I missed the White House statement Friday confirming Rove’s “pick tomatoes” comments, but protesting they were taken out of context. I’m not sure how the explanation makes them any better, but judge for yourself.

Yes, John, “obscene” was too strong; but “appalling” would have been warranted. And to the leftie e-mailers who’ve contacted me, the point is not that Bad People need to be purged and replaced by Good People — it’s a universal human trait to want to live comfortably while someone else does the dirty work, or in Lincoln’s words, “wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces.” It’s a temptation that many have given in to: our own forebears in the antebellum period, the Afrikaaners, the Gulf Arabs, the Brahmans (who turned it into a religion), the Spartans, and probably most other human societies. In other words, our modern policy of mass legal and illegal immigration (and the bipartisan proposals to supercharge it with guestworker programs) is the product of original sin. What’s more, mass immigration also creates “occasions of sin,” as even those who had nothing to do with crafting or supporting the policy nonetheless come to live as though certain functions are beneath their station.

Most of the mail I got was supportive, from people recalling the scut work they did in their youth. But one writer posed a question that requires an answer: He asked what was stopping our kids from doing those jobs that our immigration policies have turned into “immigrant work”? He suggests that if they’re just holding out for higher wages, then it’s not really about character-building.

Three points: 1. Even if it was just a matter of immigration having lowered wages for unskilled work, that itself would be a problem. Rite-of-passage jobs (as Victor Hanson puts it in Mexifornia) are essential for young people to learn the basics of workplace behavior (showing up on time, taking direction from a supervisor, dealing courteously with customers) that they will need later. Since in a prosperous modern society like ours, “consuming leisure,” as economists put it, is possible for so many more people, immigration-depressed wages may well persuade fewer young people to seek work, to our society’s long-term detriment.

2. But it’s not just finickiness about wages. Because of hiring through ethnic networks, certain workplaces become colonized by immigrants, such that outsiders are no longer considered for employment. How many non-Spanish-speakers could get a job washing dishes in Miami or L.A.? And, in the words of a recent WaPo story on the change from American to foreign workers at a landscapoing firm, “when the change occurs, it is not often reversed.” As a report we recently published put it, “It appears that employers are substituting new immigrant workers for young native-born workers. The estimated sizes of these displacement effects were frequently quite large.”

3. Finally, apart from its economic effects, mass immigration makes certain jobs in certain places socially unacceptable for Americans, and once that happens, it’s hard to change, as the Saudi government has found in its unsuccessful efforts at “Saudi-ization” of its workforce.