The actual Republican Establishment –- political consultants, The Wall Street Journal, corporate America, former Bush advisers and television pundits — are exhorting Mitt Romney to flip-flop on his very non-Establishment position on illegal immigration.

Both as governor of Massachusetts and as a presidential candidate, Romney has supported a fence on the border, E-Verify to ensure that employees are legal and allowing state police to arrest illegal aliens. He is the rare Republican who recognizes that in-state tuition, driver’s licenses and amnesty are magnets for more illegal immigration.

These positions are totally at odds with Establishment Republicans. The Establishment panders to the business lobby by supporting the cheap labor provided by illegal immigration — then accuse Americans opposed to slave labor in America of racism.

If this continues, America will become California and no Republican will ever be elected president again. Big business doesn’t care and Establishment Republicans are too stupid to notice.

If you’re not sure how you feel about illegal immigration, ask yourself this: “Do I have a nanny, a maid, a pool boy, a chauffeur, a cook or a business requiring lots of cheap labor that the rest of America will have to subsidize with social services to make up for the wages I’m paying?” Press “1” to answer in English.

If the answer is “no,” illegal immigration is a bad deal for you. Cheap labor is cheap only for the employer.

Today, 70 percent of illegal immigrant households collect government benefits — as do 57 percent of all immigrant households — compared to 39 percent of native households.

Immigrant households with the highest rate of government assistance are from the Dominican Republic (82 percent), Mexico and Guatemala (tied at 75 percent). This is based on the latest available data from 2009. The immigrant households least likely to be on any welfare program are from the United Kingdom (7 percent).

British immigrants aren’t picking the tomatoes Karl Rove doesn’t want his son to pick. (That’s how he justified Bush’s amnesty plan.)

You can either pay a little more for tomatoes picked by Americans or you can pay a lot more in welfare to the illegal immigrants who pick them, as well as to generations of their descendants.

Yes, many illegal immigrants work hard, but it’s not our responsibility if their employers don’t pay them a living wage. This is known as an “externality,” which we hear a lot about in the case of greedy businesses polluting the land, but not when it’s greedy businesses making the rest of us subsidize their underpaid employees.

Romney is one of the few Republicans to recognize that there is no need to “round up” illegal aliens (in the lingo of amnesty supporters) to get them to go home. Illegal aliens will leave the same way they arrived. They decided to walk across the border to get jobs — and welfare, apparently — and they’ll walk back across the border as soon as the jobs and welfare dry up.

Obama has a similar plan, but instead of using E-Verify to stop illegal aliens from taking American jobs, he did it by destroying the entire job market. Hmmmm, drug-ravaged Juarez, or Obama’s America … I’ll take Juarez!

Wrecking the American economy is not a good long-term solution to the illegal immigration problem. Romney could get elected, and then we’ll need a fence in a hurry.

It didn’t take a government administrator “rounding up” foreigners and putting them on buses to get 20 million illegal aliens here, and it won’t take a government program “rounding them up” to get them home.

While Romney’s views on immigration are wildly popular with Americans, they are extremely unpopular with the Republican Establishment — Bush, Rove, McCain, Huckabee, Perry, Gingrich, Giuliani, Krauthammer, Kristol, Gillespie, etc, etc. It’s the Establishment calling Romney “Establishment.”

So now the elites are demanding that Romney “moderate” his position on immigration. To justify their underpaying the maid, they claim support for illegal immigration is crucial to victory!

The truth is, a tough stance on illegal immigration can only help Romney, not only with the vast majority of Americans, but with any Latino voters who would ever possibly consider voting Republican in the first place.

As Romney said in one of the early debates, Republicans appeal to Latinos “by telling them what they know in their heart, which is they or their ancestors did not come here for a handout. If they came here for a handout, they’d be voting for Democrats. They came here for opportunity and freedom. And that’s what we represent.”

Romney crushed pro-amnesty Newt Gingrich in the Florida primary, winning a huge majority of that state’s substantial Hispanic population. (And Gingrich promised Hispanics their own moon base!)

Before the primary, Gingrich played up his support for amnesty, while accusing Romney of wanting to “round up” illegal alien grandmothers. The one thing every Florida primary voter knew was that Romney said he’d veto the Dream Act, giving citizenship to illegal alien children.

And then Romney won primary with an even larger percentage of the Hispanic vote than Florida at large. Romney beat Gingrich statewide, 46 percent to 32. But among Latino voters, Romney routed Gingrich, 54 percent to 29 percent.

It’s not just Florida. In 2006, Arizona Hispanics supported four anti-illegal immigration propositions by 40 to 50 percent — which is a lot more than voted for pro-amnesty Republican presidential candidates John McCain or George W. Bush.

Among the propositions supported by Hispanics in larger numbers than they typically vote Republican was one making English the official language of Arizona (49 percent). As governor of Massachusetts, Romney pushed English-immersion programs. That’s my kind of Hispandering!

These are our Latinos — the ones, as Romney said, who came here for opportunity and freedom. Any race-mongering, welfare-collecting, ethnic-identity rabble-rousers are voting for the Democrat.

COPYRIGHT 2012 ANN COULTER

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