10/16/2016
From the transcript of Hillary Clinton’s expensive question & answer session with Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs at Dove Mountain in October 2013:
So yes, we do have to get back to telling the American Story and telling it to ourselves first and foremost. That’s why Immigration reform is so important. I mean, get immigration reform done you. It sends exactly the signal you’re talking about.So when your CEO tells you you have to train your H-1B replacement if you want to collect your severance pay, that’s because your CEO isn’t optimistic about immigration. Or something. I can’t really follow Hillary’s train of thought on the subject.(Applause.)
CLINTON: Get it fixed so that the people who have been here working hard, building futures, are given the chance to become American citizens. There’s no requirement that they do, but they would be given that path to citizenship.
So it still is the case that more people want to come here than anywhere else in the world. People still, despite all of the problems of the last decade, see through it and see the underlying reality of what a life in America can offer them and their children.
But we need to get back to believing our own story. We need to jettison a lot of the skepticism. I mean, there’s not a skeptic among you when it comes to being an entrepreneur. …
And what I really resent most about the obstructionists is they have such a narrow view of America. They see America in a way that is no longer reflective of the reality of who we are. They’re against Immigration for reasons that have to do with the past, not the future. They can’t figure out how to invest in the future, so they cut everything. You know, laying off, you know, young researchers, closing labs instead of saying, we’re better at this than anybody in the world, that’s where our money should go.
They just have a backward-looking view of America. And they play on people’s fears, not on people’s hopes, and they have to be rejected. I don’t care what they call themselves. I don’t care where they’re from. They have to be rejected because they are fundamentally un-American.Trying to explain their immigration policy always leaves progressives sounding like Joe McCarthy.
… I mean, American was an invention. It was an intellectual invention, and we have done pretty well for all these years. And these people want to just undermine that very profound sense of who we are. And we can’t let them do that.After 8 years of being lectured by Obama, the semi-cool junior college professor, we can look forward to four more years of being lectured in virtually the same words — “who we are” — by Hillary, the uncool middle school assistant principal.
So it’s not just about politics or partisanship. It really goes to the heart of what it means to be American. And I’ll just say that I’ve been reading a lot of de Tocqueville lately because he was a pretty smart guy, and he traveled around and looked at this country and came up with some profound observations about us. But he talked about how unique early Americans were because they mixed a rugged individualism with a sense of, you know, community well being. So the individual farmer would quit farming for a day to go somewhere to help raise a barn, for example.I think I wrote a paper on the need to balance rugged individualism and community in 8th grade in 1972 and I used Hillary’s barn-raising analogy.
… We are a unique breed, and people come here from all over and kind of sign on to the social compact of what it means to be an American.One thing that is striking is just how dumbed down discourse gets when the topic turns to immigration policy. Here’s Hillary getting paid $225,000 or whatever to give the inside scoop to the smart money boys at Goldman, and yet she’s just shoveling the same lowbrow schmaltz on immigration we hear everywhere else, and the Goldman guys are lapping it up.And we can’t afford to let people, for their own personal reasons, whether they be political, commercial, or whatever, undermine that. So, yeah, there’s a lot of to be said. And we need to say it more, and it doesn’t just need to come from, you know, people on platforms. It needs to come from everybody.
(Applause.)
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