Mark: Downgrading your condemnation of Karl Rove from “obscene” to “appalling” may count as a minor adjustment, but it’s undone once again by your hyperbole. Rove made a simple point: Parents want their kids to secure high-skilled, high-paying jobs. I didn’t hear him say anything about how they should refuse to perform any other type of work–merely that he wants their professional destiny to be something other than menial labor. But you waste no time in hauling out the Lincoln quotes on slavery. Jeez o’Pete!

You also ask a question: “How many non-Spanish-speakers could get a job washing dishes in Miami?” Well, that’s more or less what I did in high school, which I spent in Florida. Okay, it wasn’t Miami–it was just north of Miami–but my boss was Cuban and most of my co-workers in the kitchen were Haitian. A few of them spoke good English and some spoke none at all. Collectively, we used a lot of English–those who didn’t know it wanted to learn it–but I also picked up a form of kitchen Creole, comprised of the Haitian words for knives, forks, and spoons, plus all kinds of cusses and insults. This was one of the main places where I learned all of the things you praise: showing up on time, dressing the right way, taking out the trash when the boss says to take out the trash, etc. Jobs such as this remain available today and I fully expect my own kids to fill them in a few years. Then I expect them to do other things. I guess that makes me Saudi Arabian at heart.

And if you think “immigrant colonization” of certain jobs is a bad thing, then you need to go back and read Thomas Sowell. Start with Ethnic America. This is how economic assimilation and immigrant entrepreneurship begins.