We like to do kind of big picture thoughts here on John Girardi Show. I like using the radio as my sort of sounding board for my larger sort of thought pieces. And maybe I'll do a Maybe I'll do
a written essay on this. I want to talk about illegal immigration, and I want to talk about it from the problem of macro harms versus micro harms, and the inclination to want to address micro issues not understanding how they impact macro issues, and sort of the macro bad outcomes that result from intentionally I think in many cases result from our status quo that we have that we have had in America of allowing as much illegal immigration as we do one political party just being kind of
dedicated as a party to a policy of just not really enforcing American immigration law. So I maybe one way of thinking about this. I've seen this tension myself in my own work. Okay, So I helped start a nonprofit opgyn clinic. From the perspective of that work, I have had frustration in the past because so I started the clinic in January of twenty twenty two.
The clinic's been in three twenty four to twenty five.
So the clinic's been open for three years, okay, between twenty twenty two and twenty twenty five.
I think it was in twenty.
Three Gavin Newsom and the California legislature changed California law opening medical eligibility to everyone under the required income threshold, regardless of your immigration status. So medical health insurance became open to illegal aliens. Before that, I had had instances where it was frustrating.
You know, we're trying.
You know, we have all of our pro life work that we're doing through Right to Life and through our Overria Clinic. We're trying to help women in difficult situations. People are pregnant, they might be considering abortion. We want to provide them with care. They're pregnant, but they're not in the country legally and they're nervous about you know that they can't sign up for medical so how do they get health insurance? That's a big push to drive
them towards abortion. So there's a part of me that's like, well, yes, I'm glad that Gavin Newsom provided medical eligibility to people who are in the country unlawfully, because then it means I can take care of this person.
That's the micro benefit.
On a macro level, though, oh, I could very easily understand how giving health insurance government funded health insurance to illegal aliens is a terrible idea. Maybe not it by itself, but it along with a suite of other social welfare programs. Why are we expending state resources to make it easier to come to the country illegally. You're making California almost like a magnet for illegal immigration. If word gets out,
Hey you can go to California. You can get health insurance, you can do this, you could do get this program, that program by bah blah blah, bah bah blah, blah bah bah. At a certain point, you're on a macro level, you're encouraging this behavior that's not good. So I see, and I have seen, and I have felt this tension between my as a nonprofit. What is my concerned Well, I'm not as concerned about in my day to day work.
I'm not as concerned with the problems, the macro level problems of immigration, illegal immigration and the vast social and economic pluses and minuses that it brings, economic, social, national security, whatever pluses and minuses it brings. All I'm seeing is this pregnant woman who overstated or visa who's scared to sign up for medical.
And I want to help her out.
I think, for example, a lot of the criticisms of the Catholic Church a lot of and its service to immigrants, and I think a lot of the ways in which the bishops in America advocate around the immigration issue is infected by this micro level concern. They have people in their parishes who are in the country, either they over state of visa or maybe they came into the country illegally at some point years ago who are now scared, and they see their fear and concern. And these are Catholics.
These are people in their parishes whom they love and care for and want to help, and that is what motivates this sort of almost knee jerk reaction resistance to immigration enforcement efforts. They see the micro harms, but there sort of there's this unwillingness to sort of step back and look at the macro picture. All right, So I want to look step back and look at this macro picture.
And one of the things that sort of alerted me to this was the episcopal female bishop in Washington, d C. Who at the National Cathedral started wagging or started lecturing President Trump and Vice President Vance, and she's sort of lecturing that they need to be merciful towards Is this one part of her sermon in fairness, I don't think it was the whole thing, But in this one part of her sermon, she says she's urging them to be merciful, to be kind to transgender kids and to the immigrants
who are picking vegetables in our fields. Now, first, the transgender kids thing is revealing that mercy and kindness is not what this person's about. This person has a warped, perverted sense of human nature that thinks that biology is meaningless, that the body is meaningless, that the body can be reshaped into whatever we want, and that therefore, giving a child a label like transgender is even something that is sane, which it is not. Again, it's a denial of this
child's biology. To assign that kind of a static identity to a child, I think is practically child abuse. So I know she's already not coming from a head screwed on right Christian starting point, but she mentions to be merciful to the people who are.
Picking the vegetables in our field and.
A lot of pro immigrant people, especially white pro immigrant people, especially white pro immigrant people from the Northeast, who've never actually seen.
A Mexican before.
And by that that is one dynamic in all this is that Northeast liberals who claim to care about the plight of Latino farm workers in the San Joaquin Valley or of Latino immigrants whatever, don't actually interact with that many Latinos at all.
You go to Washington, d C.
You go to one of these big Northeastern cities, it's often it's you know, yes, some parts of New York City, Yes, have large usually Dominican populations. It's different kinds of Latin American immigrants. It's not you know, the Northeast is pretty far away from Mexico. It's not as many actual Mexican or Central American you know, immigrants who are coming up through our southern border. There just aren't that many of them.
They're not as understanding, they don't understand as well the day to day realities of illegal immigration and its consequences as we see it here in the San Joaquin Valley, or people see it in Texas or Arizona or New Mexico.
But their bleeding hearts still go out.
To all those people picking the vegetables in our fields.
But why do we accept that.
Step back for a second, here's the Democratic Party, the party allegedly of labor, of the working man. You know that there's this repeated line that farm workers, you know, they're doing the jobs Americans won't do. Why won't they do it? It's not that we haven't had other kinds of heavy industry in this country.
We did. We had heavy industry in this country of various kinds, various kinds of construction work that Americans.
Did basically, I mean, I mean, look at Detroit, look at the entire auto industry was built on men from America working really hard making cars. Why did farm labor wind up being the way it is that it's dominated by people either or on worker visas from Mexico or people who are here on questionably legal status. Why is it dominated by that? Well, in many ways, it's financially advantageous to have workers not from America rather than from America.
And it's not because workers from Latin America work harder. The advantages come from their tenuous legal status on a visa and or the fact that they are illegal all right. If you're a factory, if you're working the line at Ford or GM in Detroit, and your boss treats you like crap ely and eventually this did happen, you unionize, okay, you unionize. A whole political party organizes itself around your right.
Because you're a citizen, and because you're a voter, a whole political party organizes around your right to unionize.
You're a citizen, you're a voter.
And by the way, if you want to quit your job at Ford and go work for GM, you're totally free to do that. If you want to quit your job at Ford and go work for anyone else, you're free to do that. When you're in America just on a visa of some sort, some kind of work visa, you have to still be working to keep that visa going, all right. The H one B visa debate, what was a classic example of this. The H one B visa is a visa that's basically given to people for certain
kinds of like technical work. It seems that a lot of this is happening, bringing engineers over from India on H one visas. Guess what company like doing that because they can get away with paying them less and they don't complain. What Well, if you're an H one B visa holder and you complain and you get fired, your rear end is going right back to India because the whole point of your visa you maintain your visa as
long as you maintain your work. So employers are able to treat you worse, pay you less, give you worse working conditions, treat you like crap. Generally, if they do that to an American citizen, what can happen? Well, One, the American citizen can just quit and go find another job. That they always have that option. You know nothing, you know other than you know they need income. But they
can just quit. They can just go get another job. Two, the American citizen can say, hey, uh, if you're violating labor law, I'm gonna sue you. American citizen can say that. American citizen can say, Hey, all of us here working for this company, none of us are being treated very fairly. We don't have great bargaining power. Why don't we unionize? American citizen workers can do that. American citizen workers can
alert their congressmen. American citizen workers can alert their state assembly member their state Senator, American citizen workers have actual rights and employers have to treat them well. You know, liberals always complain about farm laborers, how they're poorly treated, and you know what, if I'm being honest, I think there have been, at various times, various places, various ways,
total legit concerns. Farm labors work, in many cases bone breaking hours, under very difficult conditions, under you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Sometimes they're mistreated. There's plenty of historical examples of that. Why did the farm labor industry
get so dominated that way? Well, if you're in the country, has a farm labor on some kind of work visa, and you're working some job at some farm where there's bad conditions, they're not giving you off water breaks, they're not doing blah blah blah blah blah, are you gonna complain? You're only there with that work visa. Your only reason for being in America is to work. Are you gonna
complain and risk losing this job? You might you're in the country not legally, either you came across illegally or you overstayed your visa.
Are you going to.
Bring attention to yourself. Are you gonna get all the other workers at the farm together to unionize and join UfW when half of you, or whatever significant percentage of you maybe don't want to rock the boat given your tenuous legal status.
So, on a.
Micro level, I think a liberal like that liberal episcopal bishop in Washington wagging her finger at Donald Trump, be merciful to the people picking our vegetables. Why are you okay with a permanent subclass, permanent legal subclass, and I'm talking both both in certain cases, legal immigrants here on
work visas and illegal immigrants. Why are you okay with a permanent racial nationality subclass of people with fewer working rights than actual American citizens being the ones who pick your vegetables, make the beds in your hotels, do your
janitorial work, clean your toilets, et cetera, et cetera. When the only people you're benefiting are big corporations, big corporate entities who want to make a lot of money and would like to pay their workers less, pay their workers less, have them work under worse conditions, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. There's no real reason why the farm labor industry in America couldn't have developed in the way that the autoworker industry developed, with American citizens unionized, working under
good conditions, getting good pay, making careers out of it. Obviously, Yet there are probably certain conditions that are different that that, you know, the seasonal nature of the work, et cetera, et cetera. I understand that the seasonal nature of the work, the fact that crews of workers tend to go from different places from one part of CALEI need to the next part of California.
But I still would contend there are certain kinds of historical accidents that allow the farm labor industry to develop in a way that was very different from the say, the auto industry. Clearly, immigrant labor.
Benefits big time corporations because they can get away with paying them less. And this is the bizarre sort of horseshoe that on the one hand you have these liberal, pro unrestricted labor folks who don't believe in borders and have these insane sort of ethno nationality ideas about, you know, wanting America to have lescent national sovereignty. On the one hand, these ultra lefty people on the other hand, in this
sort of horseshoe politics. You have a lot of the people who support unchecked immigration are people on the libertarian extreme right, who, you know what they want.
They want cheap labor. They want cheap labor, cheap ununionized labor.
That's not going to complain, that's not going to demand better wages, it's not going to demand better conditions. Are you really doing something great for the world? You know, I understand your micro concern for the suffering of this individual group here, but why are we just okay with this whole setup of a permanent subclass working for us when we return I want to talk about.
Some historical examples of this.
That's next on the John d'ardy show, a historical example of all this with regards to illegal immigration and the compassion we should be feeling for the illegal immigration situation.
Basically, what I'm saying is the.
Status quo of having a permanent underclass of immigrant workers who necessarily have fewer rights than Americans would. It's inherently just helpful to corporations to allow them to pay them worse, give them worse working conditions, and it's a huge disincentive
to them unionizing. There's no, I mean, I don't see any super clear reason why farm labor, for example, or hotel workers or this or that, why so many of these industries that are currently dominated by illegal labor, why so many of these industries couldn't be done by American citizens, other than it's advantageous to employers to have a bunch of workers who are here either as immigrants not with
full citizenship status, or here illegally. If you're you know, if you're here on work visa, you got to work. You got to keep a job. So if you cause, if you you know, act up at work and your employer fires you, your reason for being in the country ceases to be and you lose your visa and you get your rear end shipps home.
So you shut up.
You shut up in a way that American citizens wouldn't the American citizens wouldn't tolerate. If you're paid poorly, you don't have the flexibility just as well, I'll just leave and go to a job that pays me better. And the whole thing, honestly kind of reminds me of the Helots and the Spartans, So Sparta in kind of like sixth fifth century b see ancient Sparta is kind of heralded in older you know, history and classics textbooks as like these great heroic warrior culture. And then they were
in the movie three hundred. It's the movie three hundred, which is sort of a dramatization of Herodotus's account of the Spartans and their defeat of the Persians, well sort of their peric the persians peric victory against the Spartans
at the Battle of Thermopyli. The Battle of Thermopyla was this sort of amazing moment where just a group of three hundred Spartans held off for an enormous length of time at this point called Thermopyli, which means the hotgates, an enormous army of Persians who were coming to basically take over all of Greece, and this group of three hundred Spartans just killed tons and tons and tons of Persians.
And so the sort of manly virtues of the Spartans have been sort of talked about and written about and heralded by you know, Herodotus, certainly in other Greek historians for you know, over to millennia and what a you know, they're sort of militaristic culture that Sparta had, where every male citizen was basically a soldier and from a young age was raised in a sort of military setting.
Well.
Spartan society was also, in various ways, as were many many societies in the ancient world, fundamentally unjust in various ways. Their slavery was very common practice in the ancient world, but the particular kind of slavery that was practiced in Sparta was particularly bizarre and kind of gross kind.
There was a nearby town to Sparta called Messenia that the Spartans had conquered and it was part of their sort of regional territory, and the people of Messenia were made into this permanent slave subclass called helots, and the Spartans treated them horrifically. In some cases they're writing about, part of a young Spartan male's training involved, you know, going out and killing helots, just sort of almost indiscriminately. Helots were subjugated by the Spartans for forever.
And this idea of having this permanent underclass whose job is to do the jobs that Spartans won't, to do the jobs that Americans won't do.
It's fundamentally unjust.
And I can understand the small picture concern of I want to help this immigrant right here, right now, but I think to restore a more broadly just system is going to require cutting off the border now and maybe deporting lots of people who shouldn't be here in the first place. When we return government by executive order. That's next on the John Girardi Show. The first week, I guess what are we at? Nine days now, Day ten of Trump administration has been dominated by executive orders.
Executive orders seems to be the.
Preferred main method of governance that we have in this country, and I want to talk about it.
I want to talk about it as a phenomenon.
We're seeing this massive uptick in executive actions and greater creativity on the part of executives of the executive branch to get stuff done, greater pushing of the envelope for what is within the competency of the executive branch, to the point of within twenty four hours, both Donald Trump and Joe Biden tried to make significant changes to constitutional law itself via executive action via tweet in Joe Biden's case, with Joe Biden declaring that the Equal Rights Amendment had
been In his opinion, I think it's part of the Constitution. I think it should be recognized as the twenty eighth
Amendment of the United States. A preposterous legal or a preposterous thing for him to say, like, you know, a day before he's leaving office, and not like ordering that it be so recognized, not ordering the Justice Department that we are going to treat the ERA as the twenty eighth Amendment in the context of all litigation efforts, and I'm ordering the National Archives to publish it, and blah blah blah blah.
No, he didn't do any of that. He just sort of.
Said, it's my opinion that the ERA is part of
the twenty eighth Amendment, basically meaningless. Subsequently, though I believe that this was a Day one executive order, Donald Trump said that the fourteenth Amendment does not guarantee birthright citizenship, that just because you happen to be born on American soil does not automatically make you an American citizen, particularly if you were born here the parent to illegal migrant parents, unlawful migrant parents, so illegal immigrant parents, whatever terminology you
want to use, and that's a pretty ambitious thing for Trump to do. I mean, in the best case scenario that executive action by Trump. Say what you will about whether it is wise or not wise as a policy. Frankly, I think as a policy matter, I think it's ridiculous that we just that we would say that someone breaks our laws coming to be in the country and just has a baby here, and that that baby is therefore automatically an American citizen.
No.
I think that's a terrible policy idea. It's a perverse incentive to and frankly, could be a dangerous incentive to get extremely pregnant women to do extremely dangerous things to cross into the country to have a baby for the obvious immigration benefits that would accrue from having a son or a daughter who's an American citizen. I think it's a wildly terrible from a policy perspective. Now, it's a separate question of is that actually what the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees?
The Fourteenth Amendment says, all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are American citizens. What does that subject to the jurisdiction thereof mean? Okay, We've always interpreted that to mean that, well, the children of diplomats living in America. So if you're the French ambassador and.
You you're if you're a woman or your wife a woman, if you have a baby in America and you're the French diplomat, you you're the French ambassador, and you're living in Washington, d C.
And you and your wife have a baby in Washington, d C. Well, that baby's not an American citizen. That baby's a French subject. And the rationale being well, ambassadors are not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States.
Okay.
The French embassy is a little island of France in the midst of Washington, d C. Subject not to American law but to French law. The French ambassadors have immunity.
Okay.
The best that the United States can do is demand if an ambassador or someone in the diplomatic staff, if they violate American laws, the best we can do is demand that France take them back, get them out of the French embassy, and take them back to France and have them be punished there. But we can't prosecute they're not subject to American law.
So what about an.
Illegal alien coming into the United States. Well, that's a very complicated and difficult question. What is subject to the jurisdiction thereof If you're an illegal alien who's in the United States, I mean, you're subject to our criminal law jurisdiction, but you're not really supposed to be there in the first place. You're supposed to just be a Mexican citizen who is not subject to our laws, and you're supposed to be in Mexico or Nicaragua or El Salvador, wherever
you came in illegally. We didn't accept having jurisdiction over you, but we do have some jurisdiction, criminal law jurisdiction, et cetera. So President Trump is now President Trump's interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment, though we're talking about executive action here, President Trump's interpretation of the fourteenth Amendment. There, while I think it's a viable one, certainly in a very difficult, complicated legal question, his executive order is challenging directly a couple
of Supreme Court precedents that don't agree with him. Okay, they're Supreme Court presidents on the books, that is what we have relied on to say that, yeah, an illegal alien who has a baby in the United States is an American citizen. So Trump, via his executive orders is doing something pretty darn ambitious. He's challenging an existing Supreme Court president. There might also be normal statutes on the books that Trump's executive order could be violating. Okay, so
this is an ambitious move by Trump. If you wanted to be more, you know, more flame throwery about it, you could say it's lawless that he's ignoring statutes on the books that regardless of what the Constitution should be interpreted as, meaning, we have statutes on the books that say, you know, people born even of legal alien parents, are citizens of the United States. A president via executive action cannot contradict a law passed by Congress. Sign passed by Congress.
A president can't do that via executive order. The whole idea of an executive order is that within the framework of a law passed by Congress, a president has a certain field of action or inaction that he can pursue in enforcing that law. But he can't contradict laws via an executive order. If you want to contradict a law that's on the books, you need to get another law passed, Okay, you need Congress to change.
Its mind on something.
And so much of the Trump agenda so far that's been implemented has all been implemented through executive orders, far reaching, sweeping, big executive orders to affect big time change.
Now, why is this? Two things. One is that the executive branch has grown tremendously.
Over the last The size, the power, the scope of government in general, and therefore of the executive branch has grown tremendously. Since nineteen thirty seven, the notion of what kinds of things Congress could regulate as being interstate commerce expanded enormously. And so Congress has set up all these Congress passes, all these laws. We're going to regulate this, and we're going to regulate that. We're going to regulate this,
and we're going to regulate that. And who is supposed to enforce laws that Congress writes, well, the President does. The President is the executive, that's his role. Congress rights
all these laws. Congress has had this vast field since the New Deal, this vastly larger field of activity that it can write laws for and regulate, and therefore has given far more ground for the executive to cover as far as enforcing LAWND To allow the executive to enforce all these laws, Congress created this vast alphabet soup of executive branch agencies, the FDA, the EPA, the this that all of those executive branch agencies have the President at the tippy top of their org chart. He is in
charge of every single federal executive branch. They are all exercising his executive branch authority. So, for one, you've got just over the course of the last hundred years, this enormous expanse of public life and law ohaw, that the executive branch is supposed to enforce and therefore so much room for activity on the part of the president. The other big reason I think this is the legacy of Barack Obama. You don't like expansive executive power being wielded
in questionable ways. You don't like governance by executive order. I'd blame Obama. Barack Obama in after twenty fourteen, his party lost the House, his party lost the Senate, and Barack Obama had been trying to get immigration reform of various kinds of pass for years. Republicans wouldn't play ball. He wanted to get the dreamers legalized. He should have done this in his first two years in office.
He didn't.
When he had massive Democrat majorities in both houses of Congress, he didn't get it done. And so famously, after the twenty fourteen elections, Obama said, well, I've got a pen and I've got a phone, and I'm just going to do by executive orders. And the most significant thing he did was DACA DACA, which was basically trying to do through an executive action what he couldn't do in passing
the Dream Act. So the Dream Act was basically, someone comes into the country unlawfully, but they're brought there as a child, and they've been living in the country since they came into the country illegally as a kid. You know, if they came in as a kid, we can sort of consider it. Well, they they weren't the ones who came in. It's not their fault. They came into the country unlawfully. Their parents brought them here, so maybe we
give them some path to legal residency. Barack Obama just did it via executive order Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals DACA, and basically tried to argue, well, you know, I have I have executive discretion, I have prosecutorial discretion. I don't have to enforce all the laws all the time. I'm just choosing not to enforce any I'm just choosing not to enforce American immigration law as it relates to this group of people. But he also set up like basically
a whole program for it. It wasn't just him not enforcing certain provisions of the law. There are very good arguments that he positively did things. So here's this incredibly ambitious executive action by Barack Obama, and it held up in the courts. The courts didn't demand that it he got rid of even the Supreme Court under President Trump.
When Trump tried to get rid of it, the Supreme Court said, well, yeah, you legally could, but you didn't follow the administer the Administrative Procedures Act in doing it, so you got to start over again.
DACA is still on the books.
You know, about a decade later, when it was highly questionable whether Obama legally had the authority to do it, and by I can certainly learned that Lesson Biden tried to keep forgiving student loan debt via executive order when it was pretty clear he didn't have the authority to do it. And President Trump's basically saying, well, what's good for the goose is good for the gander. I'm gonna do stuff via executive order if that's the game we're
gonna play when we return. My global thought on RFK next on the John Girardi Show RFK Juniors having his congressional hearings today. Here's just my general thought. There are all these trumpy people say, if you don't support OURFK, you're a monster. I'm just a radio host, so I'm not gonna lose my job. I can agree with you all you want that we've had bad food additives.
Over the last you know, fifty years in America. Whatever, I will agree with you all you want.
That pharmaceutical companies are bad in various ways. I can agree with you all you if you want to get rid of pharmaceutical companies advertising, you want to, you know, a greater scrutiny of the pharmaceutical industry, the ways in which regulatory captures happen, where pharmaceutical companies have captured government regulators. All right, fine, I just don't want someone extremely pro abortion in charge of HHS.
And that's it. That's my whole thought on RFK, See you next time on Power Talk