Remembering
James Robison

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Amnesty for Sweatshop Farms & Hotels Tempts a Prodigal America to Stay in Its Pigsty

By John Zmirak Published on July 8, 2025

“America First” might sound like a call to national selfishness. For most of us it isn’t. Instead, that slogan means something like: “In case of a loss of air pressure, put your own mask on first, before assisting others.” Or to be even blunter: “You want Change? Start with your underwear.”

Our country’s in deep, deep trouble. It’s only patriotic to admit that starkly and squarely. If your family member has cancer, you do him no favors by insisting he’s perfectly fine, that “those doctors just want to suck you dry.” Self-styled conservatives who keep offering you ideological crack pipes stuffed with balled-up old Ronald Reagan speeches aren’t “standing for principle.” They’re trying to squeeze the last few dollars out of a dying, discredited grift.

We have sinned, gone far astray, and must repent. We are the Prodigal Son, who demanded his inheritance prematurely, squandered it, and now lies in a pigsty gnawing the corncobs meant for swine. Our Father waits far away, down a long, dusty, uphill road. And the voices of those around us, the other Prodigals, are telling us we’re better off in the pigsty — that it would be arrogant, selfish, and cruel to leave them behind.

And hey look, here’s a fresh batch of corncobs: it’s time to eat.

Our Immigration System Is a Sin

The lawless immigration status quo we have lived with for two generations is self-destructive and suicidal. Worse than that, it is sinful — a structural sin on the order of slavery or serfdom. We have relied on mass immigration to make our lives superficially easier and cheaper, in order to shirk the hard work and sacrifices necessary to leave behind a decent future for our children. I’ll start with the starkest example: Up until the mass influx of illegals enabled by Joe Biden, there was almost a one-for-one correlation between the number of children aborted in America and the number of immigrants we accepted.

It’s as if the nation knew it needed a certain number of people and since it couldn’t stop itself from murdering its own kids for sexual convenience, it replaced them with foreigners. Hillary Clinton was quite explicit about this practice. She pointed to our low birth rate and explained that to fuel our economy, we must accept millions of foreign colonists. In other words, we must outsource the sweaty work of reproducing the species to people in the Third World.

We Want It Cheap and Easy

We want cheap food in stores and cheap hotel rooms. Big Agriculture and Big Hospitality are happy to offer us those. The price? Just let their businesses flout our laws. Let them hire illegal aliens who will work for lower wages and rely on public emergency rooms and Medicaid when they get injured. That way, some other taxpayer (we imagine) will bear the cost of our inexpensive apples and dirt-cheap Hilton suites. Better him than me.

Those illegal aliens’ kids will be magically blessed with “birthright” citizenship and flood our public schools. So those schools, inundated with foreigners and alien gangs, with no common tongue and Third World academic standards, will be no-go zones for natives. That helps suppress the birth rate for anyone who can’t afford private school. So do high home prices, high taxes, and flat middle-class wages — all of those fueled by mass immigration.

Which means we need more immigrants.

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See how this works? It’s like an addiction to heroin or fentanyl, which are magically more available now thanks to our heretofore porous, unenforced borders.

But we’d rather leave our children a fractured country with no cultural majority, with millions who don’t value our heritage and wave foreign flags, than mow our own lawns, clean our own homes, or bear our own children. We want the next corncob and a cool patch of mud where we can wallow.

Will We Return to the Father?

It won’t be easy to wean ourselves off the habits of riotous living, eating cheaply now and letting the price pile up later. We’ll be called vicious names (such as “racist”) by those who prefer life in the hog stall. Our ICE officers even now are getting fired on by domestic terrorists.

Hypocritical pastors who profit directly from trafficking immigrants (see Catholic Charities) or take money from George Soros to promote open borders (see Christianity Today) will join in the chorus like the “comforters” of Job. They’ll tell us there’s no going back to our Father’s wholesome farmstead, where an honest day’s work means an honest day’s pay and your inheritance stays in the family. Those old days are dead and gone.

The corporate scofflaw profiteers and their Chamber of Commerce sock puppets will say that an amnesty for sweatshop farms and hotels is “compassionate” and “pro-business.” Anyone who opposes it is a “radical right” nativist. It’s simply “not possible” to find Americans who’ll do these dirty jobs — at least not at the skimpy wages they’re willing to pay. They’ll even threaten us with unaffordable tacos and filthy sheets on our hotel beds.

They’re counting on buying our birthright. Are we ready to sell it so cheap?

UPDATE: In the hours after this column was completed, the Trump administration announced that it will not, in fact, draft legislation offering amnesty to illegal aliens employed in agriculture and hospitality. Apparently, pushing back works. It’s good to know that the President is listening to his voters.

 

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of 14 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.