Speaker 1: You don't hear much about the border unless you're watching
Speaker 1: Fox News or listening to some AM talk radio. But
Speaker 1: we're setting records every single month. I'm sure our next
Speaker 1: guest has the numbers at hand, but they're very large
Speaker 1: numbers of people coming across and staying, as there have
Speaker 1: been for years. By the way, I always like to
Speaker 1: point out that Gallup polling has been pretty consistent that
Speaker 1: close to nine of Americans want secure borders close. Obviously,
Speaker 1: that includes a lot of people from every political strip. Now,
Speaker 1: beyond securing the borders, how many people you want to
Speaker 1: come in from? Where is where we get into an argument.
Speaker 1: But that's fine, That's absolutely fine. Why we can't secure
Speaker 1: the borders though, when almost everybody wants it and it
Speaker 1: leads to tragedies like we had the other day when
Speaker 1: all those people died horrific deaths in the back of
Speaker 1: that truck. We have been saying, administration after administration, both parties,
Speaker 1: for a very long time. If you come to America,
Speaker 1: if you try to get across the order decent change,
Speaker 1: you're gonna get across. And if you get across, you
Speaker 1: get to stay. And if you stay, we're gonna take
Speaker 1: care of you no matter what health care, food, whatever,
Speaker 1: or let you work where. We won't really cracked down
Speaker 1: on the whole whether or not you've got an I D. Stuff,
Speaker 1: We'll let you be here. We've been sending that message
Speaker 1: to the world for a long time, and of course
Speaker 1: we get this result. That's my opinion. Let's hear more
Speaker 1: from somebody who deals with this for a living. Mark Krikorian,
Speaker 1: we've talked too many times over the years, Executive Director,
Speaker 1: Center for Immigration Studies, Mark, thanks for joining us today. Well,
Speaker 1: thanks for having me. Could you hit me with a
Speaker 1: quick statement of what you guys want? What? What? What
Speaker 1: would be your if you could, if you were king
Speaker 1: and rule the world? What would you like to see happen? Well,
Speaker 1: the first thing is you've got to enforce whatever the
Speaker 1: immigration laws are. As you suggested. I mean that that
Speaker 1: should go without saying. But as far as legal immigration goes,
Speaker 1: the short version is that a modern society like ours
Speaker 1: has outgrown immigration. Immigrants aren't different really from a hundred
Speaker 1: or two hundred years ago, the same kind of people.
Speaker 1: What's different is our society. We have a post industrial
Speaker 1: knowledge based economy, we have a welfare state. The world
Speaker 1: has shrunk and so we need to downsize the federal
Speaker 1: immigration program because that's what it is. It's just a
Speaker 1: government program like the Air Force or the Small Business Administration,
Speaker 1: and it needs to be smaller, uh than it is now.
Speaker 1: And we take a million sometimes more legal immigrants every
Speaker 1: year and half a million plus so called temporary workers.
Speaker 1: A lot of them just end up staying anyway, uh.
Speaker 1: And that, you know, we just need to turn the
Speaker 1: dial down from that, you know, turn it down from
Speaker 1: eleven down to I don't know, something lower. That's interesting.
Speaker 1: I don't know if we've ever gotten into this. So
Speaker 1: you think the number of a million legal immigrants is
Speaker 1: too high? What do you think the number are to be? Well,
Speaker 1: I don't have a magic number because I don't think
Speaker 1: that's the way to think about it. What I The
Speaker 1: way I think about it is kind of like zero
Speaker 1: based budgeting, um where you start at zero not because
Speaker 1: you want zero immigration, but you start there because a
Speaker 1: modern society like ours, with a third of a billion
Speaker 1: people that spans a continent, doesn't really need any immigration.
Speaker 1: But once you started zero, then who are the categories
Speaker 1: of people that have such a compelling case to come
Speaker 1: in that we should let him in and for me
Speaker 1: that would be husband's wives and little kids of Americans.
Speaker 1: That's a lot of people every year, three hundred four
Speaker 1: hundred thousand people a year. And then real Einstein's which
Speaker 1: is not a huge number, and then people humanitarian immigration
Speaker 1: of people who really don't have anywhere else to go
Speaker 1: and literally cannot stay one more second where they are.
Speaker 1: The un actually keeps a list of people like that.
Speaker 1: So you add that up, it's you know, half less
Speaker 1: than half of what we take now, but it's still
Speaker 1: more immigration than any other country in the world taps,
Speaker 1: which often gets left out of the conversation um by
Speaker 1: people who who think we're evil and mean. Um. So
Speaker 1: you're laying this horrible tragedy from a couple of weeks
Speaker 1: ago where all those people died in the back of
Speaker 1: that truck the blame at Joe Biden's feet. Why, well,
Speaker 1: it's plenty of blame to go around. I mean, the
Speaker 1: smugglers themselves obviously are most directly responsibilities of the scum
Speaker 1: of the earth who use people for money, But the
Speaker 1: administration shares in the blame because what they've done with
Speaker 1: their immigration policies is essentially lure people here, uh like
Speaker 1: you said, if you get past the border, your home
Speaker 1: free for all intents and purposes, but it's you still
Speaker 1: have to There's still some people that get arrested and deported.
Speaker 1: So it's not totally open borders, which are terrible but
Speaker 1: at least wouldn't result in these kind of tragedies. But
Speaker 1: it's not an enforced border either. The way I refer
Speaker 1: to it is what we have under Biden is an
Speaker 1: open ish border. It's like putting a fence up around
Speaker 1: a swimming pool, which you're legally required to do because
Speaker 1: if some kid falls into your pool and there's no fence,
Speaker 1: your posible. But what we have is like offense around
Speaker 1: your swimming pool, but there's a lot of holes in
Speaker 1: it and you don't take care of it, and people
Speaker 1: can kids can still get in and they fall into
Speaker 1: the pool, and um, you know, that's that's on you.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's your responsibility. There's always going to be
Speaker 1: some people who want to come here, regardless of the laws,
Speaker 1: even if they know the odds are low of their
Speaker 1: getting of their succeeding. Some is still going to try,
Speaker 1: but not as many as now, given that the odds
Speaker 1: of success getting past the border patrol and living home
Speaker 1: free in the United States are so high under this administration.
Speaker 1: I would certainly try it if I was from one
Speaker 1: of these other countries and had a chance to get
Speaker 1: my family into the United States. Sure you would, I mean,
Speaker 1: especially if I mean the majority of the people who
Speaker 1: are encountered, that's the pc tourna instead of arrested who
Speaker 1: were encountered at the border, the majority of them in
Speaker 1: May were let go into the United States one way
Speaker 1: or another. Uh. In fact, since this administration has taken
Speaker 1: over well over one million illegal immigrants, illegal border crosses
Speaker 1: have just been let go into the United States. Some
Speaker 1: of them will show up for hearings, maybe, uh, some
Speaker 1: of them won't. But even the ones who show up
Speaker 1: for their hearings, at the end of the process, if
Speaker 1: they get turned down for asylum, as most people do,
Speaker 1: they still don't leave. And there's no intention of that
Speaker 1: Biden administration to find them and make them leave. So, um,
Speaker 1: why would like you said, why wouldn't you do it?
Speaker 1: And the Wall Street Journal crowd, which tends to be Republican,
Speaker 1: they're not gonna raise a stink about it because they
Speaker 1: need workers in you know, hotels, restaurants, and farms. The
Speaker 1: left is not going to raise a stink about it
Speaker 1: because they think they're getting voters, although I think that's
Speaker 1: being decreasingly true. But between those two things we don't
Speaker 1: get to the answer that you described earlier. I feel
Speaker 1: like if you put what you just described at the
Speaker 1: beginning of this as an immigration policy to Americans, I
Speaker 1: feel like that would be an above issue, don't you.
Speaker 1: I suspect it would be. Um. You know, it's not
Speaker 1: usually pulled in that way, and other posters don't really
Speaker 1: ask the questions that way. But yes, I think so.
Speaker 1: And I gotta say, though, both the libertarian and corporate
Speaker 1: folks on the one side and the lefties on the other,
Speaker 1: the kind of things you talked about, whether it's cheap
Speaker 1: labor or cheap votes, it's part of what's going on
Speaker 1: in there, you know, calculations, But I don't think that's
Speaker 1: the main thing in either case. I think it's ideological.
Speaker 1: In other words, their worldview is that they're citizens of
Speaker 1: the world. They're post American. I don't mean they hate America.
Speaker 1: Some of them do, but for the most part, you know,
Speaker 1: they're happy enough to be here, but they don't consider
Speaker 1: themselves to have any greater responsibility to their fellow Americans
Speaker 1: than to others. And therefore, what that means is it
Speaker 1: would be wrong for somebody, say from Haiti, to be
Speaker 1: kept out. And if they make it here, we have
Speaker 1: no right to say no. That's the what that that
Speaker 1: at the bottom, that's what the perspective of the anti
Speaker 1: borders people is, is that believe an unlimited immigration. I
Speaker 1: get that libertarian argument that works if you don't have
Speaker 1: a welfare state, because you know, if you even even
Speaker 1: if you did, even if you didn't have a welfare state,
Speaker 1: it wouldn't work. I mean, it'd be better to live
Speaker 1: on the street in the US than type of job
Speaker 1: in Haiti. Equally decent point, but it wouldn't work as easily.
Speaker 1: But if you do have a welfare state like we do,
Speaker 1: it works pretty well. If you can get in here,
Speaker 1: you'll get fed, you'll get your cancer treated, you'll get
Speaker 1: your abortion paid for, whatever it is that you want. Then,
Speaker 1: you know, and what I what I tell people who
Speaker 1: make that argument is Okay, well, let's just for the
Speaker 1: sake of argument, let's stipulate that, so get rid of
Speaker 1: the welfare state and then come back to me and
Speaker 1: we'll talk, and the fact is it's not happening. A
Speaker 1: welfare standard. Look, I'm a conservative personally. Matter think tank
Speaker 1: is more kind of diverse and ambidextrous. But um, I'm conservative,
Speaker 1: and I think our um social system of social provision
Speaker 1: for the poor needs to be more tightly run and
Speaker 1: more responsible. But even I don't want to get rid
Speaker 1: of the welfare state. It's the part of a modern society.
Speaker 1: I don't want people dying on the steps of the
Speaker 1: emergency room because you know they can't afford care. But
Speaker 1: you can't have a society like that and then constantly
Speaker 1: have it open two people from countries that aren't as developed.
Speaker 1: What kinds of people do you think we need in
Speaker 1: this country? And I don't mean skin color, for crying
Speaker 1: out loud, I mean skills. I don't care what some
Speaker 1: of these skin colors, But what what what best benefits?
Speaker 1: Outside of that you talked about refugees and people from
Speaker 1: all that sort of stuff. Get that. I'm on board
Speaker 1: with that. But in general, if we want to import workers,
Speaker 1: what what do we need? We don't really need workers,
Speaker 1: That's that's my point. In other words, there were, like
Speaker 1: I said, we have a third of a billion people.
Speaker 1: We have actually a larger and larger share of working
Speaker 1: age people who have dropped out of the labor market.
Speaker 1: This is a serious social problem. That's what we need
Speaker 1: to fix, not just import people to replace them and
Speaker 1: then send the Americans welfare checks and you know, cheap
Speaker 1: hypodermic needles. I mean, that's not a solution. But uh,
Speaker 1: you know, there are people who a relatively small number
Speaker 1: of people, like I said Einstein, immigrants whose contribution to
Speaker 1: the productive capacity of the United States is so could
Speaker 1: be so large that um, I'm happy to let him in,
Speaker 1: and most people are. But we're not talking about people
Speaker 1: with you know, a bachelor's degree from hid or a
Speaker 1: bad community college. We're talking about somebody with a pH
Speaker 1: d in chemical engineering or something like that that you know, Okay,
Speaker 1: I'm I'm happy for I'll go and drive the green
Speaker 1: card over to the person myself. But and and people
Speaker 1: like that are and he can get in even under
Speaker 1: our current system. It's just that we have defined you know,
Speaker 1: best and brightest as it were, way too broadly, which
Speaker 1: is probably similar to the fact that domestically, you know,
Speaker 1: half the kids in school get the honor roll. You
Speaker 1: know what, I mean, it's not because they're all smartest,
Speaker 1: because everybody is supposedly above average. Well, we've got that
Speaker 1: same perspective for too much of skilled immigration. Well, and
Speaker 1: then the other side of our immigration system, which is
Speaker 1: so angering. If you've ever known anybody who tried to
Speaker 1: do it the right way. I had a friend who
Speaker 1: was a PhD PhD biologist who was constantly fighting our system.
Speaker 1: He would he would like need to go on to
Speaker 1: go home to take care of his sick mom, and
Speaker 1: he couldn't go because something happened with the paperwork and
Speaker 1: they weren't gonna let him back in. And I mean,
Speaker 1: they make it so, we make it so hard for
Speaker 1: people are trying to do it the right way. It's
Speaker 1: very frustrating. Yeah, I mean, and that's one of the ways.
Speaker 1: That is one of the reasons you see that our
Speaker 1: immigration law is the is the second most complicated and
Speaker 1: byzantine part of our immigration our legal system, after the
Speaker 1: tax code. And so one of the important elements of
Speaker 1: a better immigration policy is radical simplification. In other words,
Speaker 1: streamlined stuff, cut out all of this nonsense. And the
Speaker 1: fact is the immigration lawyers and the rest of them
Speaker 1: like that stuff because it creates employment for them, just
Speaker 1: like tax lawyers. Lawyers complicated the voice lawyers. I suppose, yeah,
Speaker 1: well you're luckily you will only say I suppose I
Speaker 1: can speak from personal experience. UM. Hey, Mark Rikorian Um,
Speaker 1: executive director, Center for Immigration Studies, Thanks for coming on today.
Speaker 1: Very enlightening. I appreciate the fact that you always have
Speaker 1: so much knowledge at your fingertips. Thanks for coming on.
Speaker 1: Thank you.