In today’s Morning Jolt (you should subscribe) Brother Geraghty highlights a posting at Ace of Spades pointing to Newt’s appeal in upholding the value of work:

For me, it was the part where he stood up for work. Where he discussed the essential virtues of work. Nobody does that anymore. It was refreshing. It was important to me to hear someone say it. . . .
This message resonates. That’s why Gingrich won. Not just the slap at ‘the elites,’ but the content of the slap. The part where all work is good work and no one should consider themselves demeaned by what is *good.* Yeah, that may have been pre-formulated, and Juan Williams walked right into it. So? It needed to be said. Most of us thoroughly enjoyed hearing it clearly and unambiguously elucidated.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that’s the reason Gingrich won South Carolina, but it has to have helped. Despite his many (and, in my opinion, disqualifying) flaws, what conservative didn’t cheer when Gingrich said “I’m going to continue to find ways to help poor people learn how to get a job, learn how to get a better job, and learn someday to own the job”?

Which is why it’s ironic that Gingrich doesn’t realize that the core of his immigration plan would torpedo the ability of less-skilled Americans to find work. The “red card” worker-importation scheme he’s lashed himself to would, in a matter of just a few years, foreignize whole occupations, turning us into a vast Saudi Arabia, where immigrants do all the work and the native born live on government handouts. This isn’t some flight of fancy — as I wrote in NR a few years back, one of our little colonies in the Pacific, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (Saipan and Tinian, for WWII buffs), had a version of Gingrich’s red card plan. Guess what? In time, 70 percent of the labor force were non-citizens and 56 percent of the native population “worked” for the government. What’s more, “The corrosive effect on the work ethic and morals of the American citizens is so bad that, in 1995, the government actually had to issue a directive prohibiting welfare recipients from hiring foreign maids.”

So, my question is, does Gingrich really believe in the value of work, or does he believe, with Karl Rove, that we should import foreign workers because “I don’t want my 17-year-old son to have to pick tomatoes or make beds in Las Vegas“?