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unidentified
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Civil discussion, learning from people of different parties. | |
| We need more of this. | ||
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| We'll see you a little bit. | ||
| Wednesday, a look at ways to increase government efficiency and reduce unnecessary spending with Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds and Citizens Against Government Waste President Thomas Schatz testifying before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. | ||
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| Welcome back. | ||
| We are joined now by Mark Grocorian. | ||
| He's Executive Director of the Center for Immigration Studies. | ||
| Mark, welcome. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| So just start by telling us about the Center for Immigration Studies and what position you take on legal and illegal immigration. | ||
| The center is a think tank. | ||
| We've been around 40 years. | ||
| This is our 40th anniversary. | ||
| And our mission is to critique current immigration policy and make the case for tighter enforcement and lower levels of legal immigration. | ||
| So even legal immigration, you would like to see that reduced. | ||
| Why is that? | ||
| Large-scale immigration is incompatible with the goals and the characteristics of a modern society. | ||
| In other words, conditions have changed from 100 and 200 years ago. | ||
| We're a post-industrial knowledge-based economy. | ||
| We have a welfare state. | ||
| Advances in transportation and communication have shrunk the world. | ||
| All of those things mean the situation we're in is fundamentally different from anything we faced before. | ||
| And large-scale immigration is just creates problems and is inconsistent with the kind of society we have now in a way that wasn't necessarily true 100 or 200 years ago, even though immigration even then was a challenge, but it was easier to deal with back then than it is today. | ||
| And what data do you point to to come to that conclusion that we're at a point now in our country's history where we just don't need as much legal immigration? | ||
| We're a continent spanning country with a third of a billion people. | ||
| We don't actually need any immigration. | ||
| The issue is, are there particular groups of people whose admission is so compelling that we let them in anyway? | ||
| And that would be husbands, wives, and little kids of American citizens, which is actually more than you think. | ||
| That's 300,000, 400,000 people a year. | ||
| A handful of real geniuses, Einsteins, and a handful of humanitarian immigrants who literally have nowhere else to go and no other options. | ||
| You add that up, it's something like half or less than the current level of 1.1 million immigrants that we take today. | ||
| And when you look at the economy, are there certain jobs, for instance, in agriculture, for instance, in home health care, that are predominantly staffed by legal immigrants? | ||
| If that were to go away, would that impact the economy and the services that Americans expect? | ||
| First thing to keep in mind is that any changes in immigration policy, whether it's enforcement or whether it's legal immigration policy, will result in a process of change, not an overnight event. | ||
| In other words, you don't wake up overnight and then all the immigrant workers are gone. | ||
| The issue is how do we sort of adjust to a different situation? | ||
| And in a market economy, there's no such thing as jobs that Americans won't do. | ||
| There are jobs that Americans won't do at particular wages, in particular ways, with particular benefits. | ||
| And the fact is, almost all categories of jobs that people think of as immigrant-dominated, in fact, native-born Americans do most of them, whether it's janitorial work, whether it's construction work, all of those kind of things. | ||
| There's only a handful of relatively narrow slices of the job market that are immigrant dominated. | ||
| Picking fresh fruits and vegetables is one of them. | ||
| But there aren't that many people who do that. | ||
| And there are technological solutions to that, to mechanize that work. | ||
| So there's still people involved, but fewer people. | ||
| And the incentive to move to that kind of higher productivity economy are undermined when we take in lots of people from overseas. | ||
| If you'd like to join our conversation with Mark Krikorian about immigration, you can do so. | ||
| Our lines are bipartisan. | ||
| So Republicans 202748-8001. | ||
| Democrats 202-748-8000. | ||
| And Independents 202748-8002. | ||
| Let's talk about President Trump's immigration raids. | ||
| What has been your reaction for these first two weeks? | ||
| We really needed this kind of restart of immigration enforcement because immigration enforcement was, for all intents and purposes, stopped under the Biden administration, especially inside the country. | ||
| And so what Tom Holman, Border Czar Tom Holman, has done, and he said is we're going to go after the worst first. | ||
| They're going after criminals, but they're also going after people who have had final orders of removal, it's called. | ||
| In other words, they've been ordered, deported, and they just ignored it. | ||
| They're fugitives. | ||
| There's close to a million and a half people like that. | ||
| So the idea that we're now restarting immigration enforcement, that if you just ignored an order to leave the country, you don't just get away with that anymore. | ||
| And it's essential to end that kind of impunity. | ||
| So I applaud what they've been doing so far. | ||
| You said a million and a half? | ||
| Close to it. | ||
| I think it's 1.4 million is the last number I saw. | ||
| Do we have an idea of how long those immigration raids would last for those 1.5 million people? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, you can't, I couldn't come up with a number. | ||
| I have no idea. | ||
| And part of the reason, part of the strategy, of course, is not just to arrest everyone they need to arrest, but also incentivize people to go home on their own. | ||
| In other words, that they're not going to be able to get away with this anymore. | ||
| The party's over and it's time to pack up and frankly leave on your own terms in a more kind of dignified way so that you pack up the car, pack up the family, and leave ahead of ICE coming to get you. | ||
| And do we know if that's happening? | ||
| It's definitely happening. | ||
| We don't know the magnitude of it because it always happens to some degree. | ||
| Heck, even under the Biden administration, there were illegal immigrants who left. | ||
| There's always churn. | ||
| The goal is to have fewer people come in illegally and more of the people who are here illegally leave, either on their own or, you know, under in custody. | ||
| And this new center that's being built in Guantanamo Bay, can you explain what that is and who would be there and who would be detained there? | ||
| This is actually just restarting something that we've done a number of times under the Clinton administration, other administrations, where we would detain illegal immigrants of one sort or another at Guantanamo. | ||
| And it's a big place. | ||
| It's not like they're going to be with the terrorists. | ||
| This is its own facility. | ||
| And the way the Trump administration has talked about it is that's where they're going to put the criminals that their own countries aren't taking yet. | ||
| In other words, it'll be sort of a holding facility while the administration applies pressure to what is called recalcitrant countries, countries that are not honoring their international obligations to take their own people back. | ||
| And there's a lot of countries like that. | ||
| Venezuela was one of them, but the president seems to have, you know, persuaded them, either with carrot or stick or both, to comply with their international obligations. | ||
| There are still other countries that aren't doing that. | ||
| And so as I understand it, that's one of the main reasons they're setting up this Guantanamo facility so they can get people out of the United States until they can get the paperwork and the travel documents and et cetera to send them home to their own country. | ||
| And is there information about how many people they'll be able to hold ultimately or how long? | ||
| Yeah, the capacity they've reported is up to 30,000. | ||
| And frankly, in earlier crises back 30 years ago now, there was a Cuban-Haitian rafter boat people crisis. | ||
| They held more than 20,000 people there at one point or another. | ||
| So, you know, we would be a moving target, but as I understand it, there would be maximum capacity of 30,000. | ||
| And there was, of course, President Trump was threatening tariffs against Mexico. | ||
| That's been halted for 30 days. | ||
| What do you think of that as a method of decreasing illegal immigration flowing over that southern border? | ||
| And can that be, is there more that you think should be done? | ||
| Mexico is what you would call a gatekeeper country for us. | ||
| In other words, it's the country that illegal immigrants pass through to get to our country, like Turkey is for Europe, for instance. | ||
| And they play an essential role in limiting illegal immigration into the United States. | ||
| Mexico never used to care too much about it because they were mainly Mexicans, and they're not going to start their own people, stop their own people from traveling. | ||
| But most illegal immigrants are not Mexican anymore. | ||
| And so Mexico actually has an interest in working with us to stop third country illegal aliens coming through their own country. | ||
| And in fact, even politically in Mexico, with regular voters, they've kind of, they're sick of foreigners using their country as a doormat. | ||
| And so I think there really is a confluence of interest here in both stopping illegal immigration, but also drugs, which is the other top thing, even though that's not my area. | ||
| That's the other thing that the president has stressed. | ||
| All right, let's talk to callers. | ||
| And this is Rob, a Republican in Deedham, Massachusetts. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey, good morning. | |
| How are you doing? | ||
| Mr. Kikorian, very familiar with your organization. | ||
| Both Jessica and Todd Bensman have swung to Boston for Bostonians against sanctuary cities. | ||
| And Lou Murray says hi to you. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Anyways, we're in the middle of ground zero here with Michelle Lou and Governor Healy. | |
| And we have all these convoluted laws that have been basically bastardized to support all these people. | ||
| And we're all full here. | ||
| And the problem is, I think personally that the reason why they want all these illegals here is to basically fill up roles again for all the other Massachusetts people who left. | ||
| They need a new congressman, sir, besides all the collateral damage that these people judge. | ||
| What do you think? | ||
| Well, I don't think there's actually that kind of strategy behind either sanctuary cities or, you know, at the national level when the Biden administration was allowing massive illegal immigration. | ||
| I think their perspective is that immigration controls are immoral, that stopping anyone who wants to come here is simply not allowed. | ||
| It's not acceptable morally. | ||
| It's racist, it's oppressive, et cetera. | ||
| And so everything kind of follows from that. | ||
| I'm not really sure. | ||
| I really don't think there's sort of a thought-out strategy about why they're doing this. | ||
| It's just a kind of natural reaction to their rejection of the very idea of immigration limits. | ||
| President Trump made changes to the CPB1 app, which was a way for asylum seekers to ask for a hearing in front of a judge. | ||
| That's gone away. | ||
| There are reports that even those appointments have been canceled. | ||
| Can you tell us what's happening with that and what your view is on asylum seekers in the United States and what should happen to them? | ||
| The CBP1 app was developed actually during the first Trump administration, but it was just a traffic management thing for like bus lines and truck lines to smooth out the traffic at the border. | ||
| The Biden administration turned it into a tool for illegal immigrants or potential illegal immigrants to schedule their illegal immigration is kind of what it amounted to because these are people who are inadmissible. | ||
| have no right to enter the United States and so the Biden administration including asylum seekers yep they have no asylum seekers Asylum, a request for asylum is a defense against deportation. | ||
| You're an illegal alien and then you say, I want asylum, please don't deport me. | ||
| So nobody from overseas or across the border has a right to enter the United States illegally just to make an asylum claim. | ||
| But the Biden administration was using this tool, CBP1, as a way for people who have no right to come here to come in and then ostensibly to make an asylum claim. | ||
| So it was, frankly, the administration, the Biden administration was violating the law. | ||
| The people coming in with the CBP1 app were out breaking the law. | ||
| They weren't jumping the border illegally. | ||
| It was the administration that was breaking the law for them by letting them in. | ||
| It had to be ended. | ||
| And frankly, this is a whole other show, but asylum is a surrender of sovereignty. | ||
| The illegal immigrant says, you have to let me in. | ||
| You have to let me stay. | ||
| That's not sustainable, and we need a bottom-up reassessment of what our asylum policy is. | ||
| Do you think that those who are already in the country who are seeking asylum should have their case heard in front of a judge and determine whether or not they should be allowed to stay based on that asylum claim? | ||
| Yeah, they're in the pipeline. | ||
| Yeah, we end up having to inevitably give them their day in court. | ||
| The problem is the law requires that everyone making that kind of asylum claim has to be held in detention until a decision is made. | ||
| The previous administration just let them go. |