Wednesday, FNC host Tucker Carlson dissected the new Biden administration’s approach to immigration policy and why it might be offering low estimates on the number of illegal immigrants within the country.
The “Tucker Carlson Tonight” host speculated a process was underway by the White House to import as many Democratic voters as possible.
Transcript as follows:
CARLSON: Have you ever noticed how nobody in Washington can agree on a number? Now math is supposed to be objective except in Oregon where it is racist. But in the real world, you would think that people with functioning calculators could come to similar math-based conclusions once in a while, but not in D.C.
Try getting a consensus on unemployment projections or consumer confidence levels from Members of Congress. You can’t even get a straight answer on how many troops will be occupying the Capitol three months from now and that’s something they directly control.
Even allowing for the fact that most politicians aren’t capable of math, it is striking. Statistics turn out to be a lot sloppier than they look.
So with all of that in mind, it’s pretty amazing to watch virtually everyone in Washington — Republican and Democrat — repeat precisely the same number on one of the most critical problems that we face, and that number is 11 million.
That number they tell us is exactly how many foreign nationals currently live here illegally. All the experts say that. There are precisely 11 million undocumented aliens.
Now 11 million is a lot. On the other hand, at a time of trillion-dollar spending bills, is it really so many? Eleven million isn’t what it used to be.
In any case, that’s exactly how many illegal aliens there are, 11 million, 11 million, 11 million. No more, no less.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Of the 250 million undocumented people in the world today, the United States has 11 million.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The 11 million undocumented immigrants already paid taxes.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: To those, a lot of the 11 million people we’re talking about.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Right. I’m deporting 11 million people. Is that what we want to do? Is that the solution?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Eleven million undocumented people.
CARLSON: OK, OK. Only 11 million.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is America, we’re not going to go round up 11 million people.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The undocumented population has remained stable at about 11 million for the last half a decade.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Negatively impacting not just 11 million people.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We have 11 million people here who are undocumented.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: As an undocumented immigrant in this country, one of 11 million who are viewed as criminals.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: It’s almost like a script. Now people have different views on what we’ve got to do about illegal immigrants, but nobody questions how many there are because there are 11 million. Period. Joe Biden knows this.
He checked with a doctor he lives with. Dr. Jill Biden isn’t a practicing physician, we established that, after doing a little shoe-leather reporting with our sources in the medical community.
But Dr. Jill isn’t noted an internationally regarded academic researcher who once wrote a tripled space thesis on Community Colleges in Delaware, so she knows precisely how many undocumented future Americans live here. It is 11 million, she passed on her findings to Joe.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JOE BIDEN (D), PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Within a hundred days, I’m going to send to the United States Congress, a pathway to citizenship for over 11 million undocumented people. And all of those so-called DREAMers, those DACA kids, they’re going to be immediately certified again, to be able to stay in this country and put on a path to citizenship.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Now that tape was shot a month before the November election, Joe Biden then promised to turn 11 million undocumented people, DREAMers, people with big dreams into American citizens by giving them amnesty. And not long after that, by giving them absentee ballots.
It was a big promise, but Joe Biden is in the White House. Now his party controls everything. So he can make good on that promise and he plans to do so. In fact, it’s one of the very first things he is doing.
How is it going to affect you? Well, according to Joe Biden’s flak, it means you’ll have exactly 11 million new fellow Americans.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JEN PSAKI, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: Certainly, as part of the proposal that the President outlined and proposed on day one is an earned path to citizenship, right, for 11 million immigrants who are undocumented immigrants who are living in the country.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: So it’s an earned path to citizenship, no big deal. They earned it, every bit of it. Presumably, by mocking the laws of the country they’ll now have a role in running. But actually, it is kind of a big deal.
Adding 11 million new citizens would have big effects on America, profound effects. How many people is 11 million people? Well, 43 of the 50 U.S. states have a smaller population than 11 million. That’s not just Wyoming and South Dakota. It’s Virginia, Georgia, Michigan, New Jersey, Massachusetts and so on, big states. What would this cost? No one asked. It’s kind of hard to know the real answer.
But if you’re trying to put the math together, be sure to factor in the free healthcare, you’ll shouldn’t be paying for every one of the 11 million.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JAKE TAPPER, CNN ANCHOR: Do you support giving universal healthcare, Medicare-for-All to people who are in this country illegally?
KAMALA HARRIS (D), VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Let me just be very clear about this. I am opposed to any policy that would deny in our country, any human being from access to public safety, public education or public health. Period.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Now, it doesn’t take an economist to know that giving free, quote, “healthcare” which obviously will include gender transitions, by the way, to 11 million new people can easily capsize the entire U.S. economy very easily.
As Milton Friedman once wisely noted, you can have a welfare state or you can have open borders, but you cannot have both. Yet we’re getting both.
But we may, in fact, be getting a great deal more than that, and that’s the purpose of the segment tonight.
We all assume that 11 million is the real number. But is it the real number? Is that actually the number of foreign nationals who live within our borders illegally and will be getting amnesty very soon?
No, it’s not the real number. In fact, it’s a totally fake number, which people endlessly repeat only because they are badly informed or dishonest. They’ve been repeating that number for a very long time, more than 15 years, at least.
Way back in 2005, the Pew Research Center announced that quote, “The undocumented population has reached nearly 11 million.” The weird thing is that 12 years later, Pew had roughly the same estimate. Nothing had changed in more than a decade and that should have been a-tell that the number itself was fraudulent.
In 2018, the Department of Homeland Security which exists to track numbers like these, played along with it and put the number of illegal aliens in the U.S. at somewhere around 12 million. Right? They just made that up.
Watch our interview from April of 2019 with the then-head of the Department of Homeland Security, Kirstjen Nielsen. When pushed, Nielsen conceded that actually, she didn’t know the real number. She had no idea.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Does the U.S. government know exactly how many people are living in this country illegally? I’ve seen academic studies that put that number between 11 million, 22 million, maybe more. What is the real number?
KIRSTJEN NIELSEN, FORMER SECRETARY OF DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY: Yes. We debate it. I think that’s accurate.
CARLSON: So we don’t know.
NIELSEN: We do not know. No.
CARLSON: That must be a grave concern to you that we potentially have more than 10 million people here whose identities we don’t know, it could be over 20, whose identities we don’t know. And like they could be anybody?
NIELSEN: Yes.
CARLSON: And so why is that not the single most pressing problem the country has?
NIELSEN: In my opinion, right now, this is one of, if not the biggest crisis this country has faced in a decade.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: OK, so we don’t know. The question is, what is the real number? And why is everyone saying it is 11 million? Why is everyone coming to the same wrong conclusion? They’re not all lying.
So we checked and here’s what we found. Pretty much everybody who talks about immigration, including Dr. Jill Biden is using the Census Bureau’s Annual American Community Survey to estimate how many illegal immigrants live in this country.
One senior lecturer at M.I.T. School of Management put it this way. “It’s been the only method used for the last three decades.” So what is the method?
Well, the Census tallies up the number of foreign-born people they’ve identified who live in this country, then estimate or subtract the number of foreign-born people known to be in the U.S. legally. Bingo 11 million. That’s what you get.
The problem is, this method of calculation is bound to be wrong. Many illegal immigrants don’t respond to census takers, why would they? They’re here illegally.
Robert Groves, the former Director of the Census Bureau summed up the reality this way, quote, “There’s no magic bullet that anyone has discovered to count this population. This is really very difficult to estimate.”
Oh, so many of the studies projected that there are only 11 million illegal immigrants have, in fact, acknowledged that the census is not perfect. They’ve been honest about that. But strangely, they assumed that it was pretty close to perfect.
Specifically, they operated on the assumption that only about 10 percent of illegal immigrants weren’t being captured by census takers, weren’t responding to the forms. Put another way, their models assumed that 90 percent of the people living in this country illegally were willing to cooperate with census takers.
Now, why would they assume that? That seems like a ridiculous assumption, but there’s a reason.
Ann Coulter explains that reason in her book, “Adios, America,” which even now is one of the few serious explorations of this topic, assuming it’s not now banned by Amazon, which it may be.
It turns out that researchers have been relying on a 2001 study, 20 years ago, funded by the University of California. That survey surveyed a total of 829 people born in Mexico and living in Los Angeles, and asked them whether they responded to census interviews.
Now, the majority of them said yes, but here’s the amazing thing. Nearly 40 percent of those households refuse to answer the survey, at all.
In other words, all the assumptions that there are 11 million illegal immigrants in this country are based on a separate asylum and it’s that 90 percent of illegal immigrants are willing to cooperate with the Census Bureau, and that assumption itself is based on a survey showing nearly half of all illegal immigrants refuse to fill out the survey. This is bad math at the very least.
In 2018, researchers at Yale and M.I.T. decided to update the methodology, yes, not a minute too soon. They did not rely on census data. Instead, they used, quote, “operational data” such as deportations, visa overstays, demographic data, death rates, immigration rates, et cetera. Those are real numbers.
They combined them and used a mathematical model to establish a range of estimates. How many people live here illegally? Here’s what they found, quote, “After running one million simulations of the model, the researchers’ 95 percent probability range is 16 million to 29 million illegal aliens with 22.1 million as the mean.”
In other words, the estimates that we’ve been relying on for decades and repeating to each other like they are real, the estimates the Biden administration is now using to justify mass amnesty could possibly in fact, may likely be off by more than 18 million people.
There could easily be 30 million illegal immigrants living in this country or more. How many people is that? That’s more people that live in the entire State of Texas. So how would amnesty for that many people affect our, quote, “democracy,” one we’re also worried about?
In effect, it would end our democracy. People who have lived here all of their lives, paid taxes, followed the rules, have been good citizens would find their votes diluted to the point of irrelevance.
By the way, it would mean an instantaneous end to African-American political power. That would be over for good, no question about it. Apparently, Maxine Waters is too dumb to know it, but that would be the effect.
Of course, it would also ensure permanent rule by the Democratic Party, which is the point of it.
We should tell you that it’s not just Yale and M.I.T. who have concluded the 11 million number is ridiculous. Back in 2005, Bear Stearns, the bank, of all places, reached the same conclusion.
Bear Stearns estimated the total illegal immigrant population to be as high as 20 million. That was 16 years ago. Here was their top-line finding in that study, quote, “Our research has identified significant evidence that the census estimates of undocumented immigrants may be capturing as little as half of the total undocumented population. This gross undercounting is a serious accounting issue, which could ultimately lead to government policy errors in the future.”
Oh, you think? Like giving amnesty to 11 million who are actually 30 million? Yes, that could be an error.
Now, to make this calculation, Bear Stearns did not rely on census data because they are a bank, they’re not as dumb as our government. Instead, they looked at bank transfers, remittances from the U.S. to Mexico.
They wanted to capture the number of payments from illegal aliens living here to their families back home and here is what they found.
Quote, “The rate of increase in remittances far exceeds the increases in Mexicans residing in the U.S. and their wage growth. Between 1995 and 2003, the official tally of Mexicans has climbed 56 percent. The median weekly wage income has increased by 10 percent. Yet total remittances jumped 199 percent over the same period.”
How did that happen? Well, there was no obvious explanation for this disparity apart from a lot more illegal immigration than the authorities were acknowledging.
And then researchers at Bear Stearns looked at other indicators. For example, they analyzed data on school enrollment and housing permit applications for multiple dwellings.
In one instance, they found that some towns in New Jersey reported a five or six percent growth in population size, at the very same time that requests for housing permits were increasing by 600 percent. What? Quote, “In major immigrant gateway cities, the influx of immigrants has led to overcrowded dwellings and a housing boom, unexplained by official population growth.”
Happening all across the country, our authorities don’t know or intentionally ignore it, or they lie to us about it.
Again, that was all 16 years ago. And now in 2021, the party in charge is still assuring us that the number of illegal immigrants in this country has somehow declined by up to 10 million people. Could that be true? How insulting is that? Even to float that idea?
Consider everything that has happened since 2006. The amnesty for the so-called DREAMers, the promises of mass amnesty, the endless caravan.
So the 11 million number is above all a lie. The 11 million number is one of the more obvious lies ever told. We’re a TV show. We’re not social scientists and it took about an hour to find this out. It’s a ridiculous lie.
On some level, Joe Biden knows this. In the summer of 2019, he had more or less admitted that the point of amnesty he suggested is not just to give citizenship to 11 million people. The point is to import as many new Democratic voters as possible and there’s no limit. Watch.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BIDEN: We could afford to take in a heartbeat another two million people. The idea that a country of 330 million people cannot absorb people who are in desperate need, and who are justifiably fleeing oppression is absolutely bizarre. Absolutely bizarre.
I would also move to increase the total number of immigrants able to come to the United States.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: He’s just throwing numbers out there. They all are. They don’t know the real number. They’re hiding what they do know. They’re cloaking the obvious beneath more slogans.
Consider how unbelievably irresponsible it is for a policymaker, and now, the Vice President of the United States just throw out there, yes, we’ll cover free healthcare for everyone here illegally without even knowing how many people that is. That’s insane. Who would do something like that?
How do you feel about the country you would do that to? You’d have contempt for it.
Of course, they won’t tell you the total number. They want you to believe it is 11 million always and forever. And by the time you figure out they are lying to you, it will be too late to do anything about it, obviously.
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
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