Friday on Fox News Channel’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” host Tucker Carlson addressed a proposal by the Trump administration to release illegal immigrants in sanctuary cities.
Carlson compared current attitudes by those on the left on immigration and compared their reactions to the proposal offered by President Donald Trump. He concluded many were be inauthentic about immigration.
Transcript as follows:
CARLSON: Good evening, and welcome to “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” What if someone you hated offered to pay off your mortgage? Put your kids through college? Or deliver a tractor-trailer full of Snickers bars to your house? We’d be confused at first and suspicious, why is an enemy giving you the gift of a lifetime? But in the end, if you were smart, you would take the gift. It would be too good to pass up.
Well, something very much like that happened in Washington last night. The Washington Post reported that the Trump administration has been debating moving some of the thousands of migrants now massing on our southern border into various self-proclaimed sanctuary cities across the United States. The President later confirmed that as true in a tweet as of tonight, that policy remains under consideration. Talk about great news for blue America.
The left loves impoverished immigrants in the developing world and why wouldn’t they? They make our cities safer, they tell us. They improve our schools. They provide the backbone of our economy. They do the work that we won’t do. They are diverse. They are our strength. They are the best of America even though technically they’re not Americans. Sanctuary cities love them best of all, that’s why they’ve become sanctuaries for illegal immigrants.
Every Democrat now running for President has affirmed this repeatedly.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
CHRIS HAYES, MSNBC ANCHOR: If you could, would you take the wall down now here?
BETO O’ROURKE (D), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Yes.
HAYES: Like you have a wall.
O’ROURKE: Absolutely.
HAYES: You’ll knock it down.
SEN. ELIZABETH WARREN (D-MA), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Offer a home to refugees. That is who we are. That’s our values. That’s part of what we do.
JULIAN CASTRO (D), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: So instead of building a wall or closing the border, we should choose compassion instead of cruelty.
SEN. KAMALA HARRIS (D-CA), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: We welcome refugees and bring people out of the shadows.
SEN. KIRSTEN GILLIBRAND (D-NY), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Immigration is not a security issue. It is an economic and a humanitarian and a family issue. There is no such thing as an illegal human.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: “There is no such thing as an illegal human.” Good point, Kirsten Gillibrand, we appreciate your eloquence. Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf believes that so deeply that last year, she warned illegal immigrants in her city, including several criminals, that an I.C.E. raid was coming. She wanted to give them time to flee, and they did. And she later explained she had no choice. All good people want more illegal immigrants in their cities.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
LIBBY SCHAAF (D-CA), MAYOR, OAKLAND: It is a continued perpetuation of a racist lie that immigrants are not valued members of our society. We in Oakland know better. We in Oakland have a community that welcomes and honors all people, no matter where they came from, or how they got here.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: In Oakland, they’re welcoming. In fact, the whole state is welcoming. In his inaugural address this spring, the incoming Governor of California, Gavin Newsom echoed those words. Everyone can come to California, he said, absolutely everyone.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
GAVIN NEWSOM (D-CA), GOVERNOR: Let us build a house stronger than the coming storms, yet open to the world. A house that provides shelter to all who need it, and sanctuary to all who seek it. We will not have one house for the rich and one for the poor, or one for the native-born and one for the rest.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: So the left really couldn’t be clearer on this question. All immigration is good. More immigration is better. There is no distinction between legal and illegal varieties of immigration. And if you disagree with any of this, you are a white nationalist. That’s what they said almost every day for the past two years. We’ve watched carefully and so have you.
And now here, completely out of the blue comes the man they despise most in the world, Donald J. Trump, offering them the one thing they want more than anything — more immigrants — immediately delivered right to their door at Federal expense. Well, it must have been like Christmas morning. You think you’re getting another pair of socks and yet there it is a pony tethered to your mailbox. Holy smokes, amazing. Best day of your life.
But that’s not how they responded. The left wasn’t happy about Trump’s offer. They were shocked, and they were completely enraged. “You know what this is,” they said. “It’s dumping.” Dumping — like what you do with garbage or used truck tires in the woods.
The headline of “Mother Jones” read, “Donald Trump wants to dump asylum seekers on the streets of American cities — democratic cities.” “Busing people,” wrote “The Washington Post,” Greg Miller, “To dump them in cities just to punish political rivals.” In the view of Harry Siegel at “The Daily Beast,” quote, “The White House wanted to dump refugees in sanctuary cities.” Siegel called that idea “nasty.”
At the same time, almost simultaneously, as if in concert, in fact, most CNN and MSNBC ran headlines accusing the White House of wanting to dump immigrants into cities.
So what’s the message the left is sending us? That immigrants are trash? Something you drop off as a cruel prank like a flaming bag of dog waste? If you want it to defile someone’s pristine city, you’d, quote “dump” immigrants on it. Whoa, that sounds a little searching for the word here – – racist. A lot racist actually.
But Nancy Pelosi agrees with it turns out. She lives in one of these cities that might be dumped on, so she immediately issued a statement decrying it quote, “The extent of this administration’s cynicism and cruelty cannot be overstated. Using human beings — including little children — as pawns in their warped game to perpetuate fear and demonize immigrants is despicable.”
But wait a second, this is getting really confusing. It doesn’t seem to make sense. How can the presence of immigrants quote, “perpetual fear”? Immigrants aren’t dangerous. They’ve told us that a thousand times, they’re safer than you are. They’re amazing, much more amazing than you are. Pelosi says that a lot. So why is it bad that Trump wants to send more immigrants to San Francisco?
San Francisco is a sanctuary city. It subverted Federal law in the hope that more illegal immigrants would come there, and now they may be coming. But San Francisco is upset. “Well,” say the news anchors, “Trump’s plan is illegal.” You can’t just send migrants to American cities, they’re telling us. There’s a process.
Really? Did the people of Lewiston, Maine go through that process when an entire population of Somalis was moved from a refugee camp in Kenya to their already beleaguered city? Nope, no process. Nobody asked them. The government just did it. The same thing happened to Hazleton, Pennsylvania, and countless other places across this country. That’s how it works. That’s how it always works. But when you try to do the same thing to the city where Nancy Pelosi lives, it’s supposedly, quote, “illegal.”
This is getting confusing, so let’s make it easier for everyone. Here’s a list of neighborhoods that could use some immediate refugee resettlement. These are affluent places. They’re politically liberal as most affluent places are. As a matter of policy and conviction, they love impoverished immigrants from abroad. They just don’t really have any yet. So let’s change that.
First in line would be Beacon Hill in Boston. That neighborhood has a median income of over $120,000.00 a year. For perspective, that’s more than double the national average. It is strikingly not very diverse, so it would be of course greatly strengthened by thousands of migrants.
As John Kerry who lives in Beacon Hill warned us two years ago, quote, “Fear of the outsider, fear of someone who isn’t you, fear of someone who doesn’t look like you is an attack on America itself.” Whoa, that’s heavy. Let’s stop that attack, and let’s do it by sending — I don’t know — half of the most recent migrant caravan to John Kerry’s up code. He will be thrilled. He’ll have to be thrilled.
Next, we’ll head to the Upper East Side of New York. Former Mayor Michael Bloomberg still lives there. He loves poor immigrants. Unfortunately for him, virtually none of them actually live in his neighborhood. In a city where kids speak close to 200 different languages in the New York City public schools, Michael Bloomberg’s zip code is shockingly lacking in diversity. Let’s change that, shall we? And while we’re at it, let’s integrate that city’s two most famous private schools — Collegiate and Spence — one for boys, one for girls. Both of those schools are famously and rigorously progressive. They know that diversity is our strength.
But how many newly arrived Guatemalan immigrants have they enrolled this year? Not enough. Let’s see if we can get that number to over 50 percent by September. Eisenhower did something very similar at Central High School in Little Rock in 1956. Let’s see if Trump can do it with Collegiate and Spence.
Finally, we’ll go to the Kalorama neighborhood right here in Washington. Barack Obama lives there, as he once put it quote, “We are a nation of immigrants. It has always given America a big advantage over other nations.” Now that may be true, and yet there are virtually no poor immigrants in Kalorama where he lives. What do you say we import a few thousand from the border tomorrow and drop them in? How could Obama say no?
But of course, he would say no. He’d be livid. He would stop it. Nobody hates diversity more than rich liberals, the very people pushing it. Let’s hope immigrants are watching all of this on TV and drawing their own conclusions. The left can say endlessly that they love you. But if they don’t want you in their neighborhood, if they don’t want you going to school with their kids, they’re lying.
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor