Very much a joy, a pleasure to be here in the big seat in for El Rushbo himself today.
Phone lines open, 800-282-2882, because we are in Open Line Friday status because it's Friday, obviously.
Want to talk to you a bit about sanctuary cities now?
Oh, yes.
Sanctuary cities.
The first one has caved.
Although the mayor of the Miami-Dade mayor is saying, was it Carlos Jimenez has ordered the county jail to comply with federal immigration detention requests, but they're saying that they don't claim to be a sanctuary city at the same time.
So someone's going to have to make sense of that one for me here.
I was like, wait a second, what?
Hold on a minute.
Just so we're all on the same page, some facts and figures, because I like data.
I'm a data guy.
I like to crunch the false.
Actually, I'm bad at numbers, but I do like to use them when I can.
The data on sanctuary, counties is a better way to put it.
Interesting breakdown here in the Washington Post, so take that for what it's worth.
That 69 sanctuary, there are 168 counties where a majority of the 11 million illegal immigrants live.
That's the official number that's used all the time, 11 million illegal immigrants, illegal aliens.
And of those 168 counties, 69 of them decline federal requests to hold arrestees in jail due to their immigration status, according to the post here.
99 counties accept federal requests to hold arrestees in jail due to their immigration status.
So there are almost 70 of these counties where they say, you know what?
Sorry, federal government.
We know that you want this person that we have in custody for non-immigration offenses, it should be noted.
This is a very important distinction.
Sanctuary cities are not saying, hey, look, we got crime problems, whether we're talking about Chicago or St. Louis or Detroit or Baltimore.
We got a lot of problems here.
We can't also be the immigration police.
We're trying to clean up our streets.
That's not the issue.
Very important.
You don't allow the left to conflate this stuff.
What sanctuary cities do is when they have, or I should say the ones that we're designating here and talking about, the ones that are problematic, when they have someone in custody for a criminal offense unrelated to their immigration status,
and then they figure out that the person they have is an illegal, and they run it by immigration and customs enforcement because the fingerprints are taken and sent to the FBI, which sends them to ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
And U.S. law requires this sharing between local and federal law enforcement.
But some of these counties, after that information has been shared and ICE says, okay, hold them.
We'll come and get them.
They're like, nope, back out on the streets.
See you later.
That's just reckless.
That's just flouting the law.
That is colluding to do end runs on federal statute.
And it's going to stop, according to the Trump team, according to President Trump.
They're going to stop.
Because now cities or counties that still play that game are going to see federal funding pulled.
I should say right off the bat, there are going to be those who say, well, discretionary spending, what are we talking about?
Is it federal counterterrorism funds?
What kind of money are they going to pull away?
Keep in mind that the left, the smarmy, oh-so-smug left, was silent, silent as a church mouse, had nothing to say at all when President Obama threatened to pull funding from, was it North or South Carolina with the transgender bathroom rule?
North Carolina, thank you, Mr. Snerdley.
North Carolina threatened to pull school funding unless Jimmy and Susie are using the same bathroom.
Or Jimmy who thinks he's Susie can use the bathroom that the other Susie's, whatever.
Threatened to pull school funding, the Department of Education.
And now we're going to talk about coercion of the states.
Now we're going to talk about an overreaching federal government.
No, no, no, no.
Very important distinction.
If we had moderate man from before back on the line now, this is the one I would make for him.
What the Trump administration has done so far with its executive orders.
And maybe there will be overreach.
And maybe there will be things that they do that I feel like are usurping the prerogative of the legislative branch that are allowing the president to pretend to be the Congress himself, a Congress of one.
That's scary stuff.
We don't want that.
We have a separation of powers for a reason.
But Obama would decide on a policy: I want this to happen, and so I'm just going to sign a piece of paper that says I'm the president, it's going to happen.
The immigration orders that Trump is signing are: this is the law, and I am the head of the executive branch.
And so, to the extent possible, to the extent permissible, I want us to actually enforce the law.
That's a very different thing.
We cannot line these up.
You're going to see a lot of smoke screens, a lot of obfuscation.
People are going to talk about the number of Obama executive orders.
I don't care how many executive orders there were.
I care what the executive orders were.
And on immigration, on sanctuary cities, this is one of the prime examples of the lawlessness of the left when it comes to illegal aliens in this country.
And we get it.
It is a built-in constituency for big government, for statism, for authoritarianism from D.C. We understand that.
They're going to need greater amounts of assistance, and it will be in their interest to vote for the party that has already started to say, and this did not get nearly enough coverage when Hillary Clinton was running, Hillary Clinton wanted illegals to get Obamacare.
People forget this.
You could have gone on her campaign page.
It was there.
Oh, she wanted illegals to have access to, regardless of immigration status, have access to Obamacare.
Subsidized health care by the taxpayer.
And in many cases, it just means Medicaid, but giving free health care to people who aren't supposed to be in the country.
We are spending ourselves into oblivion, something the Trump team is going to have to deal with at some point.
I'm wondering when that will come up.
But for now, one thing at a time, one step at a time.
These sanctuary cities, though, back on track here, Buck.
These sanctuary cities are deciding that they have the right to override federal law.
They're deciding that they don't want to comply.
And people say that, well, it's a function of discretion for them to turn, to hold, to continue to detain people that keep in mind, these are those that immigrations and customs enforcement are like, whoa, we need to get that guy out of here.
These aren't just your run of the, this isn't the hardworking immigrant story of, oh, just came here.
He's, you know, working three jobs, feeding his wife and his five kids.
And it, no, ICE isn't going to say, well, we need to get that guy out of here right away because there are priorities in the deportation process.
There are limited resources when it comes to access to the courts and how quickly law enforcement can, in fact, deport.
I'm assuming that as Trump is talking about soon putting a halt on visas from terror-prone countries, we also may revisit the fact that it is federal law right now that any foreign country that does not take back its foreign nationals who are here and we deport has their visas cut off.
Donzo, Finney, no more.
That's just the law right now.
This is what everyone needs to understand.
When the Trump team brings that up, the left's going to say, oh, this is destroying our relations with foreign countries, and Trump is a rogue elephant, and this is insane.
No, it's the law right now, just like there's a law to build the wall, just like there's a law that there's sharing of information between counties and the federal government when it comes to immigration.
By tackling the issue of illegal aliens in this country across the board, the Trump administration is dealing first and foremost with lawlessness.
So when he gets up and he talks about how we're going to be a country of law and order and we're going to deal with crime and criminality, that includes bureaucracies and municipalities and counties that take it upon themselves to play the humanitarian,
benevolent, wonderful people that won't, in fact, do what is necessary and do what is required of them to protect the rest of the American people because they're so kind and wonderful and thoughtful, because it's easy for them, because they don't necessarily live in neighborhoods where they'll have to deal with the large numbers of illegal aliens who also have a disproportionate impact on criminality and also city services.
English as a second language is not something that people across the country should be paying for in public schools.
Full stop.
The Trump administration no longer has a Spanish language website or a section of it that's all in Español.
They don't have that because they don't want to, because they shouldn't.
That this is in any way revolutionary thinking, that this is supposed to shock people, tells us all much more about the state right now of enforcement in this country and the willingness to engage in shenanigans, play games with this than anything else.
And I also want to note to you that the discussion on this, I think, will change quite quickly when we see that Trump is going to publicize the crimes of illegal aliens in sanctuary cities.
We have, I shouldn't say all of us, many of us familiar with Kate Steinley's case in San Francisco.
She was killed by an illegal alien who shot off a gun.
It looked like it was a stupid, reckless thing, but it's still, it's negligent homicide.
And he had been deported, I think, was it five times, Mr. Stern?
Five times, right?
Five times.
In and out, in and out.
Seven times convicted, felony, deported five times from the country.
But we're supposed to think that, no, we've got this whole border thing on lock.
It's fine.
We know what we're doing.
We've got this under control.
Well, we have the data-loving left, they pretend to love data, but they actually hate data.
Ask them to show you the climate change data and their heads will explode.
Oh, my gosh.
The data-loving left is going to get a dose of their own medicine here because President Trump, according to the New York Post, is going to publish a weekly list of crimes committed by illegal immigrants in New York City and all other sanctuary cities that do not cooperate with federal authorities.
He is going to now force people to reckon with the reality of what it means to have large, illegal, alien populations in these cities.
Ann Coulter did a lot of research on this for her book, Adios America, and one of the most stunning conclusions she came to was how hard it was to just find information on illegal alien criminality.
They don't keep the records.
They don't keep lists.
The government knows a ton about all of us, but they don't want to know how many illegals are really in the country.
They don't want to know how many legals are committing crimes in the country.
They don't want to know what the cost to the taxpayer is of all of that.
And that includes our million legal immigrants a year, it should be noted, who are paying taxes and who are trying to live the American dream and who went about this the right way from all corners of the globe, all over the world.
We have a million a year becoming permanent residents, either citizens or green card holders, year in and year out.
That's about the number.
We are taking in enormous numbers of people from all over each year, but through the legal system.
And we're supposed to just forget about the lawlessness and criminality that comes from the illegal population all this time.
We're going to let Bill de Blasio here in New York City or the mayor of Los Angeles.
I was going to say the mayor of Miami, but he's like, okay, actually, you know what?
My bad.
We're going to do this right.
We'll comply.
We will comply.
Don't take away those discretionary federal funds.
Like I said, it's all about tackling lawlessness head on.
And when you have a president who has to sign executive orders saying that we will now enforce laws that are already on the books, and that there are many who think that is some sort of affront to the republic and evidence of creeping fascism, it tells you a lot both about the duplicitousness of our Congress and the state of enforcement of laws in this country as it is.
It's all about politics, not about the law.
That's not okay.
And hopefully President Trump is beginning to change that.
I hope.
We'll have to see.
Buck in for Rush.
We're going to talk about illegal voting in just a few.
We'll be right back.
Buck Sexton here, Infor Rush on the EIB.
We're joined by Catherine Engelbrecht.
She is the founder and president of True the Vote.
Catherine, thanks for making some time for us today.
Absolutely, Buck.
Thanks for having me on.
All right.
So your organization looks into issues of voting and voter fraud.
What can you tell us?
What do you have to offer in terms of either perspective or hard and fast numbers on the claim that Donald Trump has made that 3 to 5 million people voted illegally in the last election?
The media is in a tizzy about this.
Well, you know, I am certain that the President of the United States has access to information that is far, far, far above my pay grade.
But what I can tell you is that there is very real reason to be concerned.
And I am so thankful that after eight years of being silenced, that we now have an opportunity just to put all the cards on the table.
The data exists.
The technology to do matching exists.
So let's just answer the question.
Let's resolve for identity, residency, and citizenship and answer the question.
So what do we need to do to answer the question?
If the Trump administration says, you know what, we're just, let's put all this to rest.
Let's get to the bottom of this.
If it's so necessary to look into Russian hacking for the sake of democracy, one would think that actual voting would be worth looking into or illegal voting would be worth looking into as well.
Well, one might think.
And here's the challenge, and this is really important.
The fraud has been institutionalized.
And so while there are some basic matching techniques that you can use by pulling up the voter rolls and then bouncing that against the Social Security Death Index to see who's dead and voting, those are some basic searches that certainly need to be done.
But the real fraud is going to be found baked much more deeply into the system.
We have issues through Motor Voter right now that require that supported services like getting your driver's license and the DMV records and applying online through healthcare.gov, those federal formats get pushed straight into the state and they do not verify for citizenship.
Those are the kinds of, that's the kind of depth that we're going to have to get into to realize what's being put into our state roles and the accuracy of that.
And then from that point, clean the rolls up and hopefully from this, develop some solutions that will protect our roles moving forward.
Catherine, I know you're a friend of the Motor Voter, the National Voter Registration Act of 1993.
Anyone who goes in the DMV now and can get a driver's license, which we know includes illegals in some states and we know includes people who are non-citizens.
Anyone who can do that can also very quickly find themselves registering to vote.
People that I've talked to you about this who are immigration experts and specialists say a lot of any illegal voting that goes on may be inadvertent or not inadvertent, but unintentional in the sense that there may be a lot of non-citizen permanent residents even who think that they're allowed to vote because they're being given a registration card at the DMV and they're just voting because they think they're supposed to vote.
That's exactly right.
And we take no issue with that.
I mean, let's just get the answers.
For eight years, we haven't been able to get to the answers because we haven't been allowed to ask the questions.
And we've only got about a minute, Catherine, but I wanted to ask, your group became very well known first because it was one that was targeted by the IRS, by Lois Lerner's weaponization of the Internal Revenue Service.
There's been some court action on that recently.
Can you just give us about a 45-second update on where that stands?
Well, we're continuing to press on, but I have to tell you, I feel like we've already won.
I feel like that there's a new day dawning and that the transparencies that this administration is going to begin to introduce across a whole host of issues puts us in a position that hopefully we're very soon going to be able to put that behind us and get back to the focus of what this was all about to begin with, which is free and fair elections.
And it's an issue that should unite us, and we need to be united.
Catherine Engelbrecht is the founder and president of True the Vote.
Well, what's your website, Catherine?
TrueTheVote.org.
There we go.
TrueThevote.org.
Great to have you, Catherine.
Thank you so much.
Appreciate it.
Buck Sexton and for Rush.
Oh, we've got a lot more show.
Going to talk more about immigration and maybe some State Department firings that they pretended were walkouts.
Oh, yeah.
Be right back.
Buck Sexton in for Rush today on the EIB.
The data is what we want here.
It's what we need.
When we're talking about trying to find whether there were a lot or just a few illegal votes cast in the last election, the left is always, yeah, they don't show data.
And also, if you ask them for their climate change data, they're like, no, it's a secret club.
And you say, but why would I trust data that you won't show me or that you change after you show it to me?
And they go, you just don't understand.
You just don't pay enough attention to, I don't know, Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson, the progressive leftist scientists that people who know nothing about science point to and say, see?
And he knows a lot about gun policy, too.
It's like, no, he doesn't actually at all.
Neither of them do.
Side note.
But no, no, Neil deGrasse Tyson on, I love what he writes things like, I just wish that reason would guide all of our policies.
Yeah, because everybody who disagrees with him on things doesn't understand reason and facts and logic.
There is a weird fetishization that occurs among the left when it comes to science, because what they mean by science isn't actually cause and effect and constant questioning and looking at having a hypothesis that you test and retest.
You know, it's like I'm going to go Einstein here right now.
It doesn't matter what the consensus is.
It only takes one person to prove me wrong.
Very important.
That's the way scientists should approach everything.
I don't care if you have 99 scientists in a room.
They need to be able to prove one scientist who disagrees with them wrong.
Prove it, not say, well, there's 99 of us.
Consensus is not science.
Mic drop.
I can't actually drop the mic in here because it's attached.
But I thought about that for a second.
Yeah, for sure.
So, but back onto the data for a second.
The $3 to $5 million number, that seems a little high to me.
When you look at how many non-citizens, non-citizen permanent residents there are in the country, though, many, many millions.
And they're being told, they're being handed registration forms because the 1993 Bill Clinton signed National Voter Registration Act, the motor voter law.
I'm sure a lot of them think, well, I'm allowed to live here forever and they're giving me this voting thing.
Why can't I vote?
And a lot of those individuals are probably going to vote Democrat, which may be why the Democrats don't want to poke into this too much.
But the left will also tell you that there's nothing to see here because there's no such thing as voter fraud.
And then you'll use something called the Google and you'll find instances of prosecutions or voter fraud and you'll show it to them and then they'll say, okay, what I meant by that is there's not a lot of voter fraud.
But a week later, they'll go back to there's no such thing as voter fraud.
So this is, that's how the propaganda mill works.
It just keeps telling you things that are untrue.
And when it's proven wrong, they just sort of wait and then they come back again.
It's like a zombie lie.
Like you think it's gone, but then it comes back.
You think it's gone, but then it comes back.
So where was I on all of this?
Oh, yes.
And also that Trump is lying about the number, which is what the media is saying, that Trump is lying about this.
Well, how can they know he's lying if they don't have the numbers themselves?
They don't know.
They can't look into this.
You can say it is an allegation that has yet to be substantiated, but then let's substantiate it one way or the other.
You're going to notice the left doesn't want to look into this one.
They don't want to look under the hood on this.
They don't want to peek under the hood of the motor voter situation.
They don't want any of that.
They want to just keep it all going.
And they want Hillary and her Democrat colleagues to be pushing for Obamacare for illegals.
And it's just an obvious, obvious benefit to the Democratic Party from to keep this stuff up.
All right.
It is open on Friday, which means we should let some other people talk.
Jeff in Jacksonville, Florida, you're on the rush show.
You're speaking to Buck.
Thanks, Arabia, Buck.
Thank you.
I have two comments related directly to the wall.
One, we're always told from the left that these are the valid Victorians, the dreamers that are all coming over.
Wouldn't it be beneficial for Mexico to build the wall to keep those great people in their country to make Mexico great for once?
And then my second point is, none of these newscasters, including the guy from ABC who had the first interview, have read Trump's plan.
It's only two to three pages long of how Mexico will pay for the wall.
So again, it'll be beneficial for Mexico to come and negotiate because they're going to pay for the wall whether they like it or not.
The wall will be paid for through taxes on Western unions from the United States to Mexico.
Interesting you bring that up.
Because the Trump team, Jeff, has walked back a little bit.
And they say that they were floating it out there.
And I leave that to all of you to decide if you think they were floating it or if they realize it wasn't a good idea.
But a 20% tariff on imports, which means the end of NAFTA.
NAFTA, I should note, is an old trade agreement that should be updated and renegotiated.
What is it?
It's from the early 90s.
Isn't it?
Yeah, I'm forgetting what the original date of NAFTA was.
But people I know who are very free trade even admit, yeah, we should probably take a look at NAFTA and at least update it.
They don't necessarily want to throw it out entirely.
But you mentioned Western Union, the remittances that come, untaxed remittances that come from the United States to Mexico via wire transfer services.
The estimates on that that I've seen are in the $10 to $20 billion range.
And that's just U.S. cash flowing south to Mexico to subsidize their economy.
Those are untaxed dollars.
And by the way, if you started sending money around to people that was never taxed, the IRS would come looking for you.
But if you're an illegal, well, you know, again, different set of rules seems to apply.
But if you look at the remittances, that's where you might have even more leverage.
I don't really care, Jeff, how the wall gets paid for because in the grand scheme of things from a federal budget perspective, $10 or $12 billion is not a make-or-break situation.
And you look at the costs of continued illegal immigration, and it dwarfs anything that we're going to spend on this wall over the long term.
But I do understand that Trump sees the optics of this a certain way.
He wants Mexico to have to make good on things here.
He wants Mexico to start to be forced to do what he says is do what's right.
By the way, there was a meeting that was going to happen.
It's not happening.
And the latest I see here is President Peña Nieto spent an hour on the phone with Trump.
They were talking about things.
Everyone's already jumping to trade war and how we're going to collapse the Mexican economy.
And we haven't done anything yet.
This is a negotiation phase.
This is an unfinished, an unfinished exchange of ideas.
Jeff, what do you think?
Well, I think that maybe we should take some of this money that they're going to be withholding from these sanctuary cities that are going to hold out, and maybe that could pay for the blueprints for the wall or the first batch of concrete.
Yeah, they'll find a way somehow.
I do think they're going to build sections of, they're not going to build a wall continuously and all at once.
It's going to be in pieces.
It's going to be a very big barrier, wall, fence, all of the above.
But it does seem to me like the administration wants to get it done.
This was a central promise of the campaign.
A lot of, and thank you for calling in, Jeff, a lot of never Trump conservatives said that this was the first place you'd see that Trump was all flash, no substance, that he would back off on the wall.
And so signing this executive order makes it appear at least that he plans to follow through with this.
And for him to back out at this point would be particularly difficult.
Let's take Sal in upstate New York.
Sal, you're on the rush show.
You're speaking to Buck.
Thanks, Buck.
I find it comical.
Like this morning on CNN, they'd ask a Republican House member, how dare you ask the American ⁇ and I'm paraphrasing ⁇ ask the American taxpayer to foot the bill for this wall, as if it's some cylinder type port expenditure.
This is something that secures your border.
And I just feel you never, if you can't agree with someone that a secure border is better than not a secure border, if you stop 10% of the Kate Steinley murders, that's 10 out of 100 murders you're stopped with this $12 to $20 billion.
It's ridiculous to talk about it as if the American taxpayer has to foot that bill.
I'm happy to foot that bill, put it under Homeland Security or military.
And then secondly, and you touched on this, the illegals that are here, and I have worked with them and I have hired them.
Not proud to say that, but I have a business that at times you are forced to hire the most qualified at that time.
I speak to these people.
They want to be on the books.
And if we just collected federal income taxes from these guys and gals, we would be able to pay for that wall.
They would be happy to pay federal income taxes as long as they're promised, hey, if I come to the surface and I go on the books, I'm not going to be deported.
And that's another thing.
When they get deported, they only get deported because they want to get deported, because they need to go home.
They'll get deported.
And then this is a question I have for you, and that is, what happens to the entire underworld of the human trafficking portion?
Like, that's not just going to go away.
These mafia-type individuals that bring these people here, how do you, you're going to take their livelihood away from them.
How do they make up for that?
And that's just another question I have.
But those are three points I wanted to make, and thanks for listening.
Yeah, of course.
Thank you very much for calling and Salon sharing your thoughts and experiences on that.
In terms of where the, I think you're referring mostly to the smuggling operations and cartels.
What will they do if there's a wall that's going to make their lives harder?
A wall is not a panacea.
Wall doesn't cure everything.
Wall doesn't make all the problems go away.
A wall is one very visible and important manifestation of a broader policy to secure the border.
Now, part of border security is also going to be interior enforcement.
As anybody who studies the issue and understands it will tell you, we've got about a half a million for the last year we have complete data.
Visa overstays in this country.
You overstay your visa, guess what?
You can't come back in legally for quite a while, which means that most of those half million visa overstays are probably never planning to leave.
Means they came here on a legal visa, they overstayed, and they are now illegal aliens living in this country.
That's why you need to deal with the wall.
Then you need E-Verify, interior enforcement at workplaces.
Then you can also, there are cascading effects to this too.
You can look at ports of entry.
You look at your airports, and you begin to tighten biometrics and other ways of looking at who's coming into the country, knowing who's here, tracking who's here, and understanding who's coming and going.
This is all a series of decisions and policies and processes, and they're putting some of them into play right now.
But it's going to take some time.
With the Obama administration, what you got was a massive headfake.
Oh, yeah, I'm deporting all these people.
I'm totally about border security.
Let's get a huge amnesty bill through because I'm really into border security.
And then the amnesty bill doesn't happen.
He's like, okay, well, I can stop pretending to care about border security now.
Forget it.
Catch and release.
No more deportations unless you're running around killing people or selling drugs to school children or something.
That was the Obama policy after a while.
And I know, actually, you can kill people and not necessarily get deported.
There are people who are, I don't know, it's insane.
It is insane.
And people have had enough.
And this all leads to the how we get President Trump thing.
Buck Sexton in for Rush.
We're going to talk more about immigration, more of your calls, and also some follow-up to that State Department story from yesterday.
The walkout, that was not.
More coming.
Buck Sexton in for Rush on the EIB.
Open line Friday, which means calls, calls, and more calls.
Jim in Texas, you are speaking to Buck.
You're on the EIB.
What's up?
Hi, Buck.
Great to hear you.
You're my favorite replacement host for Rush.
Thank you so much.
Back in the late 70s, early 80s, I was a border officer along the East-West German border in the U.S. Army.
And East Germany and Czechoslovakia not only had one fence, they had two fences, which had shotgun mines along them.
The area between them had minefields.
They had vicious guard dogs.
They had machine gun towers.
And they'd kill you if you tried to cross.
And people still came across.
In fact, in our area, we had one family that made a hot air balloon out of cloth and flew it across the border, just as one example as to the desperation and how eager they were to get across.
My point is that we're treating symptoms with a fence, and we're not going after the actual problem.
The problem is we have companies here in America that are hiring these people or they wouldn't be coming over.
And we're allowing them to send money back home.
If we have to turn off the magnet.
I totally agree with that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And until we do that, I mean, you've seen the same pictures I've seen where there are people with ladders and they're literally mobs climbing across what fences we have in place right now.
Well, a few things.
First of all, your experience is fascinating to me.
I appreciate you sharing that with all of us.
I think, though, that you mentioned the family that built a hot air balloon out of cloth, those who are trying to get from east to west Berlin, that's more, and we're willing to brave the attack dogs, the machine guns, the razor wire.
That's really more a commentary on the desperation of people living under communism and behind the Iron Curtain than I think it is on the efficacy of walls per se.
But also, there's no such thing, and this makes me go into my former counterterrorism officer toolkit.
There's no one thing that makes the problem go away entirely.
And I know you know that.
You're saying we need to deal with workplace enforcement, you need to deal with remittances.
But the wall is a foundational piece of all those other things that need to be done.
And ultimately, you also come back to the reality of we can have open borders in a welfare state, and we do, not open, open borders, but something pretty close to it.
You've got at least 11 million illegal aliens in the country, and we've got 20 trillion in debt.
Thanks, Obama.
And the notion that we're not going to secure our borders and we're not going to be dealing with the continued inflow of individuals who disproportionately will be accessing federal benefits that my generation is probably never even going to get in the terms of the long-term Medicare, Medicare and Social Security benefits.
So these are all, you know, the world is not fair.
Some people are born in America.
Some people are born in North Korea.
We also have to start from that proposition.
And it doesn't make me feel good to say it, but that's just reality.
And I think that building a fence, while it does make it seem like we're more closed to the world, first of all, a lot of countries are building fences or borders.
Israel's done so with tremendous success in terms of its security.
Other countries, I believe the Saudis are building one on their border with Yemen.
I think there might be one in Western Sahara where they're thinking about it between Algeria and Morocco.
Obviously, North and South Korea, which is more akin to the wall between East and West Berlin in terms of the militarization.
So walls do work, but walls are not perfect.
I think that's a fair way to say it, Jim.
What do you think?
They do, but what you've got to keep in mind about a lot of those countries is they're more than willing to shoot people who are trying to cross, and America will never do that, nor would I want them to.
I wouldn't either, of course.
I'm just saying that you need a holistic report.
Yes, but also people who are fleeing Mexico are not fleeing jackbooted tyranny on the throw.
I mean, I know the cartels are pretty terrible, but generally they're coming here for economic opportunity or they're coming here for benefits.
They're not necessarily fleeing a totalitarian society where there's no music, no joy, nothing good.
I mean, Mexico is actually a pretty nice place.
Mexico is not North Korea, nor is it East Berlin, right?
So I think that's another important point to keep this all in perspective.
But Jim from Texas, great call.
Thank you very much for giving us a ring here on the EIB.
Great call.
Lots of great calls today.
Lots of great calls.
All right, Bucking for Rush.
We'll be right back.
Buck in for Rush flying by today on the EIB.
Next hour, we're going to talk about game-changing Trump approaches to regulation.
We're going to be joined by Kim Strassel of the Wall Street Journal to talk a bit about that.
I'll give you that follow-up to the State Department.
Walk out.
We're losing all of our talented diplomats.
No, no, actually, that's not true.
But I'll give you the full update there.
Also looking to see if that executive order on a pause on refugees gets signed.
We will be taking your calls too because it's open line Friday.
So 800-282-2882.
Oh, just wanted to note, since we're talking about immigration in Mexico, under Mexican law, illegal immigration is a felony punishable after two years in prison.