Monday, FNC host Tucker Carlson opened his program by mocking the Biden administration approach under Vice President Kamala Harris to immigration.
Carlson called the lax immigration standards, which have allowed mass demographic shifts in parts of the country, an attack on democracy.
Transcript as follows:
CARLSON: Joe Biden may have lost a step along the way, but his handlers work fast. Within hours of the Inauguration in January, Biden’s White House opened America’s borders to the world, not simply to job seekers and gang members from Mexico and Central America, but to varieties of illegal migrants from all over the globe from Africa and Asia, from the Middle East, virtually anyone who could get to Mexico was and is admitted into the United States without a visa.
In some cases, foreign nationals whose identities we cannot verify, were flown to the interior of our country and permanently resettled without the permission of the people who already live there, Americans. How did migrants get from Congo to Lewiston, Maine? And why?
Well, because Susan Rice and ideologues like her very much want to change Maine’s demographics, as well as the population mix in every other state in the union. So, the administration is working to do that, by fiat, without a vote in Congress, without public consent of any kind.
By definition, this is the most radical possible attack on the core premise of democracy, which is that citizens get to run their own countries, not foreigners, citizens. The leaders of the Democratic Party, though no longer believe in democracy as constituted, and they definitely don’t plan to lose another election.
So, as the rest of us go about our lives, they are importing huge numbers of new voters into the United States. When you say this out loud, they become absolutely hysterical and call you names. But they do that only because it is so obviously true.
Unfortunately, for Susan Rice, this is one change to the country that is pretty hard to hide. If you live within a hundred miles of the Mexican border, for example, you watch it happen in real time.
On the border, the rule of law has been suspended. The American system of order and decency and fairness is being mocked and destroyed by the very people in charge of sustaining it. You don’t have to be a conservative Republican to be deeply offended by what’s going on.
Last November in Texas, many thousands of lifelong Democrats with Mexican last names voted for Donald Trump. Why? Because they knew perfectly well what the left planned to do to the border, and they were right. They’re patriotic Americans. They didn’t want to see their country destroyed.
So for the Joe Biden administration, this is potentially a very serious political problem. Most people no matter what color they are, no matter who they vote for, think that Joe Biden’s current immigration policy is lunacy, because it is.
Opening the border is the single most unpopular thing the White House has done so far — by far. Biden’s handlers understand this could be a disaster for them. So this weekend, they dispatched Kamala Harris to Central America with orders to pretend she is trying to fix it. Harris, you may remember is the shallow political opportunist from Canada, we are often told as some kind of Civil Rights hero/moral leader.
On Sunday, Harris flew to Guatemala to unveil her policy to address the crisis. What is it? In a word, the plan is bribery.
The administration plans to spend billions of dollars to pay Latin America’s poor not to move to the United States. CNN, of course, loves the idea. It blames America. Quote, “Kamala Harris’s visit to Central America signals a new chapter.” The channel slobbered in the headline this morning.
But there’s nothing actually new about this. We’ve seen this cartoon before.
Six years ago, as Barack Obama’s Vice President, Joe Biden announced what he called a plan for Central America in “The New York Times.” The idea at the time is the idea now: once we send billions to corrupt foreign governments, their citizens will stop showing up in Texas and California.
So, we tried it. How did it work exactly? Well, let’s see, we now have more people from Central America coming over our border illegally than at any time in decades, possibly ever. So, it didn’t work very well. That’s obvious to everyone, but Joe Biden who doesn’t seem to have noticed.
In April, he told Congress that his plan was a brilliant success.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JOE BIDEN (D), PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: When I was Vice President, the President asked me to focus on providing help needed to address the root causes of migration and it helped keep people in their own countries instead of being forced to leave.
The plan was working, but the last administration decided it was not worth it.
I’m restoring the program and ask Vice President Harris to lead our diplomatic effort to take care of this. I have absolute confidence she will get the job done.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: So the last administration was weak on border security, right? OK, got it. But the sentence to pay attention to is the claim that people from Central America are quote, “forced to come here.” Who are they forced to come here by? Well by us, of course. We’re not keeping up with our bribes to the drug traffickers who run say, Honduras. So it’s our fault. Better restart the payments immediately or someone could get hurt.
But that’s a lie. Foreign aid almost never accomplishes what we pretend it will accomplish for the people for whom it is intended. And if you think otherwise, how about explaining Africa. For more than 50 years, the West, the U.S. in particular has bombarded that continent with taxpayer and NGO money, as well as with all the stupid and very patronizing assumptions that accompany that money.
And the result, is there a single African country that is better off for it? Less corrupt, and more self-sufficient? Take an hour or two to check that fact sometime, if you have the time. It’s hard to find a single country.
Foreign aid projects are where liberal arrogance goes to die, they almost never work for the people they’re supposed to work for. Sorry, they don’t. It sounds like they would, but they don’t.
Yesterday, even The New York Times can see that this is true. For example, over the past 10 years, Guatemala alone has received more than a billion and a half dollars in U.S. aid. So, what’s the result of that aid? Small country, a billion and a half dollars.
Well, according to The New York Times, poverty and malnutrition in Guatemala have now risen to unprecedented levels. Really? Why are you surprised? When was the last time that welfare made someone stronger or happier? The same is true with countries.
If anything, Joe Biden’s aid package encouraged illegal migration to the United States. Michael Clemens, a fellow at the Center for Global Development, studied the data on this. He found that, quote, “Foreign aid focused on economic development is actually associated with increases in emigration from poor countries.” But of course, that’s true. The only surprise is that we would be surprised.
Healthy places are by definition, self-sufficient places. Dependence by contrast, breeds misery. That’s always true. Misery causes people to flee and they have.
Kamala Harris is no genius, obviously, but even she must sense this. She knows more bribes won’t work. So instead of defending her plan on the specific, she is taking the much easier and far more familiar road, more babbling about racism and sexism, and of course, climate change.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
KAMALA HARRIS (D), VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: There are also longstanding issues that are often called the root causes of immigration. We are looking at the issue of poverty, and the lack therefore, of economic opportunities, the issue of extreme weather conditions and the lack of climate adaptation, as well as corruption and the lack of good governance and violence against women, indigenous people, LGBTQ people and Afro-descendants.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Often cause by so-called the root causes of immigration. Really? By whom exactly? No honest person. Quick, Kamala Harris, name three global problems of any kind that are not caused by racism and sexism and climate change and whose solutions don’t make you more powerful? Because that’s always the acid test of good faith.
Does the solution cost you or does it help you? If it helps you every single time, maybe it’s not really a solution. So, what’s the answer? Just kidding. Trick question.
Obviously, there aren’t any global problems that aren’t associated with racism and sexism and global climate change, and that don’t require Kamala Harris to become a lot more powerful.
The funny thing is, and it is funny, no one has told Central Americans this. They think they’re coming here to Brownsville and San Ysidro precisely because Kamala Harris is now the Vice President. Watch.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE (voice-over): Giammattei says increased border crossings have been caused in part by the change of administrations in Washington.
ALEJANDRO GIAMMATTEI, SALVADORAN PRESIDENT (through translator): The messaged change, too. We’re going to reunite families, and we’re going to reunite children. The very next day, the coyotes were here organizing groups of children to take them to the United States.
We asked the United States government to send more of a clear message to prevent more people from leaving.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Oh, so they’re not coming here because of sexism. In fact, in Latin America, they kind of like the patriarchy. Sorry, Kamala Harris. They’re not coming here because they are fleeing a culture they don’t like, it’s their culture. They’re coming here because this is a much richer and much more generous country and now they can come here, so why wouldn’t they?
It’s not their fault. It’s ours.
And if you really wanted to solve the problem, the answer is pretty simple. You would deport people here illegally. That’s what normal countries do. How much time does Mexico or Israel spend blaming itself for people who break their laws? Not a lot of time, actually. Not one second.
They swiftly deport people who do that, and if we did that, it will get the world’s attention immediately. Because the truth is, many of these countries need illegal immigrants in our country in order to continue. That’s how unhealthy the economics of this arrangement are.
As of 2019, for example, remittances from immigrants to the United States accounted for fully 20 percent of El Salvador’s entire GDP. Is that healthy? Should we continue that? Don’t we want an independent El Salvador that can feed itself? Clearly, we don’t care.
The same was true, essentially in Honduras and Guatemala. According to a recent piece that moved on the AP wire, quote, “So many Guatemalans have left that much of the country survives on remittances they send home.” Once again, if you cared about Guatemala, you would try to make Guatemala independent, you wouldn’t make it yet another third world country dependent on NGO and foreign aid money. That’s a horrible thing to do.
The same story in Mexico, by the way. In 2018, then presidential candidates AMLO admitted, quote, “These remittances are the main income that this country has, more than oil, more than tourism.” Is that what we want for Mexico? If you cared about Mexico, would you want that? No, it’s degrading, and it might be part of the reason Mexico is a disaster in the middle of a drug war ongoing for 10 years.
Kamala Harris doesn’t care. So her solution is the same solution: give more money to the narco states, to Honduras where the President is under a DEA investigation for drug trafficking.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
HARRIS: We are launching our call to action for businesses to invest in the northern triangle. I believe that the businesses, in particular, our private business sector have a very significant role to play, as we all know, in creating jobs and promoting economic opportunity and in long term development.
I am proud that we have companies already in the United States who have committed to act. We have Mastercard who intends to partner across sectors to bring five million people in the region into the digital economy, and to support one million small businesses.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: This is hilarious. Only because no one on the left talks about economics or understands economics, all debates used to be in economics. It’s not even mentioned anymore. It’s all race and gender. But underlying all of this is economics. And what Kamala Harris is saying is that big U.S. companies are quote “ready to act selflessly,” of course, to get more cheap labor in the third world. They’re ready to act.
Even as our own labor market does things that no healthy market would do. Unemployment is going up, even as businesses can’t find labor to fill open jobs. Something very ominous is happening in our labor markets, it is being ignored, so we can help Honduras’s labor market on behalf of El Salvador and by the way, send more money to governments that don’t deserve it, that are corrupted, don’t serve their own people in the hope they’ll stop invading us, but they will invade us anyway because it’s been going on for 10 years.
Who benefits from these arrangements? A lot of people, but not you. That’s for sure.
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor