was not too good to pick up other people's stinking trash. My dad, who grew up during the Depression and who worked his way into the middle class by studying and by the sweat of his brow, has had nothing but contempt for men who look down on physical labor as beneath their dignity.

I wonder what my dad would think of this item "this item Mark Krikorian put on The Corner. Excerpt:

According to a congressman's wife who attended a Republican women's luncheon yesterday, Karl Rove explained the rationale behind the president's amnesty/open-borders proposal this way: "I don't want my 17-year-old son to have to pick tomatoes or make beds in Las Vegas."

There should be no need to explain why this is an obscene statement coming from a leader in the party that promotes the virtues of hard work, thrift, and sobriety, a party whose demi-god actually split fence rails as a young man, a party where "respectable Republican cloth coat" once actually meant something. But it does seem to be necessary to explain.

Rove's comment illustrates how the Bush-McCain-Giuliani-Hagel-Martinez-Brownback-Huckabee approach to immigration strikes at the very heart of self-government. It is precisely Rove's son (and my own, and those of the rest of us in the educated elite) who should work picking tomatoes or making beds, or washing restaurant dishes, or mowing lawns, especially when they're young, to help them develop some of the personal and civic virtues needed for self-government. It's not that I want my kids to make careers of picking tomatoes; Mexican farmworkers don't want that either. But we must inculcate in our children, especially those likely to go on to high-paying occupations, that there is no such thing as work that is beneath them.
[snip]
This is why the president's "willing worker/willing employer" immigration extravaganza is morally wrong — it's not just that it will cost taxpayers untold billions, or that it will beggar our own blue-collar workers, or that it will compromise security, or that it will further dissolve our sovereignty. It would do all that, of course, but most importantly it would change the very nature of our society for the worse, creating whole occupations deemed to be unfit for respectable Americans, for which little brown people have to be imported from abroad. In other words, mass immigration, even now, is moving us toward an unequal, master-servant society.

UPDATE: John J. Miller makes a fair point: that before stringing Rove up, we need to have stronger sourcing for this quote than an anonymous GOP lawmaker's wife. I wish I had noted that earlier. I do so now, with apologies -- but the discussion about the dignity of manual labor is still an important one to have.