Tuesday, Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson hosted his show from San Salvador, the capital city of El Salvador, a nation many of its citizens are fleeing to come to the United States, in many cases illegally.
Carlson, noting the crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border, speculated that the situation could come into play with U.S. domestic politics, as Congress is considering immigration legislation.
Transcript as follows:
Right now though, we’re in San Salvador. It’s a compact and handsome city, a pretty place. It’s ringed by dormant volcanoes.
But unlike other countries in the region, this country, El Salvador is not stud with high-end beach resorts or tourist hotels along the coast. There’s been comparatively little foreign investment here and there’s a reason for that.
For a long time, El Salvador has been a very dangerous place. A few years ago, The Economist”magazine ranked it the most violent country in the world. There’s been ongoing fighting here since the 1980s, beginning with the brutal Civil War, and then extending to the government’s current battle against gangs like MS-13.
If you’re from Long Island or suburban Virginia, you know all about MS-13. You’ve heard the stories about human trafficking and beheadings. MS-13 is at this point, El Salvador’s most famous export, along with millions of low wage workers.
About a third of all Salvadorans now live in the United States, many of them illegally, and many more appear to be coming soon.
The reason: the Biden administration has declared the violence in El Salvador and other parts of Central America a humanitarian crisis. That means the United States now has a moral obligation to fix and pay for that crisis.
Biden has ended so-called Safe Third Country Agreements that the United States once had with Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. That means that migrants moving north without visas will no longer have to apply for asylum in the countries they come from. They can come directly to our country, no questions asked.
Once they’re in the U.S., they can qualify for free healthcare, free education and ultimately for citizenship. They will not be deported and they know it.
So simply by crossing an international border, a line on a map, these migrants move instantly from poverty to the unimaginable benefits of the world’s most generous welfare state, our country.
So who wouldn’t make that trip? Huge numbers of people are making it. In February last month, Customs and Border Protection agents found more than a hundred thousand people trying to enter the United States illegally, most of them appeared to be from Central America.
A year ago, for context, that number was just 34,000. There’s no precedent for an increase like that over a month. Today, we learned that several people arrested at the southern border are on the FBI’s terror watch list. We also learned that there are now over 13,000, unaccompanied migrant children tonight in our border detention facilities.
That’s more than tripled, the record high under the Trump administration. Just days ago, we were told the total number was 4,000 migrant children in custody.
So the numbers have been increasing exponentially since December, and they seem likely to increase exponentially from here.
In one border facility in Donna, Texas. The situation is now 729 percent overcapacity, so kids are getting hurt by definition. Is it an emergency? Well, FEMA has just been called in to help.
Just two months in to the Joe Biden administration, the border is officially a disaster. The administration isn’t denying this, they can’t deny it. It’s on tape.
So instead, they’re telling us that the tragedy they created is in fact a sign of hope. Watch.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
PETER DOOCY, FOX NEWS CHANNEL WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Do you think it’s a coincidence that as soon as Trump and his immigration policy were on the way out, and Biden and his state of policy were on the way in, this historic surge at the border started?
ROBERTA JACOBSON, WHITE HOUSE NATIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL COORDINATOR FOR THE U.S. SOUTHERN BORDER: Surges tend to respond to hope. I don’t know whether I would call that a coincidence, but I certainly think that the idea that a more humane policy would be in place may have driven people to make that decision.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: “Surges tend to respond to hope” explains a reckless, arrogant bureaucrat called Roberta Jacobson, who should be teaching at the Gender Studies Department in the Community College, but instead has power.
Hope. Whose hope exactly? Is there anyone in our country in the United States who sincerely believes that we are seeing tonight on our border will improve our country. Of course, no one believes that.
But it doesn’t matter because the lives of actual Americans mean nothing to the people making these decisions, your happiness is not a consideration. It’s never even discussed in Washington.
Instead, the rest of us are lectured that we have a duty to fix problems in countries that we don’t understand, problems that by the way were substantially caused not by the United States, but by other colonial powers centuries ago.
So if anyone has a legacy responsibility for what’s happening in Latin America, if anyone is ultimately responsible for the millions of Latin American immigrants moving north, it is not the United States, it is Spain. Maybe the Spanish government could start by sending back the gold now sitting in its Central Bank, where do you think that came from? El Salvador might appreciate that.
But Roberta Jacobson isn’t suggesting that, it has never occurred to her, because the point isn’t to help the United States. In fact, the point is to punish the United States.
Official Washington agrees with that. A surge of desperate illegal immigrants is what you get when you vote for the other party. That’s the message.
In fact, they’re telling us the last President is responsible for all you are seeing right now. It’s a pretty remarkable claim, if you think about it, given that the last president was literally elected president, because everyone else in Washington thought it was somehow racist to have international borders.
And yet they’re saying it because they have no shame and they’re convinced you’re stupid. Here it is.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
REP. NANCY PELOSI (D-CA): What the administration has inherited is a broken system at the border.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The 11-year high for crossings without documentation at the border was in the middle of Trump’s presidency. This idea that it’s Joe Biden’s election that has prompted more people to show up is belied by the actual facts.
SEN. CHUCK SCHUMER (D-NY): Joe Biden inherited a huge mess on immigration.
REP. VERONICA ESCOBAR (D-TX): What we are seeing today is the consequence of four years of dismantling every system in place to address this with humanity and compassion.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: It’s hard to believe you’re hearing that, so let’s repeat it slowly so you can get every word. “What we are seeing today (the border crisis) is the consequence of four years of dismantling every system in place to address this with humanity and compassion.”
That was Congresswoman Veronica Escobar of Texas. So she is telling you that the last administration was just too liberal in its border policy. Those open borders Trump people. They are always warning us about that.
And that’s why just two months into a Democratic administration, holding facilities for illegal immigrant children are now at over 700 percent capacity in her state. Donald Trump did that.
Please keep talking, Congresswoman and tell us exactly how that all works. Lecture us some more about humanity and compassion.
These people.
You’ve got to wonder if they think a single human being believes anything they say. They probably don’t care. They certainly don’t care about the country they are supposed to be in charge of. That’s the one obvious thing.
They’ve given up even trying to pretend that they are in any way making life better for American citizens. It’s easier to yell at Americans about making life better for the rest of the world. That’s the appeal of it. It shifts the attention.
Ocasio-Cortez can feel like a hero when she offers free healthcare to the people of El Salvador, someone who has never had a job giving away other people’s money.
By enriching foreign nationals, Ocasio-Cortez doesn’t have to worry about the Americans who live in Queens, the people that she is supposed to be, is hired to represent and help and clearly, she is not worrying about them. Ever been to her congressional district? Ever been to Detroit or Newark or Oakland or Gary, Indiana?
These are the actual places the Democrats run, the places they’re supposed to be improving. But those places have not improved, not in 50 years. They’ve become much worse.
But the people in charge don’t pause to reflect on what they have done, much less apologize for it, they just move on. They head to Afghanistan, or Libya, or Syria, or now El Salvador.
We hope the good people of Central America are ready for the Democratic Party’s version of humanity and compassion. They might want to take a quick field trip to Baltimore just to see how it works out in the end.
In 2018, the City of Baltimore recorded a higher murder rate than the nation of El Salvador, or for that matter, the countries of Honduras, Guatemala or Afghanistan even. And yet no one thought to call FEMA to help the people of Baltimore, somebody should have.
No one from Baltimore was offered asylum in El Salvador. And by the way, if they are offered that they should strongly consider accepting because it’s much safer to live with MS-13 than it is to live in Baltimore. It would be far safer to go to Honduras.
In 2018, thirty of the 290 municipalities in Honduras reported no murders at all. Same in Guatemala and in fact, here in El Salvador where 14 municipalities reported zero murders. That is a massive improvement over so many of our cities.
So here’s an idea: if you’re telling us that parts of Central America are so dangerous that crime constitutes a humanitarian crisis, and that’s exactly what the Biden administration is claiming, then why don’t we just move the people of El Salvador, Honduras or Guatemala to safer parts of their own countries?
Has that even occurred to any of the professional compassion merchants in the Biden administration? Apparently, it hasn’t.
So instead, in a cruel twist, they are encouraging every young ambitious person in El Salvador without family money to leave the country and head north to wash our dishes and do our laundry.
How is that a compassionate program? How is it not exploiting the people of Central America? How is it good for El Salvador? It’s not.
In fact, it sounds like something McKinsey & Company thought up. It is grotesque.
In the name of solving an international crisis, they are as usual, making it much worse. The message that the Biden administration has sent to El Salvador and the countries around it could not be clearer, the border is gone. We’ve erased it. Come join us. And the people of this region have heard that message.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JULIE PACE, WASHINGTON BUREAU CHIEF, ASSOCIATED PRESS: They don’t have a plan at the moment to get this under control. We do know that the White House is dispatching some officials to the border to try to see the situation firsthand.
Families with young children do feel like this is a moment where they can get into the United States. They do feel like there’s going to be a more receptive policy from the Biden administration.
So this is the challenge that the White House has, if they don’t think that their policy actually is an open invitation, then they have to signal that more clearly because that is obviously not the way it has been interpreted.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: So if the question is: is the Biden administration, encouraging the crisis at the border? Hmm. Let’s see. There are Honduran migrants on camera saying things like “Joe Biden is going to help all of us.” So yes, they are encouraging it. They’re doing it on purpose.
Why are they doing it on purpose? Well, here’s one clue. This week, the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives is set to vote on two separate bills that would grant citizenship and legal status to at least four million illegal aliens in the United States.
One of those bills is called the Farm Workforce Modernization Act and it grants amnesty to roughly a million immigrants. The only criterion, if they can prove they’ve worked in agriculture in the U.S. for 180 days over the past two years — 180 days. That’s all it takes. That’s all American citizenship is worth at this point, apparently.
So it’s starting to make sense why Joe Biden suspended all those deportations. A hundred and eighty days, that’s all it takes and the clock is running. But don’t say that out loud in Washington. Don’t suggest impure motives to Joe Biden’s DHS where the watchword as always is plausible deniability.
Of course, you’re not working to import as many new citizens as we can in the United States to replace all the disobedient ones who didn’t vote for us. Come on now. That’s insane. A conspiracy theory straight from QAnon.
And to prove it’s not true at all, not even a little bit, the DHS Secretary has warned all potential illegal immigrants to stay far away from our southern border, or else — or else what exactly? Or else the DHS Secretary could be mildly unhappy with them, miffed at the very least. He is just that kind of ruthless border protector.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
ALEJANDRO MAYORKAS, SECRETARY OF U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY: All I can do is communicate both to the American public and to the individuals seeking protection. They need to wait.
We are not saying don’t come. We are saying don’t come now because we will be able to deliver a safe and orderly process to them as quickly as possible.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Oh, so actually, we’re not saying don’t come. And this is a verbatim quote, “We are saying don’t come now.” Don’t come now. Come next week. We can give you more stuff.
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
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