Wednesday on Fox News Channel’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” host Tucker Carlson warned that “some” Republicans want to break their immigration pledge by passing a discharge petition that would force votes on immigration measures, including amnesty.
Partial transcript as follows:
Last year, congressional Republicans, you remember, passed a major tax reform bill. It accomplished a big goal for them and many of their donors. But tax reform wasn’t what Republicans ran on in 2016, popular as it may be now. At the time, they ran, you will remember, on immigration and a promise to treat America’s borders like they are actual borders and matter, like this was a real country. Now some Republicans in Congress want to betray that pledge in the most dramatic possible way.
They’re working tonight to pass a so-called discharge petition in the House. It would force votes on a slew of immigration matters, including some that would give amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants. How many? We can’t say, because when you push on the numbers a little bit it turns out that nobody actually knows how many illegal immigrants live in this country. And when when we say it nobody knows, we mean nobody knows to within like 10 million. The estimate you hear for almost everyone is 11 million.
Eleven million illegal aliens living in this country. That number comes from Pew. It hasn’t changed in a decade, and that should be a tip-off, because over the last decade, illegal arrivals have continued and now states are actively sabotaging deportation efforts. The real figure it turns out is much, much higher. The ICE director Thomas Homan admitted that much last year. We know 11 million is not correct. So what’s the real number? An unpublished paper by Yale, three professors there, estimates there could be 23 million illegal immigrants in the United States.
On the low end is 17 million. Even back in 2005, analysts at Bear Stearns guessed the real number was probably 20 million or more. The bottom line is we don’t know exactly how many are here, but some members of the House Republican Caucus think it is a good idea to give amnesty to some of them, or maybe all of them. It’s not what the voters wanted, but they apparently don’t care.
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
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