Sept. 29, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
44:44
3839 The Danger of Amnesty | Rep. Steve King and Stefan Molyneux
With President Donald Trump's approval, Speaker Paul Ryan has formed a task force to create legislation to grant amnesty to those impacted by the unconstitutional era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (DACA) program. Congressman Steve King joins Stefan Molyneux to discuss how President Trump's actions have strayed from his campaign promises, the immense danger of amnesty, the importance of culture and the demographic future of the United States of America. Congressman Steve King was elected to Congress in 2002 and currently represents Iowa’s Fourth Congressional District. Rep. King serves on many committees – including the Immigration and Border Security Subcommittee.Website: https://steveking.house.govTwitter: https://twitter.com/SteveKingIAYour support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hi everybody, it's Stefan Mullen from Freedom Main Radio here with Congressman Steve King.
He was elected in 2002 and now represents Iowa's 4th Congressional District.
The Congressman is a member of many committees, including, which we'll be drilling into a little bit today, the Immigration and Border Security Subcommittee.
You can check him out at steveking.house.gov or on twitter.com forward slash steveking.ia.
Congressman King, thank you so much for taking the time today.
Thanks a lot for having me on, Stefan.
I really appreciate it. So, a little bit of a switch here.
It would seem, if I remember the rather fraught campaign correctly from last year, people wanted a repeal of DACA and they wanted a wall.
And it seems like we're kind of in the middle of a pivot.
And, of course, I guess the voters are hoping that they can push it back.
What are your thoughts as to where the administration stands now on those two key issues?
Well, it's a little hard to read the president on this, but we thought this, that, and we expected That on January 20th at noon, that was the end of DACA. We expected that there would be no more new permits issued.
We thought there was a chance that he would instead of cancel those that were already out there, that he might let that run its course and let them expire within a two-year window.
That's not what the president did.
He didn't deal with it for months, eight months at least, and then announced September 5th that he would cancel the program in the end of six months.
That is what I call the legislative equivalent of throwing the cat into the kennel and letting the congressional dogs fight over it.
And then a day or two later, he implied that, and this would be the president, of course, implied that he wanted to see some kind of what I would just call amnesty because his heart right now is overruling his head and his campaign promises.
And I'm doing my best to help him keep his campaign promises.
So what's emerging here in the country, I believe, are the people that support the Trump agenda versus the people who support the cult of personality and that Trump the person.
And I think that the election in the primary for the U.S. Senate that took place in Alabama was one of the examples of that.
The Trump agenda went out in Alabama over the Trump endorsement.
So I'm going to do my best to help him keep his word and end DACA. If we don't do that, we've rewarded lawbreakers and we could never in our lifetime Expect to see the rule of law, the respect for it, restored again.
Building the wall, that's a longer story and a difficult one, but the House is committed to $1.6 billion to start this.
They are building prototypes in California.
I think as we speak, I intend to go down there in a couple of weeks, take a look at them.
I don't think that the foundational work for that is as far along as I had hoped, and I thought we should have $5 or $6 billion in this appropriation bill rather than $1.6 billion.
But it hasn't been as aggressive as we thought.
Donald Trump that gets things done did not get things done at the pace we anticipated on either DACA or building the wall.
And it's going to be a hard push, pushing that rock of Sisyphus uphill here to defend the rule of law on DACA, given the president's call for Congress to fix it.
And if we say no and don't act, then I think that people suspect Well, and it is one of the things,
Congressman King, that the American public has been desperate for and repeatedly voting for, punishing politicians who deviate and reward those who conform to the very idea of having border security and not just this amorphous blob of easily repealable We're good to go.
Well, and then we should remember, too, that demographics matter.
And that our predecessors in this Congress understood That there was this critical mass of immigration that at a certain point you had to stop and allow for an assimilation process to take place.
And we had this massive immigration into America over the turn of the centuries 19 until the 20th century.
And in 1924, they passed legislation that more or less shut down the legal immigration into America.
And then we had at least a 40 year cooling off period.
Where we had a very, very low, today we'd say virtually no immigration into America, and that allowed for the assimilation of a couple of generations into our society, for them to learn our history, our language, our culture, our patriotism, and to embrace Americanism, as my grandfather, or excuse me, my grandmother was one of those.
And then in 64 they started to open up immigration law, and a person like Ted Kennedy said, This won't change the demographic makeup in America.
I mean, he meant there'll be just as many Irish coming in as there will as they used to be.
And of course, that didn't turn out to be true.
And now we have people kneeling on the sidelines at the pro football games out of disrespect to our flag and what it stands for.
And I just, we need a cooling off period.
We need to slow down the legal immigration significantly.
And we need to end illegal immigration.
We need to ramp up the teaching of patriotism And we need to use that word assimilation again.
One, we've got people that reject the free enterprise system, the American rule of law.
They've got sanctuary cities that essentially have declared their quasi-sovereignty from federal law, but demanded federal tax dollars to subsidize them anyway.
America is pretty well scrambled right now.
It's not at all fitting with the vision of our founding fathers.
Nor is it fitting with the vision of the people that in 1924 saw the need to pull America back together again.
Well, and of course, in the past, when there was less of this government redistribution of wealth, people without a doubt came to America for the freedoms.
And I think one of the big concerns that people have now, not just with America, but the West as a whole, is people aren't coming for the freedoms, they're coming for the free stuff.
And that is a very, very different mindset than that which built the West to begin with.
Well, it is. I mean, they see America as a giant ATM and probably don't know what one is until they get here, but they've got the concept down and then they get introduced to the ATM machine.
And I, you know, I think about conversations that we've watched this epic migration pouring into Europe over the last few years.
And the promises made by Angela Merkel, our chancellor, seem to fit really close to the promises that Barack Obama made.
And I can tell you the conversations that I've had, I walked in that river of humanity that It's just an endless stream into Western Europe.
This was in Serbia, but I talked to a good lot of them.
This was in the fall of 2015.
And I'd ask them, where are you going?
And they'd say, Germany.
Do you have a job there?
No. Do you have family there?
No. Do you have friends there? No.
What will you do? I don't know.
Germany will take care of me.
That concept is what the people pouring across our southern border think of America and Only they know where they're going.
They're going to somebody's home that is already related to them.
Part of that magnet is the familial connections that are there.
We loaded up thousands of unaccompanied alien miners at the border, many of them out of McAllen, Texas, and sent them to all 50 states by plane, by bus, by chauffeured car with federal employees driving them to the address of their choice that they either memorized or had written on a piece of paper And sent those unaccompanied alien minors into,
we didn't know whether it was a parent, a parent, whether it was a drug house, whether it was an MS-13 gang location, but we poured them into America and we're still doing that.
And it's lunacy for any country to have any immigration policy that's designed to do anything except to enhance the economic, the social, and the cultural well-being of, in our case, the United States of America.
It truly is an astonishing phenomenon that what is called amnesty means that you are not going to be prosecuted for a crime.
What is called here under DACA this unconstitutional amnesty, and I think we need to call things by their proper names.
You get to keep the crusades of the crime.
You get to keep the education.
You get to keep these instruction in English.
You get to keep the inculcation into Western values and so on.
And if these people return to Mexico or other places, they can bring all those values back with them.
Which surely will be a great boon for those countries.
It doesn't make much sense to bring a lot of illegal immigrants in, have them send a huge amount of money back in remittances, and then send foreign aid to those countries.
Because if America is taking their best, what's left to grow the country's economy back home?
You have said this in a more articulate way than I've heard from anyone.
And there's almost nobody out there that brings this up and discusses it.
I use a lot more words to express what you have just expressed, Stephen.
But I agree with you 100% on this.
And amnesty, which I've continually, I keep repeating the definition of amnesty so that the establishment Republicans, they're the only ones I think I have a chance of guilting into some kind of compliance with the rule of law.
But to grant amnesty is to pardon immigration lawbreakers and to reward them with the objective of their crime.
And you've just delivered a list of the objectives of their crime, a free education, free health care, rent subsidy, heat subsidy, learning the American way.
And then if we send them back, they get to keep the things we gave them, except another one of their objectives, which presumably was to live in the shadows.
But they could not have believed that we would be foisting citizenship on them as a way to assuage the guilt of the liberals in America That somehow people came here because they had no better alternative and we should reward them for that.
And what it does to the country that is the donor country is it robs them of their best and brightest if the description of the Dreamers is true.
I only believe a small part of those descriptions.
But here's a comparison that I use.
And that is that there are a little over 7,000 Peace Corps workers active in the world today.
We subsidize them out of federal tax dollars.
Without debate, because we know what good that does to build those networks and relationships across in the 130 or so countries that they're currently operating in.
A little over 7,000.
120 years ago, 119 years ago, we sent over to the Philippines, our military first, and followed up with a shipload of teachers called Thomasites.
And there turned out to be altogether 1,074 Thomasites.
And we also sent priests and pastors and, of course, our army over there.
And some of this is from a speech that was delivered by Gloria Arroyo, a former president of the Philippines.
But she said, thank you, America, for sending them to our islands.
Send us some more teachers.
But what you've done is, for the Philippines, she said that we taught them English, we taught them free enterprise, we taught them the American way, the American work ethic, and we taught them in solidified and expanded The Christian faith on the islands of the Philippines.
And a hundred years later, she came back to thank us for that, and the Thomasites were the foundation of the Peace Corps.
So, if we send 1,074 over to the Philippines, and a hundred years later, we get the great gratitude of what good that has done for those islands.
We've got 7,000 Peace Corps workers around the world today that are earning the great gratitude of the countries they serve in, and we recognize that.
What would it be like if we sent 750 or 800,000 of the DACA recipients back to their home countries with an American education and English language skills?
They would be bilingual, almost 100% of them bilingual.
They would have that education, the work ethic, having lived in a country that is, I'll say for their experience at least, devoid of corruption, going into a country whose biggest obstruction is the corruption in it, And to begin to take their education and utilize the natural resources, the work ethic, that'd be the best thing that could possibly happen to Mexico, to the Central American countries that are the major donor countries, to the DACA, the people that are here.
It'd be the best thing for their countries.
And we should not think that going back home again to your family in your home country, in most cases that would be true, is somehow condemning them to hell It's not.
It's sending missionaries back to their home country to enhance the economy and lift their countries up so that they no longer would need foreign aid.
And it would be a lot shorter than 100 years when we would see the realizations of that kind of an action, Stephen.
Well, and of course, criminals harm their children.
I mean, Anthony Weiner is heading to jail and nobody is saying he should be let free because he has children.
I mean, this is one of the things that parents do.
You go rob a bank, you go to jail, it harms your kids.
I mean, the moral responsibility lies with the criminals, not with everyone else who must be forced to subsidize.
But there's this weird kind of...
Trap that's been set up, as you point out, since the Immigration Act in the mid-60s, which is by switching immigration to non-white countries, now anybody who opposed immigration can be easily portrayed as a racist.
And that is a very elegant trap just to keep immigration going, which of course is because the immigrants largely vote for the left, for a bigger government, and become dependent on the state.
And therefore are for more government programs, which is what the Democrats generally are in favor of.
And one of the things that's frustrating, I don't care about the races, I care about the numbers.
And I understand, as you point out, why the Democrats want the immigrants.
They reliably vote for the left, 80-85% or so.
It's harder to understand why this demographic political suicide is being so avidly pursued by the Republicans.
Well, it is hard to understand, and you would think that they would know what's happening here.
I raised these issues when I first arrived in Congress 15 years ago, and the Republican leadership, first they said, never bring race into this, and never bring in the political motivation that Democrats have into this debate.
Well, of course I did, and I have for some time, with varying degrees of success, or intensity for that matter.
But on the Republican side of this, there are major donors that are writing big checks, not to me by the way, That do influence the decisions of especially the leadership among the Congress and among the party itself.
And I think of those chains that this is U.S. Chamber of Commerce, major hotel chains, and they need a constant supply of people from foreign countries to come in and clean the rooms and do the toilets and wait the tables and all the things that they do.
And I meet them in my travels and I know that they're scattered all over this country.
And you've got that, and you've got every industry that needs cheap, unskilled labor.
Let's see. Roy Beck, I believe it was, wrote an article about five or six years ago on the relationships, the strength between the Eastern Shore, where the resort systems exist along the Eastern Shore, Delmarva, and their connection with Poland was stronger than their connection to the Potomac.
Just a couple hours down the coast, Here sits all these unemployed people sitting here in the Washington, D.C. metro area.
They don't tap into them to put them to work in their hotel chains up and down the Eastern Shore.
They go to Poland to get their help.
And why do they do that? And it's because in Poland they don't bribe them to sit on the couch in their front lawn, but in the Potomac region they do.
And that's a big mistake that we have in America.
There are at least 102 million Americans, a third of our population of working age, not in the workforce, We have over 70 different means-tested federal welfare programs that cost us hundreds of billions of dollars every year.
And nobody is willing to tackle that because they get called racist for their trouble, just like the president gets called racist for defending our flag and our anthem.
Oh, it is truly tragic.
And I wonder the degree to which there are, of course, the Chamber of Commerce demands for cheaper labor, which harms the poorest and the most vulnerable Americans and throughout Europe and Canada as well.
There is that particular motivation.
And also, of course, there is to some degree the fading power of the mainstream media and this, you know, giant whip of xenophobic and racist and so on that they can cast against people.
But I think you get into public life to overcome the slings and arrows of outrageous insults.
And don't you kind of have to pursue the good, despite the fact that you may be insulted for it?
In fact, these days, as is the case throughout most of history, doing the good is going to get you insulted.
It's one of the badges of honor you kind of have to wear.
Well, I hope it is a badge of honor.
I don't disagree with that.
I just don't think about it in that terms very often.
But I see it this way.
For me, and I've got a cup of coffee in my hand, and by the way, it's a Ronald Reagan cup.
But before I can have a cup in the morning, I know I will be called a racist, a bigot, a name your list of phobes, all along the line.
I'll be called all of those possible names before I can possibly drink a cup of coffee.
And that's the cross that I bear.
That's my burden for this life.
And it'll happen every day of my life as long as I live.
So you have to look at that and think that's the price paid.
For having a voice to try to defend the principles that made America great.
I'll just name her.
I defended Western Civilization on MSNBC, the opening night of the Republican Convention in Cleveland.
On that panel, there was April Ryan.
I'll just say this.
She came at me with a microphone and another reporter with a microphone on the other side.
At the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and we had a long discussion because I refuse to disengage from a conversation until they understand the points I've made and I've answered everything they can possibly come up with.
But she challenged me then, aren't you a racist?
Which is the equivalent of saying, you know, when did you stop beating your wife?
And I said to her in that interview, which never got published curiously, that I said, use that word.
Use that dog-eared, worn race card over and over again.
Use it a million times because Every time you use it cheaply, it devalues it.
And that is where we are with this race allegation today.
There just aren't enough people that understand that.
And it's meaningless.
Everything is racism today.
Salt and pepper is racism.
So I look at that and I think this is counsel from Tom Tancredo, which was wise.
And it's when they start calling you names, that's when you know that they know that they've lost the argument.
And if they start with calling names, and I've had that happen.
I've had that happen with John Boyd, the head of the Black Farmers, in an interview.
First thing out of his mouth, that's racist.
And so he already conceded that he had lost the argument.
And now they know the more they call names, the more it's clear they don't have another argument.
I went back and I've read the whole collection of speeches of Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr.
And I agree with every word.
At least at the time I read them, and I went back and called up and watched several times through his Ben to the Mountaintop speech, which he gave the night before he was assassinated.
And it is glorious, and it's inspiring.
And it's inspiring to me, and you'd think it'd be inspiring to the NAACP and the self-segregating Congressional Black Caucus, but it's not.
They more or less hijacked his movement and turned it into their grievance committee, And now they're pressing all of us for special benefits based upon race, which would be abhorrent to Dr.
King. Now for those of us who are a little older, we've seen this movie before regarding DACA, thinking of course about Reagan's 86th Amnesty Act, which of course was only supposed to be a million and had all these other restrictions and was supposed to come with all this other border security stuff.
One million went to three million, which with chain migration and reproduction rates ended up turning California to the Democrats in perpetuity, which is pretty significant of course based upon I think exactly.
Exactly that. And you may know that I went to the floor of the House of Representatives in 2005, and I brought a model of the wall down there to demonstrate to them how you build a wall, how simple it is.
And as you said, the Chinese were able to do that.
Let's see, Qishai Wang, the first emperor of China, put that wall together and connected the pieces in 245 BC. And in about 1940 or so, the Japanese armies marched on top of that.
But the wall worked for centuries.
And I asked this question of Victor Davis Hanson, who is a premier American historian, and he's an American treasure.
In a meeting where I had him as a guest speaker, I asked him, can you think of another wall throughout any time in history, anywhere in history, that was designed to keep people in other than the Berlin Wall?
And his answer was, maybe the barrier between North and South Korea is also designed to keep people in.
And so that was his exception.
Otherwise, all other walls throughout history, by that analysis and by mine, were all designed to keep people out.
We've built hundreds of them over the years, thousands of them over the years, and done so to keep people out.
And all of those walls are moral.
Every wall that's designed to protect the people inside from those intruders from the outside It's a moral wall that protects you.
And they don't want it to work for a moral...
It's an immoral idea to think that we can't protect ourselves that way.
And the idea that we can't build a wall because it's too hard, too expensive, too complex.
We can have vibration sensors and infrared cameras and drones and balloons and all that stuff and that all fits within the definition of the wall.
Not to the American people it doesn't.
A wall is a wall and it's made out of concrete or it's not a wall.
And so the idea is that, you know, that you've described that the past president has declared executive by executive decisions, don't enforce the law.
I mean, essentially, I can point you to the directives that say, my interpretation of those directives are to the Border Patrol, take your red carpet down there and make sure you roll it out for them so when the rubber raft comes across the Rio Grande, They don't have to walk in the weeds before we chauffeur them to the city of their choice after we filled out their application for asylum for them.
That's what I have watched the Border Patrol do that with my eyes, from looking across the river into Mexico and watching illegals traffic across and go through that process.
So that's prosecutorial discretion delivered courtesy of the past President of the United States.
And now we're in this place where we have a president who says he's not going to offer this prosecutorial discretion, and that he's not going to offer it, and that he's going to enforce the law, except for DACA for now.
But the strongest argument for a wall you've already made, and that is, walls don't have prosecutorial discretion.
They work 24-7.
They at least slow people down and give us a chance to catch them.
And if you want to maintain and man that wall, they'll work 99-point-something percent Oh, from a cost-benefit standpoint, you really couldn't invest in anything better, just in terms of the American taxpayers being able to save money and have an honest conversation.
About politics. You know, the idea, of course, behind a republic is that there's going to be a public square where people debate ideas and may the best argument with the best data win.
And one thing I really dislike about this demographic thumb on the scale is you're not trying to win over the population with the force of your arguments, which the left has been largely unable to do since the failures of socialism and communism happened.
All the way from Soviet Russia to current Venezuela.
Since that came to light, they can't really win an argument.
So now they just need to import voters.
And that, I think, is very much cheating in the realm of ideas.
And it's bypassing the necessary public debate that is required for policy changes in a republic.
Well, yes. And I just take that thought and how this is done.
And you say that it's pretty adept to them to slip this over into politics.
You turn it into a race issue when it's really an immigration issue.
And I think we don't talk enough about culture and civilization.
And here we are. We are now the heart of Western civilization.
And if America fails, Western civilization globally eventually collapses.
And Western civilization, I will describe it broadly as that everywhere where the footprint of Christianity laid the foundation of the culture of the civilization, That's Western civilization.
And I would also draw, there are nuances and distinctions through language and history and national boundaries that change that.
I would root it clear back into Mosaic Law and the Greek Age of Reason, the Roman Republican form of government, and the Old English Common Law, the Enlightenment.
And then we also had Free Enterprise that Wealth of Nations came to us in 1776, simultaneous with our Declaration.
The American civilization was a giant petri dish of all of these combinations that came to that point in history, and we had this other concept called Manifest Destiny, that we were going to settle this continent from sea to shining sea, and we did that in the blink of an eye because we had the convictions and a gift from God that this Judeo-Christian civilization was going to flourish here on this continent and expand those beliefs to the rest of the world.
That's actually part of the prayer at Jamestown in 1607.
So we should not let any of that go.
And if we had been settled by anyone other than the English, we'd be speaking a different language today.
That's really clear.
And that different language probably wouldn't express God-given liberty the way English happens to.
And if you look at where the English language has gone, liberty has followed the language.
It's expanded wherever the English language has expanded.
And it's never expanded anywhere that I know of at that pace unless the language is there to support it.
But not just the language, it's the law, the traditions that came from old England and that are the foundation of this.
So it matters what people believe when they come here as immigrants to America.
First, do they believe that this country is, are they grateful to America for accepting them?
My grandmother was, and she made sure all of her descendants understood that, including me.
Are they grateful? Does culture matter?
Does language matter? Does history, the history that comes within the memory of the people that arrived here, does that matter?
And I say absolutely all of it does, and people have trouble with that concept because then they declare racism or bigotry.
And I would just say this, that all these little arguments are peripheral, but the senator argument can be explained this way.
The populations of Mexico and Japan are pretty much the same.
So if we loaded up everybody in Japan and took them to Mexico, and everybody in Mexico and took them to Japan, what would we name those countries respectively?
Would that country south of the Rio Grande, would it still be Mexico in 30 days?
I'd say no, they'll name it either Japan or New Japan.
And the country over there, that collection of islands that we know as Japan, would soon become Mexico.
They can't name it New Mexico.
And the culture and the character and the GDP of those countries would change immediately and dramatically.
The utilization of the natural resources that would be used would be changed immediately and dramatically.
Mexico would be, for all intents and purposes, would be Japan.
And Japan, for all intents and purposes, would be Mexico.
That's because culture matters.
And we're afraid to talk about it because we get called racist, bigots, some kind of phobe, Stephan.
Well, and of course, crime rates would enormously shift as well.
Japanese crime rates are enormously low.
And I mean, even if you discount the criminality of the Mexican government as a whole, and the cartels, even on the ground, crime rates in Mexico are extraordinarily high, which is another one of the facts that people have a tough time talking about, but it's somewhat important.
And it's funny, too, because the left says, oh, we can assimilate, we can change people's minds, we can make them Americans, that sort of...
That's not how they actually act.
I mean, if you go to a left-leaning newspaper, which is in general a newspaper, they only hire other leftists.
They don't hire Republicans and say, oh, well, we'll just convert them to our way of thinking.
They recognize that they have to hire people like themselves in order to maintain the homogeneity of ideology.
But they somehow imagine you bring someone from Somalia or from Mexico or whoever, and they're just going to assimilate no problem.
But that's not how they actually run their own operations at all.
Well, no, and they don't believe in assimilation.
They reject the assimilation, clearly.
When I was first elected to office, and that is now 15 years ago, I had to represent Sioux City, Iowa, among other places, but I decided I want to have an open dialogue with the minority representatives in the community.
So I asked my staff to pull together a meeting and bring in representatives of the minority members in the community, And in that meeting that day, I had set aside 90 minutes for it, so I had time to listen.
And we had 14 representatives come in.
They sat around my conference table, and I went in and I did about a 90-second self-introduction, told them that I'm there to listen.
I opened it up, and the first words out of anyone's mouth was, we don't need no English language.
We don't need no English only, to be exact with my quote.
And then... It was, we spend money, therefore we pay taxes.
You have to listen to us.
I invited you here to do that.
Well, it was a nearly full 90 minutes of grievance expression.
And one of them even wanted me to learn the indigenous languages of the minor tribes in Central America so that I could better empathize with them.
And when I got down to the end of the meeting, I hadn't said much of anything except listened and took notes.
And so at the end, I said, all right, I only have 30 seconds here before the meeting is over.
I don't have time to say the things I want to say, but I want to judge your reaction to one word.
I want you to get up on the front of your chairs, just kind of slide the front of your chairs, and I'm going to say one word, and I want you to let me know how you feel about this word as just simultaneously by your immediate response.
And so I said, assimilation.
All 14 of them sat back in their chair, threw their hands up, and rejected the concept of assimilation.
And that was a collection of the liberal leaders in Sioux City, Iowa.
That really told me something about what's going on in this country.
Well, immigration has changed a lot too with the internet because in the past, if you left, I don't know, Italy and you came to Canada, maybe you'd get an Italian newspaper two weeks later at your local library that was well thumbed over by everyone else.
But now you can bring through the internet your original culture with you and continue to reference that original culture.
And of course, when immigration comes large enough, the need for assimilation goes down, especially if there's a welfare state because you can create this bubble Of culture where you can reference within yourselves, you can speak within your own language, you can refer within yourselves, and you create this kind of like cyst of the home country that's really facilitated by the welfare state, by access to social media and so on.
And the pressures for assimilation in the past were vastly greater.
You could not succeed economically.
Really, without learning English, without learning the major values of the free market system.
But now the welfare state and social media can seal you off from all of that and have you in this sort of hall of mirrors that doesn't really evolve anymore.
Well, it sure does.
And we also just add to that that there's another concept.
I have not heard anybody bring up the issue of how the Internet brings the original culture into the homes and residences and mobile lives of Newly arriving immigrants, legal or illegal.
But your point is strong, and I'm just glad I heard it today.
It'll be part of the way I think about this, too.
But I've long talked about, I'll call it an axiom, and that is that the axiom that newly arriving immigrants will assimilate into the politics of the locale where they arrive.
And they also assimilate into the culture of the locale where they arrive, but into the politics of it.
And I was sitting across just one-on-one with Mitt Romney.
This would have been prior to the 2008 race, I believe it was.
Maybe it was 12. And it was in Des Moines, Iowa.
I remember exactly where we were.
And I made that point to him, trying to get him to reinforce my position on immigration, which he did a pretty good job of, by the way.
And I said to that, that newly arriving immigrants will assimilate into the politics of the locale where they arrive.
And I said, if you don't believe that, Then take me to Boston and find me an Irish Catholic Republican.
And Romney said immediately, he said, there are two of them.
And I said, I know one.
His name is Gene Hartigan.
And Romney's immediately response was, I know Gene Hartigan.
And so we identified 50% of the Irish Catholic Republicans in Boston sitting at that table in Des Moines, Iowa.
And that makes my point that they assimilated into the politics.
And there's really not much about the Irish people that would cause them to be thinking to be more Democrat than Republican, but they just stuck with the politics of the locale where they arrived.
And it went through the union mentality, etc.
And they got incorporated that way in those groups.
I happen to be with Irish blood and we're the other way.
But in any case, that's part of it.
If they move into a neighborhood, the people around them will be the ones that introduce them into the politics.
And they can also build their own culture in these communities.
Before the Small Business Committee, we had the number two in the Department of Labor testify before the committee several years ago and testify that they can't find enough workers to come into the manufacturing plants that can learn the skills necessary to run a punch press or a lathe.
Two pretty simple operations going on in manufacturing.
Because they don't have the language skills.
And I said, I understand why that's the case for first generation immigrants, but tell me, you know, is that also true?
What about the second generation?
And her answer was, it's not only true with the second generation, but also the third generation.
Sometimes they don't have the language skills that they can't teach them the simple operations and manufacturing.
So the enclaves that we are enabling through the methods that you've described, a series of those methods, The policies that we have that enable that.
Those enclaves that we're enabling are building little cells that fly somebody else's national flag, speak some other language day in and day out, and raising their children that way.
And in the end, that subverts the unity of America.
Well, and it's not hard to figure out.
I mean, I was born in Ireland, but I haven't lived there for a long, long time.
If I were to move to Ireland, I could make a go of it.
You know, I understand the culture, I got the language down, I understand the free market, the political system.
If I'm going to move to Somalia, well, it's going to be just a little bit more challenging for me to make a go of it.
And so just understanding that immigrants can add value more quickly if they come from language and culture that is similar.
It's really not that complicated, but it does seem to be something that people have a tough time with.
And it's nothing to do with race. It is to do with language and with culture.
So let's talk.
Let's finish up. I really appreciate your time.
Let's finish up with what people can do.
So I sort of have this idea that if there's enough of a groundswell of opposition to, say, legalizing To legalizing this seven, eight hundred thousand that's going to swell to a couple of million relatively quickly.
If there is this groundswell of opposition to it, I think it's nice for politicians when they can say, hey, sorry, the people have spoken, it's kind of out of my hands, as opposed to, well, it's kind of ambivalent, so I got to muscle this thing through with willpower.
And I think the more that people can communicate with congressmen, can communicate with their elected representatives at every level and say, this is not something that we want.
This is not something that we voted for.
We strongly oppose it.
I think it gives a lot of reinforcement to politicians for pushing back against legislation that's so significantly disfavored by the constituents.
Well, Seven, it does.
And, you know, I know from being at this for a little while of what it impacts, especially other members, But I say to people, first of all, yes, they need some cover.
Right now, members in the House, Republican members in the House, Democrats are not going to crack on this because they get a huge political advantage.
Republicans have to come together and be solid on it.
But right now they're thinking the president wants some of this.
He wants some kind of amnesty for DACA recipients.
So about half of the Trump supporters, I could say, will follow the cult of personality.
And the other half are going to stick with Trump's promises and Maybe endorse Trumpism rather than Trump's little glitch going on here with DACA. And it's not little.
It has huge implications.
But then the leadership has long wanted something for DACA recipients.
And that's true. I don't know what Mitch McConnell really wants in the Senate, but I expect he's not very far off of Paul Ryan.
And if the three of them are pushing this message out, and they are, then they're organizing, moving and orchestrating something towards some kind of solution.
By the way, Paul Ryan named 10 members to a committee to work on DACA. And I went through that list of those 10.
And I can't find, I mean, you know, why am I not on it?
Maybe I ticked somebody off, but it wasn't because I didn't do my immigration work here to keep up with anybody else out of the 435 or exceed almost everyone, if not everyone.
But I'm not on that list because I don't believe the right thing.
Of all 10 of them, I'd ask two questions.
Is any one of them willing to say that DACA is amnesty?
Or codifying DACA as amnesty.
Not one of them will say that.
Is any one of them publicly in favor of building a wall?
Not one out of the ten appointed by Paul Ryan.
Now we know the results of that task force's job.
They will come out and say, we need to do this for this reason.
But what people need to do is find them, call them, call their offices, call their members office, build relationships.
If you don't have a relationship with your congressman, figure out a way to do that if you can.
Or with their staff.
Talk to their district personnel that are available in the offices around this country.
Get on the phone. Make it work.
When our people are on the phone here, we're hearing from folks.
And it matters when you're from their district more so than if you're not.
But to us, it matters what everybody thinks in America.
So do all of that.
They need to know that there's support out there for them.
They may know in their heart of hearts that what we've said today here is right.
That you're right, that I'm right, and the people that agree with us are right.
But they've got to know also that they're going to have cover, that there are people that support them and will defend them.
And I'd say to individuals, wherever you can defend this cause, do it everywhere, all the time.
Never let somebody up for error that's uttered something that erodes the rule of law or damages American exceptionalism or drags this country off to the left, because all these conversations matter.
Be polite. Be respectful.
Don't call anybody any names because we don't need to.
We're right. And so that's it.
Letters, all of those things matter.
Do everything you can do.
We need a groundswell, as you said.
We've had that groundswell when this was launched at us in 2013.
We created the groundswell throughout the middle of the previous decade when George W. Bush brought his amnesty plan, and it's been a mistake since 1986.
Ronald Reagan realized it after he signed the bill, and I had a conversation with Ed Meese just about four days ago, but he has told me, not in that conversation but others, That he regrets advising Reagan to sign amnesty in 86.
And I believe that's true for the majority of the cabinet that was his circle of people at the time.
Reagan regretted it too.
So if it was a mistake for Ronald Reagan, why in the world would it be right for us today?
Well, and as far as rewarding lawbreakers go, of course there are the people who came across the border illegally, and to reward that is counter to morality and the rule of law.
My particular concern, Congressman King, is rewarding the left for their illegality.
The worst kind of illegality is an unconstitutional order.
That is the biggest law that you can possibly break.
And Barack Obama can't claim to be unknowledgeable.
He's supposed to be this big constitutional expert.
It is rewarding the left to set this trap up where they let more and more people in, let more and more people set down roots in society.
That was clearly unconstitutional.
And then what happens is you reward all of that with a path to citizenship or amnesty.
You're rewarding the law-breaking of the Democrats.
And that, to me, is only going to encourage that particular process from here on in.
That will be my last word the next time I talk about this topic.
He really brought that home.
And I've argued it this way, that why would we codify an unconstitutional act of the most leftist president America has ever seen?
And he knew it was wrong.
22 times on videotape, he explained why it's unconstitutional to move DACA. He did it because he calculated he could get away with it politically, that there wouldn't be a consequence that landed at his feet.
And I don't know why Donald Trump didn't follow through and keep his word January 20th of this year.
But if we reward unconstitutional acts on presidents, we're going to get more unconstitutional acts, and there will be a calculus that takes place at each succeeding president.
Barack Obama was successful in getting codified into law, something that couldn't be passed under his administration, by violating the Constitution, And picking the most sympathetic, small universe of people, and essentially, if he succeeds in this, he will have duped the American people, and we'll have desecrated the memory and the legacy of our founding fathers.
And I will put that in my argument in the next discussion that I have.
Yeah, the hobnail boots march across the border on the shreds of the Constitution.
Well, thank you very much, Congressman King, for taking the time today.
The website, steveking.house.gov and twitter.com forward slash stevekingia.
Really appreciate your time, really appreciate your courage, and if you are living in America...
And you're over 18, you're eligible to vote, please do what he suggests and get in touch with your elected representatives.
It is a battle that needs to be fought continuously, but it is not a battle we can afford to give up.
