Andrew Clavin dissects Trump’s revival of Operation Wetback—deporting 1.3M undocumented immigrants in the 1950s—as a law-and-order smokescreen, ignoring economic and humanitarian factors. Ted Cruz frames illegal immigration as a union-backed exploit, while Jeb Bush balances enforcement with compassion, though Clavin mocks his delivery. Trump’s "deportation force" and "wall" are dismissed as unrealistic, yet polls show his hardline stance resonates despite lacking concrete plans. Clavin critiques the GOP’s dilemma: strict enforcement alienates Hispanics, leniency risks base backlash, with only Cruz and Rubio openly admitting to eventual amnesty. The debate hinges on balancing justice and mercy, but Trump’s performative toughness obscures pragmatic solutions, leaving voters to choose between rigid law or flawed compassion. [Automatically generated summary]
The 1950s, a time of faith, family, and Operation Wetback.
And Donald Trump wants to return us to Operation Wetback.
Thank you, Donald, for always bringing out the best in us.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
All right, Andrew Clavin Show, the last one of the week, and good thing, because as you can hear, my voice is slowly, slowly fading away.
I'd like to think that the softer I get, the more profound I'll become until finally there's just this kind of Buddhistic silence.
It'll be like the lotus sermon of the Buddha.
You know, you'll all just say, wow, when he said nothing, that really, you know, I suddenly really saw the whole Zen thing.
So, Operation Wetback, that is really what it was called during the Eisenhower administration that Donald Trump was making reference to during the debate when they got rid of about a million point three, I think, of a million 300,000 illegal immigrants who were working in America, and they just shepherded them out of the country.
And they all came back, but they did chase them out, and that was Operation Wetback.
So we're going to talk about immigration and how conservatives have gotten caught in one of the most essential Western values.
They have gotten caught in the whirlpool of this essential Western value and why they're having such a hard time saying what they mean and meaning what they say.
So we'll come back to that in just a second and talk about that.
Just one other thing.
Is anybody going to the movies?
Now that James Bond is out, is that it for the movies until Christmas?
Hunger Games?
Hunger Games, yeah.
That's it?
Okay.
I have, it's screener season when I get all my free movies so that I can vote for the WTA.
What?
Creed comes out.
Oh, Creed?
Is that this weekend?
Thanksgiving weekend.
Thanksgiving weekend.
All right, that looks good.
I have to say, a genuinely clever way of moving that franchise on.
And I'd like Salone said, so I'm just as old as Burgess Meredith was when I made the first film.
Isn't that amazing?
And I thought, that's not amazing.
I was like 40 years ago.
It makes sense to me.
I got, as a screener, I got Trainwreck, the Judd Appetow comedy about, what's her name?
Amy Schumer.
Yeah, Amy Schumer sleeping with everybody and then coming, falling in love and all that.
So I will actually watch that and I will come back and report on it and it'll give us a chance to talk about sex, which is what we're thinking about anyway.
So let's start out.
Best moment from the debate two days ago, Ted Cruz.
Let's just look at Ted Cruz's comment about immigration.
The Democrats are laughing.
Because if Republicans join Democrats as the party of amnesty, we will lose.
And you know, I understand that when the mainstream media covers immigration, it doesn't often see it as an economic issue.
But I can tell you for millions of Americans at home watching this, it is a very personal economic issue.
And I will say the politics of it would be very, very different if a bunch of lawyers or bankers were crossing the Rio Grande.
or if a bunch of people with journalism degrees were coming over and driving down the wages in the press, then we would see stories about the economic calamity that is befalling our nation.
And I will say for those of us who believe people ought to come to this country legally and we should enforce the law, we're tired of being told it's anti-immigrant.
It's offensive.
Yeah, it is offensive.
And this is everything I talk about, everything that we don't do, usually do.
He's not being against programs.
He's being for people.
He's being for the poor.
He's pointing out that it is false, hypocritical compassion to just allow this cheap labor to flood into the country illegally.
Let's compare it, first of all, before we compare it to anything else, let's compare it to Hillary McSmarmy Pants.
Hillary Clinton.
And here she is talking to a group of Hispanics and making her pitch, what she's going to do.
We can't wait any longer for a path to full and equal citizenship.
Now, this is where I differ with everybody on the Republican side.
Make no mistakes.
Today, not a single Republican candidate, announced or potential, is clearly and consistently supporting a path to citizenship.
Not one.
When they talk about legal status, that is code for second class status.
So I will fight for comprehensive immigration reform and a path to citizenship for you and for your families across our country.
I will fight to stop partisan attacks on the executive actions that would put dreamers, including those with us today, at risk of deportation.
And if Congress continues to refuse to act as president, I would do everything possible under the law to go even further.
So the DREAMers, and if that is not the smarmiest piece of left-wing rhetoric, I mean, how smarmy is that?
We're all dreamers.
You know, we all have aspirations.
We all have goals.
What does that mean?
You know, like even the jihadis have a dream.
You know, their dream is to blow you the hell away.
That's their dream.
Oh, it's a dream.
He's a man with a dream.
It's your dream.
You know, that is so smarmy.
It's so incredible.
And it really bugs me that there are people going like, yes, the dreamers.
That makes them feel good about themselves, that they're that dishonest with themselves, that they would buy into that.
So she's playing the compassion card.
It's all about the compassion for these poor dreamers who maybe aren't living in your neighborhood because Democrats win the cities.
They don't win the country.
They don't win the country at all.
They only win the cities.
And so they're living out in the country somewhere doing farm labor.
They're not taking your job away.
They're not taking your media job away.
They're not taking your city, whatever your city job is.
They ain't taking that.
They're not taking your union job away.
They're taking the jobs of people that she doesn't have to worry about.
She just has to care.
She just has to care.
And Ted Cruz made this point outside the debate.
He said, I would point out, everyone talks about how compassionate it is to grant amnesty to 12 million people here illegally.
They're very compassionate, but it's not very compassionate if I say, I'm going to give away your job.
That's the opposite of compassion.
So he gets that right.
Cruz gets the right note.
He hits them where they live.
He understands what he's talking about.
Now, here's the funny thing, and we should all be aware of this.
The best studies I've looked at say that illegal immigration is good for the economy.
Now that drives people crazy, but it's true.
If you're at the lowest income, that's like if you're at the lowest level of education, like 25 million people, you don't have a high school education, you're a manual laborer, you're screwed by illegal immigration.
That's whose job they're taking away.
And you have to either decide, well, I'm going to take lower wages, or I'm just going to get out of the workforce and live off Obama's largesse.
So those people get hurt.
But for the rest of the economy, it's good.
Why?
Because the Democrats have made it so expensive to hire people legally.
The unions have made it so expensive to hire people legally that they have to import illegals to break their own rules.
So they have priced the lower guys out of the market in America.
They've priced you, you're the lowest guy out of America.
And those people we need to do low-level jobs, they have to import them illegally.
The minute they give them amnesty, they won't help the economy anymore because you'll have to pay them according to American rules.
So they've really got you coming and going.
It really is a bind, all right?
Now, the issue of immigration is tough for the GOP because in pure numbers terms, right, if we are hard-boiled about it, we gain our base, but we lose the Mexicans.
And the Mexicans, the Hispanics are becoming a bigger and bigger part of our country.
Even if we don't let more in, they're going to reproduce and become a bigger and bigger part of our country.
So we lose those voters if we're harsh about it.
If we're nice about it, of course, we lose the guys who support us, the people who believe in the rule of law.
So we're caught in between.
And all the different players are playing at some different angle on that spectrum.
How tough to be about it?
Do we deport them all?
The softest one, let's take a look at Jeb Bush.
The softest one is Jeb Bush.
He comes forward first, always first, with his compassion.
I believe that the great majority of people coming here illegally have no other option.
They want to provide for their family.
But we need to control our border.
It's our responsibility to pick and choose who comes in.
So I've written a book about this, and this week I did come up with a comprehensive strategy that really mirrored what we said in the book, which is that we need to deal with E-Verify.
We need to deal with people that come with a legal visa and overstay.
We need to be much more strategic on how we deal with border enforcement, border security.
We need to eliminate the sanctuary cities in this country.
It is ridiculous and tragic that people are dying because of the fact that local governments are not following the federal law.
There's much to do.
Oh, sorry.
What is it about Jeb Bush, Jeb Exclamation Point Bush, that the minute he starts talking, what I hear him say is, we have to do a rabba-doo-baba-baba-baba.
Because something about that guy just makes my eyes glaze over.
All right.
So he's trying in that bite to emphasize the enforcement part of it.
But really, he's offering amnesty to all the illegals who are here.
Now, this thing blew up after the debate.
Again, the issue blew up.
And I realized I don't know where I stand on this debate.
I'm kind of torn.
On the one hand, it's obvious madness to leave your border open.
We've got all these people who just can't wait to come in and kill us, aside from criminals who come in.
You can't, you know, any more than the rich people who are being so compassionate leave their front gates and the walls of the gates of their communities open.
You know, you can't, America's a nice place to be.
You can't leave the gates open and let anybody come in.
It's just not going to work.
It's insane.
It's insane.
On the other hand, I can't go with Ann Coulter.
Ann, I love Anne.
I know Ann.
I'm crazy about her.
I really am.
Her thing is that, first of all, the Mexicans vote eight to one, I think, for Democrats.
So if we let them in, Republicans will never win another election.
And then she emphasizes all the criminals who come in and the fact that when people can do things illegally, illegal types do them.
And so you get a lot of criminals.
It's true in California, our prisons are filled with Hispanics, I mean, with Latinos, and most of them, I guess, are probably from south of the border.
And Ann has just made this the only issue.
She believes it's the only issue.
And like I said, I'm just absolutely crazy about her.
I have to say, she and I have sat together many times.
We've had many pleasant evenings in a bar.
The minute I open my mouth about this and even express like the slightest compassion for these people, she'll just rip me apart.
I mean, the thing I like about Ann, in the old days, a guy would take a look at someone like Anne.
She's absolutely beautiful.
And if it doesn't come across on TV, I mean, she's just absolutely adorable.
And she's brilliant, and she's sharp, and she's tough.
In the old days, guys would like sail across the ocean to like, you know, win her, to tame her.
You know, my God, I'm going to win her and tame her.
That would be the attitude that a man would take to a woman like Ann Coulter.
Now it's like, she's so mean.
She's so mean.
You know, I spilled my cocoa on my onesie.
She was so mean, you know.
It's like, I just, you know, the time is coming, and the way I sound, it may be coming very rapidly when I have to leave the world behind to you young guys, you know.
I'd like to know it's still going to be populated in my absence.
Is that onesie on that?
Remember that guy with that one?
Does that even have a zipper in front?
Does it need a zipper?
Anyway, now I'm just getting coarse.
I have to go home.
My wife is going to say, why do you say those coarse things?
I have to admit, if I had to get my kids out of Mexico to earn a living and get away from the mob rule down there, when I say mob rule, I mean rule by mobsters, not ruled by the mob.
I mean ruled by mobsters.
I would do it.
I would break the law.
I mean, I would break the law and I would come up here.
So it's really hard for me to go along with Donald Trump.
We're going to listen to Donald Trump.
This is after the debate.
He went on Morning Joe and did his Trumpian, Trumpty-Dumpty best to sell this idea that he was going to be the toughest of all tough, incredibly tough people on immigration.
Here's Trump, what he's going to do.
Millions of people that are waiting online to come into this country, and they're waiting to come in legally.
And I always say, the wall.
We're going to build the wall.
It's going to be a real deal.
It's going to be a real wall.
There was a picture in one of the magazines where they had a wall this tall and they were taking drugs over the wall.
They built a ramp over the wall and the truck was going up and down.
They were using it like a highway.
The wall was like a highway.
And this is not going to happen.
It's going to be a Trump wall.
There's going to be a real wall.
That actually got cut a little.
And right before that, he says, we're going to have a deportation force.
We're going to have a special deportation force to go around deporting people.
And he made reference during the debate to the fact that Eisenhower had this thing.
They had let workers in during the war, basically.
And they had kept pouring in.
And so Eisenhower, under the Eisenhower administration, they had this thing.
And I swear, it was called Operation Wetback.
And they deported a million point three Mexicans back over the border.
And that's what he's going to bring back.
Before I even get into this, I have to just pause.
This has nothing to do with anything.
Just a complete tangent.
I just have to pause for a minute.
Special Deportation Force00:04:46
My pal, Stephen Crowder, he's a comedian.
He has a site called Louder with Crowder.
And he puts videos up there.
This guy, I love the guy.
One day, I'm going to get a call from his wife at 3 o'clock in the morning telling me he's been put away because he is out of his mind.
And he puts up, he is so talented, you know.
I was once going to do a video in which I did an imitation of Rick Astley, you know, that guy, I'm never going to give you up, never going to.
And, you know, there was this thing called a Rick Roll where you would send Rick Astley to people.
So I was going to imitate a Rick Roll.
And for three days, for three days, I stood in front of a mirror with a YouTube video of Rick Astley dancing around, trying to imitate this, and I couldn't get anywhere close to it.
And I was walking in to the studio to record this thing, and I bump into Crowder, and I say to Crowder, I'm going in, I'm going to imitate Rick Astley.
And Crowder, in the moment, just transformed himself into Astley, and he got every move exactly right.
It's just like this natural gift he has.
He put out this video of a debate in this is the CNNBC debate where he imitated Trump and Ben Carson.
This guy would be, he really would be on Saturday Night Live if he weren't a conservative.
Just listen to that.
You just have to hear this for a minute.
Just listen to his, this is Stephen Crowder, louder with Crowder, doing Trump versus Ben Carson.
Frankly, minorities love me, okay?
I get so many Mexicans all the time coming up to me telling me, we love your plan.
We love your plan so much.
We want to have more plans that come from Trump.
And frankly, okay, they call me the black machine with how many votes I'm going to get from the blacks.
Okay, that's what they call it.
That's not what I would call myself.
That's what they call me.
They call me the black machine.
Dr. Ben Carson, would you care to respond?
Well, listen, I think that Mr. Trump has injected some new life into the process.
I don't agree with him on everything.
I think that what he just said was borderline functionally retarded.
Oh, I am getting in my ear that your mic.
I'm sorry, Mr. Carson.
Could you repeat that?
Your microphone was not on.
No, I'm quite confident that my microphone is still on.
Holy crap, you are right.
It is still on.
Stephen Crowder, louder with Crowder.
Holy crap, their microphone is on.
I just love that.
I just like the Ben Carson thing is hilarious.
Every time he talks, I find myself leaning into the TV.
Anyway, so Trump is going to have a special deportation force.
It's going to be a Trump wall.
And the Mexicans are going to love that.
They're going to pay for it.
They're going to pay for the Trump wall.
A survey comes out.
It says, which one of the Republican candidates for president in 2016 would best handle the issue of immigration?
This was asked of Republicans, okay?
49% said Donald Trump.
The next one down is not sure.
So 49% is not sure.
And then 49% is Donald Trump, and then not sure, and then Marco Rubio.
So people just love what he is saying.
The reason I don't love what he's saying is because I don't like being lied to.
There are not going to be any mass deportations.
There are not going to be any mass deportations.
So Donald Trump is looking in the camera and he is lying.
That's not going to happen.
And what bothers me, because we're the good guys, right?
We're not supposed to want to be lied to.
When people listen to Hillary Clinton, she's talking about the dreamers.
They're going, oh, that makes me feel good about myself.
Lie to me some more, Hillary.
I love it.
I love it when you lie, Hillary.
I mean, the press actually says that about her.
She's lying.
I love the way she lies.
She lies.
We're not supposed to be those guys, okay?
And that's what Donald Trump is doing.
When you listen to Donald Trump, when anybody ever pressures him into details, he's basically saying the same thing as everybody else, including Bush.
He's saying we should seal the borders, deport the criminals, and find some accommodation for the people who are here.
They're all saying it.
It's all a question of tone.
Bush is saying it in the softest possible way.
He's starting with the compassion.
Trump is saying it in the hardest possible way.
People are angry, so they respond to the way Trump is saying it.
Of the people out there, the only ones who I really trust are Cruz and Rubio.
And Cruz is hitting Rubio because Rubio changed his mind.
I get that.
But Rubio knows what he did, and he knows the base won't respond.
And I think he's honest enough to actually live up to what he's saying.
So they're all saying the same thing.
Mercy Over Law00:08:37
And why are we getting caught in this?
Why is it that the Democrats, whose plans make no sense whatsoever, whose plans are so wrong, because not only would they ruin life for the poor workers of our country, poor American workers, but once these people get amnesty and have the vote and have to be paid according to our laws and our unions, the benefit that they bring to our economy, which is the benefit of undermining stupid Democrat economics,
would be gone.
What's going on?
This is the basic conflict of Western civilization, the rule of law versus the role of humanity and mercy.
This is so inherent in our Christian doctrine that it's even controversial in the Gospels.
In the Gospels, there's the story of the woman taken in adultery.
You know, I'll read it.
I'll read the story.
This is a woman caught in adultery.
Jesus returned to the Mount of Olives, but early the next morning, he was back again at the temple.
He's in Jerusalem.
He's teaching at the temple.
A crowd soon gathered, and he sat down and he taught them.
And as he was speaking, the teachers of religious law and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in the act of adultery.
They put her in front of the crowd.
Teacher, they said to Jesus, this woman was caught in the act of adultery.
The law of Moses says, stoner, what do you say?
They were trying to trap him into saying something they could use against him, but Jesus stooped down and wrote in the dust with his finger.
They kept demanding an answer, so he stood up again and said, all right, but let the one who has never sinned throw the first stone.
Then he stooped down again and wrote in the dust.
When the accusers heard this, they slipped away one by one.
I love that.
You can pretty well picture that.
They slipped away one by one, beginning with the oldest, until only Jesus was left in the middle of the crowd with the woman.
Then Jesus stood up again and said to the woman, where are your accusers?
Didn't even one of them condemn you?
No, Lord, she said.
And Jesus said, neither do I. Go and sin no more.
In the Clavin translation, that's get out of here, sweetheart, instead of trouble.
This passage is not found in the earliest.
This is the Gospel of John.
It's not found in the earliest Gospels.
There actually has been, I kid you not, a movement to have it removed as inauthentic.
But it's obviously authentic.
It's obviously the voice of Jesus.
You recognize that voice is unmistakable.
It's referred to in documents as old as the 300, I think, really old documents.
And it was agreed by all the church fathers that it was authentic.
They want to take it out, the people want to take it out, it's because it's so difficult.
Because we know, of course, once we take away the law, that's the rule of law.
That's what they're saying.
Follow the rule of law.
And he's saying, yeah, okay, but follow it according to your own ability.
This thing was, this idea is so powerful and so central that Shakespeare wrote an entire play about it called Measure for Measure.
It's one of my favorite Shakespeare plots.
I will give it to you really quickly, okay?
The Duke of Vienna leaves Vienna, travels away from Vienna, and appoints a very tough judge, Angelo, to take his place.
And this is what he says.
I will just read you a little bit of this.
The reason he's leaving is because the laws haven't been enforced.
And so things are getting out of hand, and he wants Angelo to come in and be tough, okay?
And the Duke says, we have strict statutes and most biting laws, the needful bits and curbs to headstrong weeds, which for this 19 years we have let slip.
Even like an oregrown lion in a cave that goes not out to pray, so the law is like a caged lion that's not being let out.
He says, now as fond fathers, having bound up the threatening twigs of birch, only to stick it in their children's sight for terror, not to use, in time, the rod becomes more mocked than feared.
Okay, so if you keep threatening your kids with a spanking, but you never do it, they start laughing at you when you threaten them.
He said, so our decrees, our laws, dead to infliction, to themselves are dead, and liberty plucks justice by the nose.
The baby beats the nurse and quite a thwart goes all decorum.
So in other words, he's saying, I haven't enforced the laws, and now it would be unfair for me to do it.
So I'm leaving town and putting Angelo in charge.
So Angelo says, all right, we're enforcing the laws, rule of law.
The first thing he does is he condemns a guy named Claudio to death.
And Claudio is a wonderful guy, but he's gotten his girlfriend pregnant.
And that's fornication against the law.
He has to be beheaded.
Now the thing is, Shakespeare plays this for everything it's worth because the two, Claudio and his girlfriend, were married in everything but like one little rule because it took weeks to get married in those days.
And so they've really been married.
They just haven't dotted the I, basically.
And he gets her pregnant.
So they're going to put him to death.
So a friend of Claudio's goes to Claudio's sister and she is a nun and just the most wonderful person in the world.
And she is, you know, obviously virginal and all this.
And she goes and pleads the case to Angelo.
And she says to him, just this great passage.
I have it, but it's easier to understand if I do it.
So she says, she says, if, let me find the passage.
Basically what she says is, it's an excellent thing to have the strength of a giant, but it's tyranny to use it like a giant.
Even heaven, she says, when it sets out lightning, hits the big things, the oak.
It hits the oak.
It doesn't hit the flowers.
It doesn't hit the little guy.
It uses, you know, uses discretion.
And she says, but man, she says that's how heaven behaves.
She says, but man, proud man, dressed in a little brief authority.
He's just a king for a minute until he's dead.
Man, proud man, dressed in a little brief authority, most ignorant of what he's most assured.
He's the surest of himself where he knows the least.
Sounds very familiar, right?
Like all of us.
Like an angry ape, plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven as makes the angels weep.
Okay, what happens?
Angelo takes one look at this nun, Isabella, this virginal nun, and he gets the hots for her.
Of course he does.
You know, she's cute, she's a virgin.
So he says, okay, I'll pardon your brother if you'll let me sleep with you.
In other words, if she'll let him commit the crime that he's going to kill her brother for.
And Isabella, she says no, because she doesn't want to sacrifice her immortal soul to save her brother's temporal life.
So everybody in the play is stuck in this bind between the law, the rule of law, and mercy.
You know, even Isabella can't be merciful enough to sleep with this guy and save it.
I'm not going to tell you how it works out.
Go read the play or watch the play.
But Shakespeare understood that this is an irresolvable problem.
The law doesn't work without human mercy.
The law doesn't work unless we humanize it.
That is our job.
That's what we're here for.
We're here to humanize nature.
We're here to humanize the law.
We're here to humanize the world.
That is the whole message of the gospels and the whole bind that all of us find ourselves in.
Basically, the Republicans have the right idea.
All the Republicans.
You've got to build a wall, stop the crime.
You stop the crime, and then you're going to have to find a compassionate way to do it.
And if the bass won't let people speak those words, they're going to get lied to by guys like Donald Trump who aren't going to do a damn thing.
Donald Trump makes you feel good because he lies to you and plays to your anger.
But that's not what's going to happen because America will not let it happen.
It is our basic nature to forgive.
And that's what Hillary Clinton is playing to, and that's why Cruz gets it so right, okay?
All I'm saying is they're all going to do the same thing.
Every Republican is going to do the same thing.
Build a wall and find some way to give some kind of status ultimately leading to amnesty for the people who are here.
They're all going to do the same thing.
So what I would say is vote for the honest one.
Jack's Departure00:01:57
Vote for the one who tells you what he's going to do.
And that's in keeping with our values.
The rule of law alone has never been our value.
The rule of law tempered by mercy is what the West is all about and what America has always been about.
That's all I have to say.
And thank goodness because my voice is almost entirely gone.
Stuff I like.
I always like to end with music.
Louis Jordan, I love this guy.
This guy, he was called sometimes the father of rhythm and blues.
He was called the king of the jukeboxes in the 30s and 40s because he was that popular.
I won't say he's forgotten because they did a play called Five Guys Named Mo, which was based on his stuff.
But we don't listen to him enough.
He's just the best.
Listen to the lyrics of this, just in case you can't hear him.
This is a song.
I picked this song because this is the first time I ever heard Louis Jordan.
I was on a road trip with a bunch of friends.
We're all in this car.
We're all laughing and talking, you know, shouting at each other, playing around.
And suddenly this song comes on and we just all fell silent and listened to the incredible brilliance of this song.
How do you tell when you're dead?
That's basically the issue of the song.
How do you tell when you're dead?
When a chick is smiling at you, even though there's nothing said, if you stand there like a statue, Jack, you dead.
When you get no kicks from loving and you blow your top instead, it's a fact that you ain't living.
Jack, you dead.
Louie Jordan singing, Jack, you dead, that's it for me.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'll see you next week, hopefully, and my voice will come with me.