“It's NOT Racist!” Immigration Debate Feat Konstantin Kisin
It doesn’t matter whether you’re in Birmingham Alabama, or Birmingham in the UK, the issues riling voters are the same - immigration, failing government and the economy. And they’re all connected. People tend to be a lot more tolerant when everybody is getting richer. But a sluggish economy which doesn’t serve the middle or the working class leads to resentment and to blame. A lot of that blame falls on immigrants, especially when failing leaders preside over a system which is chaotic and unsafe. With the issue now threatening to completely reshape British politics, Piers Morgan takes a look at it in detail - on both sides of the pond - alongside Konstantin Kisin, whose new documentary looks at asylum protests in the English town of Crowborough, The Young Turks founder Cenk Uygur, Brandon Tatum AKA The Officer Tatum and digital editor at the New Statesman, Oli Dugmore. Piers Morgan Uncensored is proudly independent and supported by: Oxford Natural: To watch their full stories, scan the QR code on your screen or visit https://oxfordnatural.com/piers/ to get 70% off your first order when you use code PIERS. ExpressVPN: Right now you can get an extra four months of ExpressVPN for free. Just scan the QR code on the screen, or go to https://ExpressVPN.com/PIERS and get four extra months for free. Masa Chips: Ready to give MASA or Vandy a try? Get 25% off your first order by going to http://masachips.com/PIERS and using code PIERS. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|
Time
Text
Cultural Problem With Asylum00:08:08
But they literally open up the border and allow every illegal person that they can possibly find to allow them to come into our country to flood our cities so they can win elections forever.
Are we in some sort of immigrant emergency here in America?
No, the number of immigrants are going down, not up.
Ultimately, this is a cultural problem.
When you have people coming from certain places where, let's be honest, women are considered second-class citizens, if not cattle.
I think this idea that your sort of culture, your national identity, can potentially be diluted by people of a different skin tone or indeed religious background is a pretty pathetic argument.
So people that believe in Sharia law, do they believe in civil liberty?
Constantine, you keep asking me the same question.
I'm going to keep giving you the same answer.
Should we deport people who want Sharia law?
Immigration, failing government, and the economy.
It doesn't matter whether you're in Birmingham, Alabama, or just Birmingham in the UK.
The issues rioting voters are the same.
Immigration, failing government, and the economy.
They're all connected.
People tend to be a lot more tolerant, a lot more open to ideas like multiculturalism when everyone's getting richer.
But a sluggish economy, which doesn't serve the middle or working class, often leads to resentment and to blame.
A lot of that blame often falls on immigrants, especially when failing leaders preside over systems which are chaotic and unsafe.
And in the US and the UK, the mistake made by educated and comfortable liberals has been to dismiss everyone who's unhappy as a racist.
The issue of immigration and the attitude towards the people who worry about it helped put Donald Trump back in the White House.
Many agreed on the problems, as we're now seeing every day, not necessarily the solutions.
And with the issue of immigration now threatening to completely reshape British politics, we're going to look at this in more detail on both sides of the pond.
Joining me to discuss all this is Constantine Kissing, the host of Trigonometry, whose new documentary looks at asylum protests in the English town of Crowborough in Sussex.
Ollie Dunmore, the digital editor at the New Statesman, Chen Uger, the founder and CEO of The Young Turks, and Brandon Tatum, better known as the Officer Tatum.
So a stellar panel.
Welcome to all of you.
Constantine, you've done this documentary.
Interestingly, for me, it's centered on the English town of Crowborough down near the south coast.
I actually was brought up in a village literally three miles away and still have a home down there.
So I'm very aware of this issue because a lot of the locals have been telling me about it and wanting me to get involved.
So I'm glad we're doing this.
Let's take a clip first and then explain briefly what this is all about.
What are you terrified about?
It's the undocumented men, and it is such a huge saturation for a small area.
My son, he's 11.
He won't get to experience walking to school on his own.
Crowborough's a small town.
It's a very community that is very close-knit.
And putting 600 people of unknown origin in a camp, which is actually going to be non-detained and open, is a concern for people.
And one of the things I've noticed walking around, as you know, I live just down the road, is how much of a sense of a community there is here.
This is really, it's just where people live with their families.
It's not just a random area for people to be dumped in.
So is that part of the concern as well?
I know there are a lot of schools next to the camp and safety is obviously a big issue as well.
Yeah, huge.
I mean, this is on the edge of a forest.
So you have got completely unlit and little parks, forest areas.
So any crimes that do go on, they're going to go unheard and unstopped.
Constantly, really interesting documentary.
And, you know, I know a lot of people from Crowborough.
It's just a very, you know, average, ordinary little town in East Sussex.
They're not a bunch of racists.
They're not people instinctively, I think, who would, you know, have an abhorrence of foreigners or anything like that.
But they are legitimately concerned about this sudden invasion, as they see it, of asylum seekers.
They don't know who these people are, where they're from, what crimes they may have committed.
All they do know is they've just been dumped right bang in the middle of their town.
What do you make of this?
Well, speaking to people there, I think your points are incredibly valid.
And I would also add, I think in your intro you talked about immigration.
We need to disentangle these things.
This isn't about immigration.
This is about people entering our country illegally and then us as taxpayers having to put them up at our expense.
And this is part of Shabana Mahmoud, the Home Secretary's plan, of course, to empty the asylum hotels where hidden in the small print was they would be put on military bases.
And when you think of a military base, you think safety, security, it's organized.
People are going to be under surveillance.
What actually is the case is they can leave the camp, they can walk out of there, they can take the bus.
There's a bus stop directly outside, they can take the bus to Tunbridge Wells, which is a town just up the road, they can take a bus to Brighton.
And there was a rape on Brighton Beach only a few days ago.
Three men were charged with that rape.
They were all asylum seekers confirmed by the Home Office, all from the Middle East.
And that's exactly the profile of the people who are going to be housed in this camp.
So when you have a town of 20,000 people where you've got 600 unvetted, unchecked men, all men, being housed in this facility that they can leave at will, no infrastructure in the town, nothing for them to do, you can understand why basically the entire community turned out on Sunday, which is what I filmed.
And you know, those conversations you saw, they're representative of what was happening there.
This isn't some political thing.
This isn't about politics.
It's not about right versus left.
It's about right versus wrong.
And when you put hundreds of young men into this kind of community, of course people are going to be concerned.
And not only are they going to be concerned, they are right to be concerned.
Right, Ollia Dungmore, 400,000 people have sought asylum in the UK in the last four years.
Nearly 40% of asylum seekers arrive on the small boats, which has been an ongoing crisis down on the southern border.
Record numbers will have crossed the English Channel predominantly from France since the start of 2025 on previous years, despite the Prime Minister saying he'd smashed the gangs.
He hasn't done that at all.
Nearly the same amount arrive legally as a visitor or on a work or study visa and then go on to claim asylum.
Over 100,000 people in the UK currently live in asylum accommodation and asylum claims in Britain are a record high with 111,000 applications in the year to June 2025 with a backlog in the appeal system of more than 50,000 people and a waiting time of at least a year.
And what causes the agitation is over half of refugees remain on benefits eight years after they've arrived.
There are, for example, 700 Albanian families living in taxpayer-funded accommodation having failed their asylum claim because the UK currently doesn't remove family groups and so on.
So this is this has been a badly handled thing for a long time under successive governments, Conservative and Labour, in my opinion.
And I do think it should be able to be scrutinised without everyone who raises a complaining eye or a concerned eye immediately being branded racist.
I think it's so unhelpful to the debate.
What do you think is going on here?
Why has it got out of control?
Why can't we run a better asylum system?
What do we do about this?
Yeah, I completely agree with you, Piers.
I think calling people racists basically is not a productive way to conduct this conversation.
In my mind, what's going on here is a complete failure of state capacity.
Whether it's to process asylum claims, whether it's to build adequate housing and infrastructure for people that do arrive in the UK, top to bottom, it is a story of state failure in terms of addressing the small boats crisis.
My proposal for addressing that is quite simple.
I think you should put a processing center in France.
I think people should be able to make their asylum claim there.
The French have offered it to us.
We decline the opportunity to do so.
We can assess whether or not they have a valid asylum claim.
And if they do, we can admit them to the UK.
They can get on, they can get a job.
They can contribute to society, which I think is the ideal that all of us would like.
Additionally, if we had that processing center in France, you've got a pretty good idea then that if someone doesn't want to submit an asylum application and tries to cross the channel in a dinghy, you've got a pretty good idea of whether or not they're trying to get here with a legitimate McClane to asylum or not.
So that'd be my approach to resolving it.
Securing The Black Vote00:08:45
Check Nuger, in America, it'd be very interesting watching what's happened under the Trump administration.
So the big tick in the box that most people can, I think, sign up to with approval is he's pretty well shut the southern border down to illegal immigrants coming in.
From various reports, it is estimated that as many as 10 million, maybe more, came over that border in the four years under Joe Biden.
We don't know the exact number, but broadly speaking, most Americans I've talked to approve of that, of Trump stopping that happening.
They also approve of people who are in the country undocumented.
If they commit a crime unconnected to their status, to their immigration status, then they should be deported.
Most Americans agree with that.
The flashpoint in America has been the extra step through these ICE agents going around places like Los Angeles, picking up undocumented people seemingly often on a whim or a suspicion, and those people being removed from the country, even if in some cases they've built a family there, they've had kids there, they contribute to society, they're paying taxes and so on.
So I think there's been some big wins for Trump on this issue of illegal immigration in America comparative to his previous administration under Biden, but also this contentious point as to whether if you're in a country illegally, whatever life you've built for yourself, however long you've been there, the state should still have the right to just pick you up and throw you out.
Today's show is sponsored by Oxford Natural, makers of the Optimum Day and Optimum Night All Natural Supplements.
Thousands of Brits and Americans are already taking them with incredible results.
Optimum Day boosts your energy and supports weight loss throughout the day.
Optimum night helps you relax and get deep, refreshing sleep.
They have countless success stories, including from some very familiar faces.
England ledger Michael Owen, who lost £40.
AFTV's Robbie, who lost more than £100.
To watch their full stories and many more, scan the QR code on your screen or visit oxfordnatural.com slash peers.
And here's the best part.
Use the code peers and get 70% off your first order.
You're 70% off with the code PEERS.
Yeah, first of all, you're all racist and I cancel all of you.
Okay, so no, nobody's talking about that anymore.
So listen, there's two different issues on immigration in America.
First is, are we allowing too many immigrants in?
So let me give you some context on that.
For the first time since the 1960s, the number of foreign-born people in America has gone down by a million people.
And by the way, you can say, hey, you know, the American people kind of like that.
That's why they like that Trump, you know, stopped people coming in from the border.
And that's a fair point, right?
But are we in some sort of immigrant emergency here in America?
No, the number of immigrants are going down, not up.
And further context, so about 15% of Americans are foreign-born.
If that seems like a high number to you, it's much higher in other countries, 22% in Canada, 29% in Switzerland, 30% in Australia.
So we don't have some sort of immigration emergency in that sense here.
So that context is super important.
Nevertheless, I understand that people are wary of change.
And sometimes change doesn't bring positive things, right?
Or it might bring a lot of positive stuff, but has some negative consequences.
So we have to make rational decisions here.
Part of the problem, Piers, is that it leads to the second issue, which is that people want you to look at immigrants and say that's the real problem.
And the reason they're doing that is because they don't want you to look up.
So the guy coming in across the border in America just crossed the Rio Grande, doesn't have any money, doesn't have any power.
He didn't rig this system against you.
The donor class in America did.
And they desperately don't want you to know that.
So they want you to get angry at immigrants instead.
So I think the number one source of discontent here in the U.S., and I would bet that it's the same in the UK, is not the raw numbers.
It's that we feel that our government isn't delivering for us.
So, you know, the right wing says America first.
These days on the Young Turks, we say Americans first.
It's because we never get anything.
And you see, like, it's not like these immigrants that are, for example, in Chicago, where people were complaining about it, including, by the way, black and brown communities in Chicago, right?
And they were getting a certain stipend.
And the stipend's not huge or anything.
But as a resident of Chicago, they were looking at that and thinking, I'm not getting anything.
And now all of a sudden, these guys are getting something.
It's not much, but it's something.
So why do I never get anything?
And the real answer to that, of course, has nothing to do with immigrants.
It has to do with the richest people in the country and mainly corporate rule that has decided that they're going to extract all of our wealth in the form of like $35 billion in oil subsidies, endless wars that enrich the defense contractors.
And by the way, create waves of new immigrants as unrest in those countries occur.
So if you really want to fix these problems, you have to look at the donors and the people in power, the people setting the rules, rather than just hating out new immigrants that came in.
Officer Tatum, you know, one of the big flashpoints in the UK, as I mentioned, these small boats just coming in all the time on the southern border with illegal immigrants pouring in.
And then once they get there, the government in the UK feeling obliged to house them and they're putting them up often in rather nice hotels.
And the flashpoint there is why are these asylum seekers, as they many of them, they all claim to be, but they're not all legitimate asylum seekers.
For example, a year and a half ago, they discovered 15,000 of the year total number who come in on the small boats actually turned out to be young economic male Albanians from Albania, which is not a war-torn country.
So they weren't genuine asylum seekers.
They were economic migrants seeking a better life for themselves.
Nothing wrong with that, but they needed a proper process of going through the legal way of getting in.
So there's a lot of anger that's been building up by people living through a cost of living crisis, can't afford to feed their kids.
Real problem with public services as the UK population continues to rise, 50 million back in the 50s, nearly 70 million now, crumbling health service because you can't cope with the extra volume of people, education, all the public services creaking up the seams.
And then they have this constant flashpoint of these people coming in illegally and seemingly in many cases being treated better than people already in the country who are there perfectly legally.
That's been causing a lot of the anger, which is now erupting in places around the country.
Yeah, it's the same thing that's happening in the United States of America.
It's a lot to unpack here.
The government is a fraudulent organization when it comes to this illegal immigration stuff.
And most of it is from the Democrat Party.
They legitimately, or I wasn't legitimate, but they literally opened up the border and allowed every illegal person that they can possibly find to allow them to come into our country to flood our cities so they can win elections forever.
This is exactly what they did.
They don't give a flying flip.
And explain, just explain why that would help the Democrats win elections.
Well, when you get an influx of people into certain areas and then you give them amnesty, which is the ultimate plan, now you have more electoral college votes.
Now you have more Congress representation.
All of those things they can leverage.
Why would you assume they don't want to vote Democrat, though?
Well, let me explain.
If you get a bunch of people who have no hope from the country that they came from and they're believing they come to America, which is utopia, they get all this free stuff.
They get all the government funding.
And then, when you give them amnesty, when you say you are a citizen, you can now stay here.
We support you.
Who do you think they're going to vote for?
The party that does that for them.
They've done the same thing to black people in this country.
They manipulated the black vote by giving them handouts and different things like that.
And now they secured the black vote.
That's why black people vote unanimously for Democrats, even though Democrats have done nothing for black people in this country.
They plan to do the same thing for illegal aliens.
They're losing some of the minority votes.
So now they have a new demographic.
And also, they don't give a F about these people coming over here.
Because if they did, they would shut the border down and have them come through a legal process because people are getting raped.
Children are getting sex trafficked.
These people, the cartel, are making money.
Coyotes are escorting these people through the desert and leaving them to die.
So it's a shame that our government is doing this.
And it's not just a minor inconvenience for the American people.
We're talking billions of taxpayer dollars spent on housing these people.
Manipulating Minority Support00:03:37
And they're not just coming over here for a better life.
They're unassimilated.
They do not want to be a part of America.
They want to do their own thing.
Their culture is very different in American culture.
They're raping people and doing a lot of other things.
Now, let me clarify this because I don't want people to take it out of context.
It's not every illegal alien that's doing this, but it is enough to be an issue.
And we shouldn't even have an issue with this because if you came here illegally, you shouldn't be here in the first place.
I don't care if your grandma, nana, whoever it is built a life here, you built it on illegal terms.
That's like me breaking in your house, Pierce, and I'm living there.
And all of a sudden, I start cooking in your house and I have a kid and now my kid lives in your house.
Somehow I'm afforded all of the amenities that you've built.
No, that don't work like that.
You got to go home.
You got to get out of here.
You should have never been here in the first place.
All right.
Konstantin, you wanted to get in there.
Well, there's a few things that both Jank and Brandon, the few points that they made, I think are relevant but different in the UK, in particular this Crowborough protest that I spoke to people at.
One of the things they were very keen to emphasize is there are hundreds of Ukrainians living in the town or have been living in the town over the last two or three years within families, within homes that people welcome them in.
But what they're saying is there's a big difference between women and children fleeing war and people who get on the boat in France, throw their passport or their ID in the sea and then get here and a single man being housed unvetted, unchecked, etc.
So again, I think it's very important.
The conversation has been about immigration.
This is not about immigration.
Both the United States, where I spend a lot of time, Brandon and Jenkins have both been on my show when we've been over there, right?
But you guys both know this.
America is the most pro-immigrant country in the world that I've ever been to.
UK, probably second or third in terms of some other places that you might compare it to.
These are welcoming countries that we live in.
We welcome people to come here, start businesses, be contributors.
But when you come to this country and you are someone who's deliberately broken the rules in order to get in here, we're right to be suspicious of you.
And we should be keeping these people under lock and key so they can't go out into the local community and threaten and menace women, children, and residents, elderly residents.
And in Crowborough, the place I filmed, do you know that you probably know this, Pierce?
The police station there is unmanned because it's such a safe place.
Now, what happens when you've got hundreds of people running around who you don't know what they are and they've got nothing to do?
You've got big problems building up because of that, to say nothing of the fact, yeah, we've got the same problem that Brandon mentions in the UK, where at one point we were spending a million pounds a day on hotels for illegal immigrants.
And the cost of housing on these military bases is basically the same.
Express VPN is the simple way to protect your privacy online.
In the US, internet providers record your online activity and can sell your data.
In many countries, they've even legally required to store your information for years.
Along with millions of others, I use ExpressVPN to stop the tracking.
It hides your IP address and it routes all your activity through encrypted servers to keep advertisers and scammers from accessing your data.
You can choose the level of protection you need.
The basic plan is just $3.49 a month, less than 12 cents a day.
Right now, you can get an extra four months of ExpressVPN if you go to expressvpn.com slash peers to scan the QR code on the screen or go to expressvpn.com slash peers to get four additional months of service.
That's expressvpn.com slash peers.
Massive Legal Immigration Issues00:08:12
Yeah, I mean, that's the problem.
I mean, although it is an illegal immigration issue, what we're talking about here, there's also been a massive legal immigration issue, Constantine, in the UK, where, you know, a year or so ago, they worked out that nearly a million people in terms of net migration for the year had come into the UK.
A lot of it was obviously Ukraine and a lot from Hong Kong and places like that, but a huge number of people, like I say, into a country already creaking up the seams in terms of its ability for the public services to serve the current population.
Again, all that does is create a lot of tension.
It turned out the biggest problem was not bringing in like highly skilled people who can contribute well to society and so on, who you want to bring to a country, any country.
But they were allowed to bring a huge number of dependents with them.
You know, families of five, six, seven people were coming in with each of the people allowed in.
That was actually the big problem.
But if you start rising the population of the UK by a million a year, very, very quickly, you're going to see the problems we've been seeing massively exacerbated.
Well, let me make just a very brief bit of context, give a very brief bit of context that I think sets the UK situation in a very clear light.
We had the Blair government and 13 years of the Labour government then, and then it got worse under the Conservatives thereafter, as you made the point.
Under one government, we had more people come into this country than had come to Britain in its entire history.
Since the Battle of Hastings in 1066, up until 1950, the number of people that came in under Blair and Brown was higher than the total over a thousand years.
And that was mainly from Eastern Europe.
Yeah.
So this wasn't a question.
This is why when the genuine racists get into this debate, which is always an unfortunate side effect of it, they often come at it from a skin colour perspective.
It's the brown and black people that are the problem.
Actually, as Constantine just rightly said, in the first part of this century, it was opening the floodgates, quite literally, to a lot of people from Eastern Europe who were white.
But that was what caused the initial big problem, I think.
I agree.
And I think you then add on top of that the subsequent Conservative governments, which then opened the floodgates to the rest of the world.
And so we've got this cumulative problem.
And look, it's very important to say, I mean, there are differences between different groups of people.
And so, you know, you mentioned the racism point.
Well, we've had tens of thousands of Hong Kongers come in.
Do you hear lots of anti-Hong Kong rhetoric in this country?
We've had hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians fleeing the war come in.
Are you hearing lots of anti-Ukrainian sentiment?
No, because ultimately this is a cultural problem.
And this point that Brandon made very well.
When you have people come in from certain places where, let's be honest, women are considered second-class citizens, if not cattle, then of course you're going to be expected, expecting that some of the incidents that we've seen, whether it's grooming gangs, whether there's lots of other problems that we've had up and down the country.
So we also have to be reasonable and actually delineate between immigration, legal immigration.
And what we basically have is people coming illegally against the wishes of the British public.
And the final point I'll make is this, both in the United States and here, nobody, and I mean nobody voted for this.
Nobody voted for this.
Nobody signed up to this.
And I'm glad we're sitting here with the four of us from different political perspectives.
And all of us now today agree it's not racist to bring this up.
But also, let's be honest, Piers.
Five years ago, bringing these points up would have got you demonized.
We wouldn't have had the debate.
Correct.
Right?
Because people would have said, if you're raising any concerns about this, obviously you're a racist.
And that's one of the benefits of this problem getting so bad.
At least we're finally allowed to talk about it.
Ollie, what do we do about the fact that it does, unfortunately, always bring out the genuine racists, right?
There are genuine racists.
They're sort of more easily identifiable now because of things like social media.
We can see them in the marches or whatever.
But there are.
There is a racist element who don't want any foreigners coming into the country.
And that tends to turn the debate into something rather different.
What do we do?
How do we have this debate and sort things out without that element exploiting it?
Great question, Piers.
I would also clarify as well this point about sort of the racism that black and brown people experience and the racism that people of Eastern European descent experience as well.
I used to work in a McDonald's with 50% of the staffers from Poland.
And I assure you, there is plenty of anti-Polish racism amongst the British public, even though they're white people as well.
Yeah, of course there is.
And I remember at the time as well, there was plenty.
But look, how do you confront racism?
Multi-pronged approach.
Education being the primary one.
I think a strong, functioning economy, a functioning state is the second one.
I think, you know, the debate we've been having, like, for example, that police station in Croebra that Konstantin mentioned.
Yeah, I'm sure Crobora is a pretty safe place.
Police stations and police officer numbers over the last 14 years were cut.
Every touchstone in this conversation, sort of the failure of the state, whether it's in the planning of skills and training, medicine is a great example, Piers.
You spoke about the NHS, right?
Huge number of foreign-born doctors in the NHS.
Huge number of British-trained doctors, the British state has invested in training, going abroad to practice medicine in other countries.
These don't seem like sort of intractable problems for us to solve.
And I think that the sort of, I commend the sort of the tenor of the debate so far on this program.
I think it's perfectly reasonable to have a conversation about sort of the costs and the benefits, you know, costs and benefits of a million people coming in, costs and benefits of net zero people coming in.
There's clearly a middle ground between the two.
Both involve trade-offs.
Probably at the extreme end of one, you're talking about social cohesion.
At the extreme end of the other, you're talking about some pretty significant macro effects to the economy.
There is a balance between those two things that we should strike.
But primarily in terms of confronting the far right, absolutely, it's education.
It's a strong economy.
And in extremists, it's confronting them face to face.
We could just deal with the problem.
I mean, this is the problem, right?
If you didn't have illegal immigration, there wouldn't be any racists getting any support at all because the British public is overwhelmingly not of that world.
Well, well, that's why it's interesting.
Tommy Robinson regularly goes on American airways and he sells them a bit of a dummy story about himself.
He's like this, you know, picked upon poor oppressed guy who's just preaching the truth.
There's a lot more complicated than that.
But the reason he's getting more and more support from people who I would certainly not categorize as far right or racist is because he's exposing very loudly genuine problems.
I mean, Cheng, this is the thing, isn't it?
You're always going to attract the far right for this stuff.
And that's a very unsavoury aspect of it.
But I do think that the governments in America and the UK have brought this all on themselves.
They fomented a lot of this anger amongst ordinary people.
And what you're seeing now is a lot of ordinary people who are not on the far right or the far left.
I know Crowborough, this town well.
They're just regular people.
Near my village, they want to go to the pub, play a bit of sport at the weekend, have local schools.
They all know each other.
It's very genteel down there.
And suddenly they've got 600 male asylum seekers from all parts of the world.
No one knows much about them.
They're very concerned about how they're going to be able to move around.
And you don't need many.
As Officer Tatum highlighted there, obviously it's not all that they're not all criminals.
For all we know, none of them might be criminally minded.
But it wouldn't take much in terms of one or two of those people in there to commit some heinous crime in Crowborough for that to become a real powder cake.
And then people would attack the people of Crowborough.
And I'd be like, well, hang on.
Just hang on a second.
You know, this was inflicted on them as a society.
And if it blows up in their face in an ugly way, it's going to cause a lot of unrest.
Yeah.
So let me address both sides of that.
Defending American Values00:17:06
So first of all, for the folks who are worried about race and all that, and is it anti-immigrant mentality is by definition racist?
No, because I can give you examples from other countries again.
And for example, in Turkey, they took in a ton of Syrian immigrants and Afghan immigrants because of the wars there.
And a lot of the native Turks were pissed.
They didn't want it either, right?
Well, Germany.
Germany.
I mean, Germany, it cost Angela Merkel a job.
She led a million in, mainly from Syria.
And ultimately, that was one of the main reasons she got kicked out.
Where I'm from, chips are called crisps.
And our chips are actually what Americans call French fries.
But that's not really my biggest problem.
Have you ever actually read the label on a bag of chips?
It sounds like a science experiment.
Seed oils, MSG, artificial dyes, mystery ingredients, which sound like diseases.
It cannot be good for you.
Massa chips are the answer.
They have just three quality ingredients.
Organic corn, sea salt, and 100% grass-fed beef tallow.
It's a snack that feels good without the crash and the sluggishness.
And if you love Massa, you'll love Vandy Crisps 2.
Three ingredients, delicious flavors, smokehouse barbecue is a personal favorite of mine.
Use code PEARS, P-I-E-R-S, for 25% off your first order at massachips.com or bandycrisps.com.
You can also click the link below or scan the QR code to play Miss Delicious Offer.
Massa and Vandi, also now available nationwide at Sprout Supermarket.
Stop by and pick up a few bags before I buy them all.
And look, it's a natural thing that happens that number one, people are used to their way of life.
And when things change a little bit, they get discomforted by it.
So I understand it.
It's a natural reaction.
And at the same time, especially when your government doesn't deliver for you, as is happening in both Turkey and the UK and America, people get frustrated and go, why doesn't anybody, our government ever represent us?
And now we've got these new folks in and they might be getting a nickel and a dime, but it's a nickel and a dime more than I'm getting.
So that's why that frustration happens.
And I understand.
And I'm an immigrant.
And what I would say to the immigrant community is, and most of us are overwhelmingly grateful, right?
And so look, for example, we talk about all the Eastern Europeans that came in the biggest wave of immigration to the UK.
My guess is that Konstantin's family came from Eastern Europe at some point into the UK, right?
But Konstantin's grateful from what I've seen.
I'm grateful for America, right?
And I would tell those immigrants, especially in the UK where they're for some magical reasons not allowed to work for a year, go to the local church, go to the local community and volunteer.
Say, how can we help?
And get to know people and get them to know you so that people are less alarmed, right?
Now, at the same time, I want to say to the folks who are non-immigrants, don't do the demagoguing, right?
So on crime, for example, here in America, unfortunately, natural-born citizens are twice as likely to commit crime as undocumented immigrants and four times more likely to commit crime than legal immigrants like myself and my family, right?
So that doesn't mean that natural-born Americans are somehow worse.
It's just these are all different geopolitical, social, and cultural contexts that leads to those numbers.
But are immigrants in the U.S. more likely to do crime?
No, they're actually less. likely to do crime.
So let's be honest about that and let's be clear about that.
So we don't need to demagogue over that.
And then in terms of what Tatum said earlier, look, there is no amnesty here.
There is no plan for amnesty.
If there was a plan for amnesty, why didn't Obama do it?
Why didn't Biden do it?
The last time we had amnesty was actually under Ronald Reagan, right?
No, they didn't, actually, brother.
And so the dark problem was the mass deportations.
No, no.
And so, and they don't vote.
There's all these demagoguing about, oh my God, they're all going to vote.
They're all coming.
No, they don't have citizenship and they can't vote.
So look, last thing on this is that in terms of how it's going so far in America, you were right in your beginning, Piers.
No question that people like the closing of the border and they like kicking out the criminals who are undocumented.
And that's super rational.
Now almost no one on the left objects to that, right?
So the part where we begin to disagree is the mass deportations.
Not begin, we definitely disagree.
And by the way, their independents are on our side saying, don't do the mass deportations.
They're ugly.
They're not the right way to go.
As we see with so many immigrants in other countries, as I said before, Canada, Switzerland, et cetera, it isn't the number of immigrants you have.
It's the system you have.
Do you have the right system?
Do you assimilate them well?
Do they assimilate well?
Are they contributing to this society?
So while Syrians might be a problem in some perceived ways because of the crowding issues and the economic issues in Germany and in Turkey, Steve Jobs' dad was a Muslim Syrian immigrant, and it led to Steve Jobs, which led to Apple.
Elon Musk is an immigrant.
So obviously immigrants can make massive, massive contributions.
And that is why America is the number one country in the world because we're the most immigrants.
I mean, opposition has a military process.
Let me just repeat my favorite comment at this stage of these debates, which is that the biggest deporter in American presidential history per year that he was in office was Barack Obama, who deported over 3 million people in eight years.
He was known as supporter-in-chief in Mexico.
He was the biggest mass deporter of them all.
The only difference is the liberal world didn't care.
If I asked any of my liberal friends in the last few years, how many people did Obama deport, they had no idea.
It never crossed their mind he might be a mass deporter.
Everybody in Mexico knew how many he was deporting because it was on an industrial scale.
So there's been a lot of hypocrisy politically about this.
And I would say in the UK, the cross-party reality is they've all cocked this up.
All of them.
None of them have worked out how to stop 60,000 or so people coming over illegally on the small boats.
They've tried everything from threatening to send them to Rwanda to all sorts of different ploys.
None of them have worked.
We've now got this gigantic backlog, which is ridiculous.
Obviously, a lot of the people claiming asylum are not actually asylum seekers.
We know that.
Most of them are young male economic migrants trying it on.
But, you know, as Ronald Reagan said so rightly, if you don't have a border, you don't have a country.
That's the whole point of a border is to protect your border.
So you are a country.
And I do think one of the issues we haven't really touched on, but if you look at Europe, for example, in the last decade, because of various wars led by Syria and others, the number of people that have come across the European continent has been, I think, seven, eight million was the last number I read in just a few years.
It's an enormous number of people.
You've not really seen this since the end of the Second World War.
And that has, and this is the other part of the debate I think we should just touch on, that has a real, a real-time sea change effect on the social fabric of a country, right?
So if you look at someone like the UK, for example, if you look at the demographic of what we were like back in the start of last century, predominantly white Christian country, vast majority of people.
Now it's a far less white country by comparison.
It's a far less Christian country.
A lot of that down to actually people not having any religious beliefs.
But also we have a lot of Muslims in the UK, 4 million, about the same as they have in America.
In America, you only have about the same number of Jews, for example.
In the UK, we have just 250,000 Jews, which is why I think there's been more of a flashpoint between the Muslim community and the Jewish community, because the Muslim community outnumbers the Jewish community many, many times comparative to America.
Now, the point of saying this is just that these are statistical facts.
And I was having a debate with Tucker Carlson, which is going on his show later today, in which we were talking about it.
He thinks this is a really bad thing.
I was defending it, saying the UK in particular, like America, has always been an extraordinary melting pot of cultures and faiths and skin colors and everything else.
And I like that.
You know, I live in a high street in West London.
I walk down pretty much every store, every service place, every hotel, every restaurant has a multicultural staff.
I like it.
I've got no problem with it.
But are we creating a problem in 20 years' time if we carry on down this route?
Does it matter?
Do you stop being England, for example?
This is what Tucker Carlson was arguing.
I argue strenuously, no, we don't.
But there's no doubt the country will look very different in 50 years' time to what it did 50 years ago.
Pierce, I think there's a big difference and we got to delineate between the two.
There's a difference between immigration and illegal immigration.
You know, the people that are coming out to our country illegally are committing a crime.
If you come into our country and you sneak past the port of entry and you go up under a fence, you committed a crime.
You should be prosecuted for that crime.
The fact that we let it go on so long is the reason why it's been exacerbated.
And if a person comes into the country and they seek asylum and they lied or they didn't show up to court, they should be deported.
That's according to the law that we have on the books.
And let's go beyond that.
I do push back on this idea that because America is less white, somehow it's going to be less American.
America is not a race.
It's an idea.
See, that's what I believe, just to be clear.
But Tucker Carlson and people like him, they get very nationalistic about this, right?
And they say that culturally, if you invite too many people from other cultures into your country, that you lose your own identity and culture as a country.
What do you say to that argument?
Well, Pierce, I think that sane people understand that it's not about color.
It's about assimilation.
There is no difference between an American that is black and American that is white because we both believe in American values.
What happens is when you start getting people into this country that do not make a vow to assimilate to American values and our constitution and our way of life, that's where the problem happens.
And unfortunately, one of the closest countries to us is Mexico and South America.
And so a lot of people are coming over that just so happen to be of that demographic and they're not abiding by the American values.
And that's why you see a color change.
But if everybody that we allow to come over here, like many immigrants that have come over here and that have contributed tremendously to the success of America, Elon Musk being one of them and a lot of others, because they do what?
Assimilate.
They believe in American values.
They believe in capitalism.
They're not coming over here to be socialists and communists.
They're not coming over here to weaponize empathy to try to create the world to be a new way of life.
Like we see these mind-dead congressmen or congresswomen that have literally said that they want to rewrite American values.
They want to get rid of the Constitution.
I mean, these things are an apparel or negative to the American people.
I mean, the Constitution, the Constitution, it's interesting as we approach Thanksgiving, but the Constitution, you know, I think there's often a misunderstanding about it.
It's not some sacrosanct, untouchable document.
There are 27 amendments to the Constitution.
It's been amended many times.
There's no reason.
In fact, the Founding Fathers made it crystal clear it was a document for the people, right?
And they imply there should be natural evolution that the people of the moment should determine the way the country is run.
And I do feel sometimes that some Americans get very strict about the absolute tiny wording of the Constitution to explain and justify whatever it is they want to do without any sense it can ever evolve.
I mean, all documents like that should be living documents, shouldn't they?
Pierce, that could be true, but we have never gotten rid of the Constitution.
We've made amendments to the Constitution.
That means we've improved upon.
That's what I mean.
If we don't get rid of it, and I think it's right.
Of course, the 13th Amendment, the 14th Amendment, the 15th Amendment were all valuable amendments, right?
To eliminate slavery, to get, and actually for the citizenship of black people, it wasn't the anchor baby stuff that they're doing today.
It was actually the citizenship of black people and the right for black people to vote.
So the amendments, as we grow and evolve as a nation and we, you know what I'm saying, we fulfill the promises that our founding fathers had in their intent with the document is something that I support.
But to say we need to rewrite the whole thing.
No, no, I didn't mean that.
I don't mean that.
I didn't say that.
I do think there's a good argument.
Well, I do think there's a good argument.
I'm not sure if I'm doing a country that feels that way.
I don't think that at all, but I do think the founding fathers made it clear that Americans in any given moment, they could evolve the Constitution.
Hence, the fact there have been 27 amendments.
In other words, nothing should stay still forever.
If the country changes, if the way of life changes, they wanted the ethos of the Constitution to continue, but the exact way it gets framed and how it is utilized could evolve.
Hence the amendments.
There's a democratic way of doing that, though.
And this is kind of the point in terms of everything that we've been discussing in this conversation, right?
The way you amend the U.S. Constitution is by having a democratic process to do that.
Illegal immigration in the way that we've been talking about it today, as I made the point earlier, is something nobody voted for.
Nobody voted to have an open border.
Nobody voted.
And you've got to understand what has happened in this country in the time that I've lived here.
I came here in 1996.
55,000 people came here net legally in 1996.
Today, the number of people coming here illegally is greater than that.
And nobody, nobody ever voted for this.
And the number of people coming in legally under the labor budget announced today is predicted for the rest of their tenure, which is four more years, to average about 360,000 a year, I think.
And actually goes up in the next few years.
So massively different to what it was like when you first came.
Because to say, on that wider point that Tucker Carlson and many like him have started talking about, which is countries losing their identity culturally, what do you think about that?
I think that America is unique in that way, in that it seems to me as a visitor, and look, it's up to Americans to decide how they see their country, of course, but as someone who loves the country and visits there frequently and spends a lot of time there, I do think the idea that America is an idea seems to me to be how Americans behave.
I think that is not true in Europe.
I think that European countries do have a national identity, a cultural identity, a religious identity.
And I think that if Britain was filled with people who were of a completely different religion and a completely different ethnic background, I don't think it would be England in Britain in the way that it has been in history.
So I think that doesn't necessarily preclude us from welcoming people in and assimilating them into our country.
And that has been happening for decades and even centuries.
But I think Brandon is right.
The assimilation is the point.
If you want to come to our country, you want to apply for a visa, you want to follow the rules, you want to adopt our culture, you want to teach your children to love this country, to speak English, to integrate, to contribute, as Cheng was saying, you know, go out and actually contribute to the country you've just arrived in.
That's great.
But that is not what we have in Europe.
We have large ghettos of non-integrating populations who do not want to participate, who do not want to contribute, who do not want to speak our language.
And look, I lived in Tower Hamlets for some time.
I went to the doctor's surgery.
The leaflet is in 100 languages.
I don't understand why.
This is an English-speaking country, and you either speak English or you find the country with the language you prefer.
Ollie, well, unlike Constantine, I think people that speak other languages are also entitled to healthcare.
I would just say that.
I didn't say that they're not entitled to healthcare.
I said they should learn English if they want to live.
Please, I'd like to speak.
So I think this idea that your sort of culture, your national identity, can potentially be diluted by people of a different skin tone or indeed religious background is a pretty pathetic argument.
It's a patriotism that's grounded in weakness and fragility.
My patriotism is grounded in strength.
I believe the ideas of English national identity, British national identity, are pretty strong.
And I'm not that worried about people that come to the UK with a different idea of what that could be coming over here and diluting it.
From Magna Carta through to now, a sense of fair play unless the English are invading your country.
I think we've got a pretty good solid idea of what English values and identity are.
What are they?
I just said.
I just said a sense of civil liberty, a pride and a sense of fair play.
Protecting National Identity00:06:00
So people who believe in Sharia law, which a large number of the Muslim community in this country do believe in and want to impose, do they believe in civil liberty?
I would say the people that want to impose Sharia law.
Do they comply with English values or British values as you define them?
No, I think if you want to come over and sort of overhaul the system of government in Britain, I think there's a pretty valid argument for us to say that you're probably not welcome in the country.
So what should we do?
Should we deport you for having a disagreement about civil liberty?
If you're an insurrectionist, if you're literally saying that we should introduce corporal and capital punishment in Britain, yeah, that's what I'm saying.
What if you just want to vote for it?
You know, 33% of the Muslim community, according to some estimates, believe in Sharia law, one Sharia law in Britain.
Should they be able to elect people who advocate for that?
Constantine, you keep asking me the same question.
That's a different question.
I'm going to keep giving you the same answer.
My idea of water.
I've just told you.
Should we deport people who want Sharia law?
That's what I'm asking you.
If you want to overthrow the system of government, I impose Sharia law instead of secular democracy.
Yes, I have a ginormous problem with that.
Additionally, I have a ginormous problem with the British head of state being a religious figure in King Charles.
I have a ginormous problem with a permanent fixture in our legislature being religious representatives.
There are only two countries.
There are only two countries in the world where that's the case.
One is the UK, the other is Iran.
You know, I have problems with both of those things.
I want us to live in a secular democracy.
What happens between you and the man that you think exists in the sky is your business.
Still, the vast majority of people in the UK identify as Christian, just under 50%.
The next highest in terms of faith is actually non-believers completely, about 35%, I think.
And then you're down to like sort of 5% Muslim and then down to the other religions.
So, you know, it's still a predominantly Christian.
Of those who have a faith, we are predominantly a Christian country.
So there shouldn't be intrinsically by that criteria.
But it's not just that.
It's too much of an issue of the head of the church being the king.
Well, just walk around London.
The entire architecture of the city is Christian in its every definition.
Everything about this country has roots in Christianity.
Now, that is not to say that everybody must be Christian.
And I certainly haven't been Christian for most of my life.
And I don't even know if I'm Christian now.
My point is, even when I was an atheist, I still thought it was a Christian country because it is, because that's a fact, because you can see it with your own eyes.
So I don't understand the squeamishness about saying it is a Christian country.
And in my view, should remain so.
It's called the Enlightenment.
What I would like to say of secular liberal democracy.
Well, as we approach Thanksgiving, we've got to wrap things up.
But Chenk and Brandon, you're over there in America.
I just feel like the one thing you could do with immigration in the United States is have a massively higher influx of British people.
Because ultimately, you all speak English over there.
You all are jealous of our accents.
And if it hadn't been, if it hadn't been for mad King George, who was useless, then we would still have a monarchy in America and we could well have King Piers.
And I think that would enrich your society immeasurably.
Okay.
That was designed to achieve the unthinkable of bringing you state.
Okay.
Well, peers, don't turn me anti-immigrant by threatening us by threatening us with more British folks.
Look, I do want to say the last couple of things real quick.
So look, America is different than the other countries.
I get it if France or Germany or even Britain says, hey, we've got to determine what it means to be French, what it means to be German.
But in America, as we all agree, America is an idea.
It's not a race, a nationality, ethnicity, or religion, right?
But at the same time, it's fair to ask people to buy into that idea.
We all agree, of course, the Constitution can be and should be amended from time to time.
In fact, we should get money out of politics.
And the best way to do that is an amendment.
But if somebody comes over here and says, I just don't even believe in your Constitution, well, it's okay to say that, no, well, then this is not the country for you.
But that almost never happens, guys.
And so for the folks who say, well, how about Sharia law, et cetera?
I interviewed Pastor Wilson, who's a well-known Christian nationalist.
So he wants to turn America into something it isn't today.
He wants it to be ruled by a religion.
And when we say Christian nation, if you say America is majority Christian, that's obviously true, right?
If you say America should be ruled by Christianity, that's a different comment, right?
Then if you mean that by Christian nation, then I don't agree at all, right?
But by the way, Pastor Wilson is a Christian nationalist, which is not what we are here in America.
But I would say to that, so what?
So a guy believes in Sharia law and a guy believes in Christian nationalism.
And by the way, some people believe in white nationalism, right?
I think they're not.
They're saying whatever they believe in because they follow the law.
I think the issue on Sharia law is you can't have a rival set of laws operating within a country that has its own laws, I don't think, right?
If you try to go to the Middle East.
Yeah, that's why everybody has to go to the lawyer.
If you try to go to the Middle East and have your own courts running your own kind of legal system, they wouldn't tolerate it.
And we should have the same.
Can we admit that illegal immigration is not adhering to our laws and the founding of our country?
100%.
If you come here illegally, you are not abiding.
100%.
And by the way, as I always say, as I always say, I was a Tatum, I do things the legal way to live and work a lot of the time in America.
It is painstaking.
It involves a lot of form filling, paying lawyers, all the rest of it, then immigration interviews and so on.
And then hopefully you get your visa and you're allowed in legally for another two, three years, whatever it may be.
And so it pisses me off when people just waltz in over the border illegally.
And that's why I think in the end, Trump, he won for a few reasons.
I think, you know, the economy certainly and the woke stuff, definitely.
But immigration was a massive, massive part of it.
That's why he had the younger Latino vote.
I mean, more Latinos voted for Trump than voted for Kamala Harris.
Supporting Judicial Independence00:02:27
Pretty well.
None of us could have predicted that.
But one of the reasons was I think a lot of those Latinos get pissed off with people just gaming the system and coming in illegally.
So I think that unusually, this panel has been one of the more civilized debates that's probably ever been heard about this issue, which is a really good thing because it means we've got to a place where we can have a rational debate about it all and hopefully get to rational solutions without everyone screaming racist at each other or fascist or Nazi, whatever else it may be.
So I'd love to congratulate my panel on really, we've reached a great point between us.
Thank you.
Well, thanks very much, Piers.
Can I just make one very quick point on this healthy solutions thing?
The citizens of Crowborough, they've organized a group called Croborough Shield.
They've raised a lot of money.
They've raised even more money since our documentary came out.
I'd encourage everybody to go and donate and support their attempt to put a judicial reach of the government because what that will do is it will create more difficulties.
And that really is what needs to happen.
The government has to be told this isn't going to happen.
So Croborough Shield, go over there and donate.
And I would endorse that despite the fact that for many years, 20 years, as a cricketer in East Sussex, Crobor was a sworn enemy of my village.
And I would do everything in my power to ruin their lives on a cricket field.
So despite that, I'm prepared to join.
And I support them.
I understand completely.
How much are you donating, Piers?
I'll make a donation in private as usual, but I will donate because a lot of people in Crowborough have asked me to as well.
So I shall do that.
Guys, thank you all very much.
Much appreciated.
Piers Morgan Uncensored is proudly independent.
The only boss around here is me.
If you enjoy our show, you ask for only one simple thing.
Hit subscribe on YouTube and follow Piers Morgan Uncensored on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
And in return, we will continue our mission to inform, irritate, and entertain.
And we'll do it all for free.
Independent uncensored media has never been more critical, and we couldn't do it without you.
Volkswagen can be used, and the family is a very good idea.