Chapters
Shownotes Transcript
Ryan Reynolds here for, I guess, my 100th Mint commercial. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I mean, honestly, when I started this, I thought I'd only have to do like four of these. I mean, it's unlimited premium wireless for $15 a month. How are there still people paying two or three times that much? I'm sorry, I shouldn't be victim blaming here. Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash save whenever you're ready. For
$45 upfront payment equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three-month plan only. Taxes and fees extra. Speeds lower above 40 gigabytes. See details. You're listening to Fox News Radio. I'm Ben Domenech. So you've seen over the past several months, actually several years, the decay of the border under the Biden administration.
Obviously, the success of Donald Trump is tied directly to his willingness to attack the border issue head on, to say things that people were unwilling to say about the way that both parties were compromised on the issue. But what we've seen under the Biden administration really is an absolute failure to match up with the constitutional duty that the president of the United States has to deliver when it comes to securing our border.
Unfortunately, this is something that we saw before in a lot of different ways, teased from the different progressives that were engaged in open border propaganda and the like during the Obama administration. But I have to remind you, Obama was referred to as the deporter-in-chief. He actually weaponized a lot of these things in ways that were surprising in retrospect. He refused to go along with a lot of the different points that progressives wanted.
And a big part of that, of course, is the fact that Obama was much more union friendly than Joe Biden. To great irony, obviously, Joe likes to style himself as being, you know, the king of the union politician and the friend of the working man. But the reality is that he wasn't at all. Most desirable solution for the Democratic Party in the labor union is blanket amnesty, political benefit and no low skilled worker solution.
These are different problems, and so I'm going to talk about them here in the ways that the context have changed for a lot of different aspects of it. We're used to talking about the recurring guest worker program problem, the low-skilled worker program problem, however you want to define it, that's been playing out in America here for decades. The truth is that when it comes to the immigration debate, it's largely Cesar Chavez's world. We just are living in it.
The labor movement that he apotheosized is a primary reason for our immigration system being the wreck that it is today.
It's a direct descendant of his 1969 March with Ralph Abernathy and Walter Mondale along the Mexican border to protest against growers hiring illegal immigrants. The riots that followed over the next decade where Chavez and his organization would routinely report immigrant workers with questionable histories to the INS is the foundation of the system that we have today. Organized labor has been for decades the chief obstacle
to broad-based common sense reform. Reform that, at least from my perspective, would allow for low-skilled workers to come across the border, do some work, go back home according to the season. This is the kind of thing that we've seen happen here, you know, illegally for a very long time without the kind of negative after effects of what we're currently seeing and at a much smaller scale.
The irony, of course, is that this broken regime, which Chavez helped create when he destroyed the Bracero program, is an anti-immigrant power grab, has to be seen as such.
It morphed into a sort of market-warping, governmentally-driven system, which Republicans criticized in nearly every other arena, and yet they've become the people who have embraced it to a large degree as a worthy law and order practice that must be defended as a matter of principle. In other words, a lot of the Republicans who you see on television talking about the regime that needs to be protected when it comes to immigration, they're defending something that was invented by Republicans
a bunch of union bosses back in the day. That's how much the pendulum has swung. The labor left alliance handed an unenforceable and wrongheaded bureaucratic regime to the right and said, you make it work. And the right has gainfully obliged to the point of criticism of the regime being sort of a litmus test.
Simpson Mazzoli didn't do anything to solve this and none of the current steps that are under discussion today will take a meaningfully different path. But what has changed, as you've seen over the past several years, is the kind of people who are coming in. Now,
In the past, what you had was largely individual males looking to do a certain amount of work and send that money home to their families. They would frequently go back and forth across the border over the course of a number of different years and according to the amount of work that they could get here. In other words, they were economic migrants who were trying to fulfill jobs up here and then send the benefits of it back to their families at home in order for them to benefit financially.
More of the Ben Domenech podcast right after this. Whoa, landing an account this big will totally change my landscaping business. It's going to mean hiring more guys and more equipment and new trucks for the new guys to drive the new equipment in. I don't know if I'm ready.
You can do this. And Ford Pro Fin Simple can help. Our experts are ready to make growing pains less painful for your business with flexible financing solutions that meet the needs of your business today when you need them. Get started at FordPro.com slash financing.
Make this new school year an opportunity for your kids to learn important life skills with Greenlight. Greenlight is a debit card and money app for families where kids learn how to save, invest, and spend wisely while parents keep an eye on kids' money habits. Greenlight also helps families get into their fall routine with a chores feature that lets parents assign chores and pay kids allowance when they check them off. Get your first month free at greenlight.com slash spotify. greenlight.com slash spotify.
What didn't happen and what hasn't happened in the intervening years is any kind of system being created to satisfy this part of the problem. There were numerous attempts to do so under the Bush administration. None of them ever got across the line. And then, frankly, Barack Obama and his union allies couldn't be trusted on any of this. So nothing really got there either.
With Donald Trump, what he really put into place was something that would just basically put a cork in it. We're going to force people who come to remain in Mexico. We're not going to allow them through. And one of the things that this did was it also pushed back against something that we saw increasingly in the waning days of the Obama years, but that has since exploded.
which is these South American families of migrants attempting to come across, attempting to claim that they have some kind of asylum, and then essentially out saying welcome to the point where they believe that they will be able to survive any type of court inquiry or that it's so far off in the distance that you won't be able to find them anyway.
This is a situation that is absolutely untenable and involves far more people than any of the migrant worker back and forth did back in the day when, you know, you were mostly talking about men ages, you know, late teenage stages to late 50s, that kind of thing. Now you're dealing with a completely different population, different
with vastly larger numbers of children, vastly larger numbers of women, and because of that, vastly larger numbers of people who are being human trafficked, sex trafficked, etc., or who are essentially working for the cartels as drug mules or the like. That's not something that you used to see anywhere near
the scale of it back in the 2000s. Of course, you also have the problem of people who are on terror watch lists and things like that. And I won't get into that because that's a whole separate, complicated problem that it's, you know, frankly, absolutely insults the idea that we have any kind of security on the border. Republicans,
All along have been operating under a premise that I just think is completely bonkers. They need to abandon the premise that they can work with Democrats on this issue at all or that they need some kind of unpopular bill with their own base to survive as a coalition. It's bonkers.
It's wrongheaded. It's the complete opposite of what we actually hear from voters. And it goes against everything that we know, particularly about the increased number of Hispanics who've been voting Republican in recent years. There was this idea of
Back during the Mitt Romney era that this was something that was absolutely necessary in order to hold on to all these new Hispanic voters who were coming into the coalition. In fact, that was not the case at all. Those are not the priorities of those voters who, you know, frankly behave a lot more like your typical middle class voter than anything else. And if you don't believe me, well, just listen to Joe Biden talking about what he proposed to Congress.
The President: Folks, we're making real progress on one of the most important issues we're facing: security at the border. The first bill I introduced was for a massive change in security at our border. Two months ago, my team began to work with a bipartisan group of senators to put together the toughest, smartest, fairest border security bill in history -- the best one the nation has ever seen. It would finally provide the funding I requested early on and again in October to secure our borders.
It includes an additional 1,300 border patrols. We need more agents on the border. Three hundred and seventy-five immigration judges to judge whether or not someone can come or cannot come and be fair about it. One thousand six hundred assail- -- asylum officers and over 100 cutting-edge inspect -- inspection machines to help detect and stop fentanyl coming on our southwest border. It'll also give me, as President,
The emergency authorities shut down the border until it could get back under control. If that bill were the law today, I'd shut down the border right now and fix it quickly. A bipartisan bill would be good for America and help fix our broken immigration system and allow speedy access for those who deserve to be here. And Congress needs to get it done.
So this proposal, this legislative proposal, has been the thing that the administration of the White House has hung their hat on now for years. They've claimed that they proposed something that was going to solve all the problems, deal with all the different issues, and result in a fix that would satisfy absolutely everyone. Whenever a politician claims something like that, you can be very confident that they're lying. And in this case, it's no different. The
The White House's proposal is involved, you know, in a number of different areas that are adjacent to this. But the simple fact is that Joe Biden can do everything necessary in order to deal with the border problems at issue directly without any new authority from the Congress. Here's what Karine Jean-Pierre had to say in reaction to questions from our Jackie Heinrich and from Peter Doocy just over the past couple of weeks.
Why are you repeating this false claim that Republicans voted to reduce the number of Border Patrol agents even though the Washington Post gave the administration three Pinocchios for that? So we don't believe it's a false claim. Our statements were very direct here. Last year, House, GOP voted, and not only did they vote for it, but they touted. They touted their Limit, Save, Grow Act. That's the act.
And they vowed that it would never affect Border Patrol. They voted for and touted it, right? This is an act. And this would have forced the elimination of 2,000 Border Patrol agents. That's what this act that they touted, that they voted for in the House. So that was their proposal, and that was what they voted for back in May. There are about 800 gotaways at the border every day.
96,000 since October 1st. Does President Biden want to locate these folks who have disappeared into this country to parts unknown? Ms. Jean- So, here's what I will say is that,
The President -- one of the reasons that the President is having these negotiation procedures or process with the Senate, with both Republicans and Democrats, as I've said many times before, is because we want to deal with what's going on at the border. He's taken this very seriously. He wants to make sure that we come up with a bipartisan agreement.
And we are very appreciative for that. But there's also the diplomatic aspect of it, of making sure that we're having conversations with Mexico -- and we have had, and we've had productive conversations with them. And DHS is maximizing -- they are maximizing its enforcement efforts.
And since May 12 -- and you have heard me say this as well -- DHS has been able to return more than 482,000 individuals who did not have the legal basis to be here. So, we're doing what we can. JOHN YANG: Now a new conversation is happening at the behest of both the Senate Republican leadership, including Mitch McConnell, and the Democrats, trying to hash something out where they saw this brief window of possibility, because
McConnell is very dedicated to getting new aid for Ukraine in a package that he believes is very important. And obviously, the Republicans have been shaking their sabers at the border and all the different issues regarding its complete devolution into chaos over the past couple of years. So the idea was, let's combine these two things into a must-pass package that we can move forward with.
The main negotiator from the Republican side is James Langford. Here's what he had to say about the bill when challenged this weekend on Fox News Sunday by Shannon Breen.
Is that part of the deal? And how would you convince someone like Senator Cruz to vote for it? Yeah, the challenge that Senator Cruz has and a bunch of other folks is they're still waiting to be able to read the bill on this. And this has been our great challenge of being able to fight through the final words to be able to get the bill text out so people can hear it. Right now there's Internet rumors is all the people are running on. It would be absolutely absurd for me to agree to 5000 people a day.
This bill focuses on getting us to zero illegal crossings a day. There's no amnesty. It increases the number of Border Patrol agents, increases asylum officers. It increases detention beds so we can quickly detain and then deport individuals. It ends catch and release. It focuses on additional deportation flights out. It changes our asylum process so that people get a fast
asylum screening at a higher standard and then get returned back to their own country this is not about letting five thousand people in a day this is the most misunderstood section of this proposal let me take briefly what it is other in the last four months we've had seven days in four months we've had seven days
that we had less than 5,000 people. This is set up for if you have a rush of people coming at the border, the border closes down, no one gets in. This is not someone standing at the border with a little clicker saying, I'm going to let one more in, we're at 4,999, and then it has to stop. It is a shutdown of the border, and everyone actually gets turned around.
And here's what Rick Scott had to say in response to that. Do you agree with that assessment, by the way? And if so, why not take something that would stop some of the traffic sooner rather than later? Well, first, I think James is smart. He's hardworking. He knows the issue. He's on a suicide mission.
THE DEMOCRATS DO NOT WANT TO SECURE THE BORDER. I'M A BUSINESS GUY. I NEVER DID A BUSINESS DEAL WHERE THE OTHER SIDE DID NOT HAVE THE SAME GOAL I HAVE. DEMOCRATS DON'T WANT TO SECURE THE BORDER. THAT'S NUMBER ONE. NUMBER TWO IS RIGHT NOW THIS BORDER COULD BE SECURE, BUT WE KNOW WE HAVE A LAWLESS ADMINISTRATION, COMPLETELY LAWLESS BIDEN ADMINISTRATION. SO THE ONLY WAY THIS IS GOING TO HAPPEN IS IF WE HAVE ACCOUNTABILITY THAT FORCES BIDEN TO ENFORCE THE LAW.
THE BORDER IS OPEN. THE BORDER IS OPEN. THERE'S LAWS NOW. TRUMP SECURED THE BORDER. BIDEN DECIDED TO OPEN THE BORDER. EXACT SAME LAWS. WE DON'T NEED A NEW BILL. WE NEED SOMETHING TO ENFORCE TO FORCE BIDEN TO COMPLY WITH THE LAW. NOW, JAMES IS DOING THE BEST HE CAN TO TRY TO EXPLAIN THE BILL THAT UNFORTUNATELY I DON'T KNOW WHY THEY DON'T SHARE IT WITH US.
BIDEN'S LAWLESS. HE DOESN'T WANT TO SECURE THE BORDER. THE DEMOCRATS DON'T WANT TO SECURE THE BORDER. AND MCCONNELL HAS TOLD LANGFORD THAT HE CANNOT PUT ACCOUNTABILITY MEASURES IN THERE TO REQUIRE BIDEN TO SECURE THE BORDER TODAY. HE SAID THAT WILL NOT HAPPEN. THE FLORIDA SENATOR SPEAKS FOR A LOT MORE REPUBLICANS THAN LANGFORD DOES. AND I THINK THAT IN THIS CASE, THEY'RE ABSOLUTELY IN THE RIGHT. IT'S ABSURD TO
to have this negotiation playing out in the way that it is. And let me just run through why. Ryan Gerdusky, who you should follow on X at Ryan Gerdusky, that's G-I-R-D-U-S-K-Y, he is someone who pays attention to a lot of immigration issues and talks about them quite a lot on a lot of podcasts. He's been a guest of mine in the past. He points out that
The president doesn't need any kind of new bipartisan immigration bill to solve any of these problems. He just needs to enforce the law as it exists today. A president can already impose restrictions or outright suspend entry into the U.S. of aliens when they determine that entry would be detrimental to the country's interests for periods as they shall seem necessary. That's 8 U.S.C. 1182.
An immigration officer can order an alien removed or deported, provided the alien isn't trying to seek asylum. That's 8 U.S.C. 1225. The D.H. Secretary may, by regulation, establish additional limitations and conditions under which an alien shall be eligible for asylum. 8 U.S.C. 1158. Aliens firmly resettled in a country other than their own before arriving in the U.S. are...
ineligible for asylum. That's 8 U.S.C. 1158. In other words, if you came from another country and you've been hanging out in Mexico for quite a while, you are not eligible for asylum. And yet what we've been seeing is people treating the asylum laws that we have here in America, which are designed for people fleeing from war, fleeing from actual conflict and threat of death,
now used effectively to let anyone in, saying, I just don't like it back at home. I'm not comfortable there. My family isn't comfortable there. And we believe things will be better for us in the United States. Well, guess what? That applies to 90% of the world, pretty much. So that's not something that we can really have as a long-term policy. And yet, it's the policy that Democrats have embraced.
Michael Lind writes at Tablet on this point. Over the past three years, the Biden administration has effectively rewritten U.S. immigration law, creating an entirely new stream of quasi-legal immigration under the rubric of parole.
The discretion of the federal government to grant parole or legal residence and work permits to a small number of refugees and other foreign nationals has been used by the Biden administration to rip a hole in America's southern border in order to invite millions of foreign nationals, most of them from Latin America and Central America and the Caribbean, to travel to the U.S. border, from which they are dispersed across the country and supported chiefly by state and local governments and government-funded NGOs.
As of September 2023, an estimated 3.8 million immigrants entered the U.S. under the Biden administration. Of these, 2.3 million have been given notices to appear before an immigration court, which could allow them to stay in the U.S. in a twilight status for years before court day. Of the rest...
An estimated 1.5 million are illegal immigrants who sneaked across the border or overstayed their visas and remain, with the government having no idea of their whereabouts and with Democrat-dominated sanctuary cities actively thwarting the ability of federal immigration officials to identify and deport them. Biden's radical immigration policy represents not only a policy revolution, but also a political revolution.
A generation ago, in the 1980s and 90s, factions in favor of more or less immigration were founded in both parties. Labor unions remained traditionally wary of immigrant competition in the workplace and immigration-driven wage suppression, while Republican business interests wanted the government to turn a blind eye to the employment of illegal immigrants. In 1994,
62% of Democrats and 64% of Republicans told Pew pollsters that immigrants are a burden on our country because they take jobs, housing, and health care. Only 32% of Democrats agreed immigrants strengthen our country because of their hard work and talents. By 2019, however, only 11% of Democrats agreed immigrants are a burden, while 83% agreed with the statement that immigrants strengthen the country.
What happened to make Democrats change their minds? Between the inauguration of Bill Clinton in 1993 and that of Joe Biden in 2021, the Democratic Party morphed into a new party of elite, college-educated white professionals. Black Americans and mostly Hispanic immigrants concentrated in a few big cities and a few populous states like California and New York. Many Democrats have called this new big city political machine the Coalition of the Ascended, confident that
The growth in the share of non-white voters fed by immigration combined with increasing social liberalism will lead to inevitable one-party rule by a hegemonic Democratic Party. In reality, however, the Democratic Party is an alliance of interests threatened with long-term demographic decline. Declining industries, declining states, declining cities, declining churches and non-profits
These civic downtrodden have united around the hope they can reverse the unpopularity of their offerings among U.S.-born Americans by importing new citizens en masse. A politics founded on this idea, namely, that if not enough American voters like what you are offering, you should compensate by importing supportive voters, may seem like something from Alice in Wonderland.
But that's exactly what the leadership of the Democratic Party is doing by refusing to enforce existing immigration laws and preventing states from securing their borders, while counting on Democratic bureaucrats and judges to enforce the dubious legality of such moves. That's Michael Ling. You can read his whole piece at Tablet Magazine's site.
From my perspective as being someone who's been on the immigration policy focus over the past couple of decades, one of the things that I think really stands out to me is the failure of politicians to really grapple with how much this situation has changed.
They do not understand the difference between the battles and arguments that were happening in the late 90s and early 2000s with what we face today. The difference in terms of the sheer amount of people is obvious, but it's also the kind of people who are coming in, people who are going to be more needy when it comes to government services, children who are going to need to be educated. The disruption to life in communities across the country is far more serious when it comes to this population than it was in the past.
And yet we still see Republican politicians talking about it the same way and Democrat politicians looking in the opposite direction, not caring at all about the security of our southern border. Do you think the children of illegal aliens should be allowed to attend Texas public schools free? Or do you think that their parents should pay for their education? Who are you addressing that to? I think you're first in this. He was looking right at you. I said he was. Look.
I'd like to see something done about the illegal alien problem that would be so sensitive and so understanding about labor needs and human needs that that problem wouldn't come up. But today, if those people are here, I would reluctantly say I think they would get whatever it is that they're, you know, what the society is giving to their neighbors. But the problem has to be solved. The problem has to be solved. Because
as we have kind of made illegal some kinds of labor that I'd like to see legal, we're doing two things. We're creating a whole society of really honorable, decent, family-loving people that are in violation of the law, and secondly, we're exacerbating relations with Mexico. The answer to your question is much more fundamental than whether they attend Houston schools, it seems to me. I don't want to see a whole... If they're living here, I don't want to see a whole...
Think of six and eight year old kids being made, you know, one totally uneducated and made to feel that they're living with outside the law. Let's address ourselves to the fundamentals. These are good people, strong people. Part of my family is a Mexican.
I think the time has come that the United States and our neighbors, particularly our neighbor to the south, should have a better understanding and a better relationship than we've ever had. And I think that we haven't been sensitive enough to our size and our power. They have a problem of 40 to 50 percent unemployment.
Now, this cannot continue without the possibility arising with regard to that other country that we talked about, of Cuba and what it is stirring up, of the possibility of trouble below the border and we could have a very hostile and strange neighbor on our border. Rather than making them, or talking about putting up a fence,
Why don't we work out some recognition of our mutual problems, make it possible for them to come here legally with a work permit, and then while they're working and earning here, they pay taxes here. And when they want to go back, they can go back and they can cross and open the border both ways by understanding their problems. This is the only safety valve right now they have with that unemployment that probably keeps the lid from blowing off down there.
And I think we could have a fine relationship and it would solve the problem you mentioned also. I'm Ben Dominick. You've been listening to Fox News Radio. We'll be back next week with more to dive back into the fray. Listen ad-free with a Fox News podcast plus subscription on Apple Podcasts. And Amazon Prime members can listen to this show ad-free on the Amazon Music app.
Cudlow on Fox Business is now on the go for podcast fans. Get key interviews with the biggest business newsmakers of the day. The Cudlow podcast will be available on the go after the show every weekday at foxbusinesspodcasts.com or wherever you download your favorite podcasts.