I think I speak for all of us when I say, “Who’s Kelly Osbourne?”
The best part of this is an offended Rosie Perez apologizing to Osbourne after being reminded that they should focus on the Common Enemy.
Perez clarified the point Collins was trying to make, saying, “There are a lot of Latinos here in this country that do agree that the immigration problem is a problem and it does need to be addressed and it does need to be fixed. But [Trump] making those comments [about rapists]—those racist comments—does not help.”
“If you kick every Latino out of this country, then who is going to be cleaning your toilet, Donald Trump?” Osbourne said. “In the sense that…you know what I mean? But I’m saying that in L.A., they always…” The other co-hosts were taken aback, and Perez said, “Latinos are not only….” Osbourne cut her off and said, “No, I didn’t mean it like that! Come on! I would never mean it like that! I’m not part of this argument.”
At the end of the show, Perez defended Osbourne, telling viewers, “I want to apologize to this young woman once again for being overly sensitive.”…
“No, Kelly Osbourne is on our side and I was sensitive,” Perez said. “My disdain should go to only Donald Trump, so I’m sorry, darling.”
Osbourne’s eating crap on Twitter for invoking toilet-scrubbing as some paradigm example of a Latino trade, but to focus on that misses the larger point here — namely, that this same example has been used by “respectable” amnesty fans for years. A Twitter buddy reminds me that no less than former L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa was known to have his mind turn towards toilets when making the case for comprehensive immigration reform:
“Today we say to America: We’ve come here to work: We clean your toilets. We clean your hotels. We build your houses. We take care of your children. We want you to help us take care of our children as well.”
All Osbourne’s doing here, really, is giving her own colorful variation on ye olde “doing the jobs Americans won’t do” lie. In fact, as I recall, a prominent presidential candidate used that lie himself recently to defend his plan for legalizing illegals working menial jobs. Who was that again? Was it Jeb Bush? No, wait — I remember now:
Trump continued:
“We have to bring great people into this country, okay? And I want to bring — I love the idea of immigration, but it’s got to be legal immigration. Now, a lot of these people are helping us, whether it’s the grapes, or whether it’s jobs, and sometimes it’s jobs, in all fairness, I love our country, but sometimes it’s jobs that a citizen of the United States doesn’t want to do. I mean, there are jobs that a lot of people don’t want to do. I want to move them out, and we’re going to move them back in, and let them be legal, but they have to be in here legally.…Otherwise, you don’t have a country. You don’t have a country, if people can just pour into the country illegally, you don’t have a country, but I would expedite the system.”
The punchline of this soundbite is that Trump himself would agree with Osbourne. Precisely because illegals from Mexico are willing to pick grapes and clean toilets and do jobs that Americans supposedly won’t do, we need a way to integrate them into the labor force legally. That’s the irony at the heart of Trumpmania: Both on the right and, per Osbourne, the left, Trump’s “Mexican rapists” remark in his announcement speech has earned him a reputation as some sort of hardline immigration restrictionist that he simply doesn’t deserve. He’s not out there arguing that illegals should be deported en masse and only the highly skilled should be allowed to return through legal channels. On the contrary. What separates him from Osbourne and most Democrats is that he considers crimes committed by illegals to be a real problem rather than trivia to which lip service should be paid en route to mass legalization.
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