A Post American Society - Mark Krikorian talks with A&G

that includes a lot of people from every political strip. Now, beyond securing the borders, how many people you want to come in from? Where is where we get into an argument. But that's fine, That's absolutely fine. Why we can't secure the borders though, when almost everybody wants it and it leads to tragedies like we had the other day when all those people died horrific deaths in the back of that truck. We have been saying, administration after administration, both parties,

for a very long time. If you come to America, if you try to get across the order decent change, you're gonna get across. And if you get across, you get to stay. And if you stay, we're gonna take care of you no matter what health care, food, whatever, or let you work where. We won't really cracked down on the whole whether or not you've got an I D. Stuff, We'll let you be here. We've been sending that message to the world for a long time, and of course

we get this result. That's my opinion. Let's hear more from somebody who deals with this for a living. Mark Krikorian, we've talked too many times over the years, Executive Director, Center for Immigration Studies, Mark, thanks for joining us today. Well, thanks for having me. Could you hit me with a quick statement of what you guys want? What? What? What would be your if you could, if you were king

and rule the world? What would you like to see happen? Well, the first thing is you've got to enforce whatever the immigration laws are. As you suggested. I mean that that should go without saying. But as far as legal immigration goes, the short version is that a modern society like ours has outgrown immigration. Immigrants aren't different really from a hundred or two hundred years ago, the same kind of people. What's different is our society. We have a post industrial

knowledge based economy, we have a welfare state. The world has shrunk and so we need to downsize the federal immigration program because that's what it is. It's just a government program like the Air Force or the Small Business Administration, and it needs to be smaller, uh than it is now. And we take a million sometimes more legal immigrants every year and half a million plus so called temporary workers. A lot of them just end up staying anyway, uh.

And that, you know, we just need to turn the dial down from that, you know, turn it down from eleven down to I don't know, something lower. That's interesting. I don't know if we've ever gotten into this. So you think the number of a million legal immigrants is too high? What do you think the number are to be? Well, I don't have a magic number because I don't think

that's the way to think about it. What I The way I think about it is kind of like zero based budgeting, um where you start at zero not because you want zero immigration, but you start there because a modern society like ours, with a third of a billion people that spans a continent, doesn't really need any immigration.

But once you started zero, then who are the categories of people that have such a compelling case to come in that we should let him in and for me that would be husband's wives and little kids of Americans. That's a lot of people every year, three hundred four hundred thousand people a year. And then real Einstein's which is not a huge number, and then people humanitarian immigration of people who really don't have anywhere else to go and literally cannot stay one more second where they are.

The un actually keeps a list of people like that. So you add that up, it's you know, half less than half of what we take now, but it's still more immigration than any other country in the world taps, which often gets left out of the conversation um by people who who think we're evil and mean. Um. So you're laying this horrible tragedy from a couple of weeks ago where all those people died in the back of that truck the blame at Joe Biden's feet. Why, well,

it's plenty of blame to go around. I mean, the smugglers themselves obviously are most directly responsibilities of the scum of the earth who use people for money, But the administration shares in the blame because what they've done with their immigration policies is essentially lure people here, uh like you said, if you get past the border, your home free for all intents and purposes, but it's you still have to There's still some people that get arrested and deported.

So it's not totally open borders, which are terrible but at least wouldn't result in these kind of tragedies. But it's not an enforced border either. The way I refer to it is what we have under Biden is an open ish border. It's like putting a fence up around a swimming pool, which you're legally required to do because if some kid falls into your pool and there's no fence,

your posible. But what we have is like offense around your swimming pool, but there's a lot of holes in it and you don't take care of it, and people can kids can still get in and they fall into the pool, and um, you know, that's that's on you. I mean, that's your responsibility. There's always going to be some people who want to come here, regardless of the laws, even if they know the odds are low of their

getting of their succeeding. Some is still going to try, but not as many as now, given that the odds of success getting past the border patrol and living home free in the United States are so high under this administration. I would certainly try it if I was from one of these other countries and had a chance to get

my family into the United States. Sure you would, I mean, especially if I mean the majority of the people who are encountered, that's the pc tourna instead of arrested who were encountered at the border, the majority of them in May were let go into the United States one way or another. Uh. In fact, since this administration has taken over well over one million illegal immigrants, illegal border crosses

have just been let go into the United States. Some of them will show up for hearings, maybe, uh, some of them won't. But even the ones who show up for their hearings, at the end of the process, if they get turned down for asylum, as most people do, they still don't leave. And there's no intention of that Biden administration to find them and make them leave. So, um, why would like you said, why wouldn't you do it?

And the Wall Street Journal crowd, which tends to be Republican, they're not gonna raise a stink about it because they need workers in you know, hotels, restaurants, and farms. The left is not going to raise a stink about it because they think they're getting voters, although I think that's being decreasingly true. But between those two things we don't

get to the answer that you described earlier. I feel like if you put what you just described at the beginning of this as an immigration policy to Americans, I feel like that would be an above issue, don't you. I suspect it would be. Um. You know, it's not usually pulled in that way, and other posters don't really ask the questions that way. But yes, I think so.

And I gotta say, though, both the libertarian and corporate folks on the one side and the lefties on the other, the kind of things you talked about, whether it's cheap labor or cheap votes, it's part of what's going on in there, you know, calculations, But I don't think that's the main thing in either case. I think it's ideological. In other words, their worldview is that they're citizens of the world. They're post American. I don't mean they hate America.

Some of them do, but for the most part, you know, they're happy enough to be here, but they don't consider themselves to have any greater responsibility to their fellow Americans than to others. And therefore, what that means is it would be wrong for somebody, say from Haiti, to be kept out. And if they make it here, we have no right to say no. That's the what that that at the bottom, that's what the perspective of the anti

borders people is, is that believe an unlimited immigration. I get that libertarian argument that works if you don't have a welfare state, because you know, if you even even if you did, even if you didn't have a welfare state, it wouldn't work. I mean, it'd be better to live on the street in the US than type of job in Haiti. Equally decent point, but it wouldn't work as easily. But if you do have a welfare state like we do,

it works pretty well. If you can get in here, you'll get fed, you'll get your cancer treated, you'll get your abortion paid for, whatever it is that you want. Then, you know, and what I what I tell people who make that argument is Okay, well, let's just for the sake of argument, let's stipulate that, so get rid of the welfare state and then come back to me and we'll talk, and the fact is it's not happening. A welfare standard. Look, I'm a conservative personally. Matter think tank

is more kind of diverse and ambidextrous. But um, I'm conservative, and I think our um social system of social provision for the poor needs to be more tightly run and more responsible. But even I don't want to get rid of the welfare state. It's the part of a modern society. I don't want people dying on the steps of the emergency room because you know they can't afford care. But you can't have a society like that and then constantly have it open two people from countries that aren't as developed.

What kinds of people do you think we need in this country? And I don't mean skin color, for crying out loud, I mean skills. I don't care what some of these skin colors, But what what what best benefits? Outside of that you talked about refugees and people from all that sort of stuff. Get that. I'm on board with that. But in general, if we want to import workers, what what do we need? We don't really need workers,

That's that's my point. In other words, there were, like I said, we have a third of a billion people. We have actually a larger and larger share of working age people who have dropped out of the labor market. This is a serious social problem. That's what we need to fix, not just import people to replace them and then send the Americans welfare checks and you know, cheap

hypodermic needles. I mean, that's not a solution. But uh, you know, there are people who a relatively small number of people, like I said Einstein, immigrants whose contribution to the productive capacity of the United States is so could be so large that um, I'm happy to let him in, and most people are. But we're not talking about people with you know, a bachelor's degree from hid or a

bad community college. We're talking about somebody with a pH d in chemical engineering or something like that that you know, Okay, I'm I'm happy for I'll go and drive the green card over to the person myself. But and and people like that are and he can get in even under our current system. It's just that we have defined you know, best and brightest as it were, way too broadly, which is probably similar to the fact that domestically, you know,

half the kids in school get the honor roll. You know what, I mean, it's not because they're all smartest, because everybody is supposedly above average. Well, we've got that same perspective for too much of skilled immigration. Well, and then the other side of our immigration system, which is so angering. If you've ever known anybody who tried to do it the right way. I had a friend who was a PhD PhD biologist who was constantly fighting our system.

He would he would like need to go on to go home to take care of his sick mom, and he couldn't go because something happened with the paperwork and they weren't gonna let him back in. And I mean, they make it so, we make it so hard for people are trying to do it the right way. It's very frustrating. Yeah, I mean, and that's one of the ways.

That is one of the reasons you see that our immigration law is the is the second most complicated and byzantine part of our immigration our legal system, after the tax code. And so one of the important elements of a better immigration policy is radical simplification. In other words, streamlined stuff, cut out all of this nonsense. And the fact is the immigration lawyers and the rest of them like that stuff because it creates employment for them, just

like tax lawyers. Lawyers complicated the voice lawyers. I suppose, yeah, well you're luckily you will only say I suppose I can speak from personal experience. UM. Hey, Mark Rikorian Um, executive director, Center for Immigration Studies, Thanks for coming on today. Very enlightening. I appreciate the fact that you always have so much knowledge at your fingertips. Thanks for coming on. Thank you.