We’re getting the bad, hard criminals out. President Trump's deporting migrants who came here illegally. That makes some people mad.
It’s inhumane to deport people who’ve been working. But most Americans want illegal immigrants kicked out. And Trump supporters are especially angry about immigrant crime.
Migrants caught on camera, attacking two New York City police officers. We have a new form of crime. It’s called migrant crime and it’s happening at levels that nobody thought possible.
Unfortunately, today, we have ever-growing hostility towards immigrants. Yaron Brook, a legal immigrant himself, is chair of the Ayn Rand Institute. He points out that illegal immigrants are actually less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans.
The only state that tracks immigrant crime, Texas, reports about 1,400 convictions per 100,000 Americans. Versus half that number by illegal immigrants, and far fewer by legal immigrants. Immigrants don’t commit more crime.
But there are plenty of other worries, like freeloading. People will come here and collect our welfare benefits. You can't have open borders with a welfare state.
We could, of course, eliminate welfare for immigrants. Actually, illegal immigrants don’t qualify for most welfare benefits. But, migrants’ kids often attend public schools, hospitals often treat them for free.
Seems cruel not to. Some towns house migrants in public buildings. No shelters on school grounds!
These people are mad because migrants lived in their kids’ high school. No shelters on school grounds! There is a real basis for people resenting that fact, that people are getting handed goodies.
And one way to deal with that is not to restrict immigration. The way to deal with that is to restrict the goodies. Why not restrict immigration itself?
Immigrants ultimately are a massive benefit to the Americans that live in America. Immigrants really are! Even illegal immigrants are a net gain.
Not just because they harvest lots of our food, do lots of construction, but they don’t collect Social Security or Medicare. While those taxes and income taxes are deducted from their paychecks. So, undocumented immigrants pay more into our economy than they get back.
Still: These new rivals compete primarily with the very Americans most likely to have lost their jobs. That’s true. Migrants do take away jobs from some Americans, but most Americans don’t want to do those jobs.
Every serious economic study has shown they create more jobs than they destroy. You might lose your job, but you live, now, in a society that has more possibilities, more opportunities because the immigrants, many of them are entrepreneurs. [crowd cheers] Immigrants do create a remarkable number of jobs.
Half of all the very successful Silicon Valley startups, were founded by immigrants. Many of us benefit enormously from our interaction with immigrants and who has the right to stop us from that interaction? Brook says restricting migrants is like saying: I have a right to stagnate and to force all of you to stagnate with me.
I’m fine with legal immigration. I like it. We need people.
Most Americans accept legal immigration, but a big reason people come here illegally is because: Legal immigration is unbelievably complicated and complex and makes it almost impossible to come here. And many people, as a consequence, who want a part of the American dream, come here illegally. It would be better, he says: If you made immigration limited to jobs, if you come to the border with a job offer and you're not a criminal, you're not a terrorist, and you don't have an infectious disease, you're in.
The United States used to do that. Well, not the job part, but anyone who came here without an infectious disease was let in. Some Americans say, alright, that worked when we brought in Europeans, but now we're bringing in the wrong people.
We are bringing in peasant cultures. Drving drunk and dumping your crap on the ground. I mean, it is changing our culture.
There are good people in every culture. When Irish came here, they were accused of being barbarians and primitive and so on. I don’t see no Americans.
I see trespassers, Irish harps. Every wave of immigrants has been accused of the same thing. The fact is, that within a generation or two, they assimilate quite well no matter where they come from.
But assimilation takes time. People say, I don’t want to press one for English. If we demanded and required them to work, to learn English, to assimilate into our culture, then the best would come here.
Not the worst. Some immigrants are Muslim fundamentalists who bring in ideas we don't like. Some are socialists.
Yes, immigrants are going to bring ideas that we don't like and that we don't support. But if we are really confident in the ideas that we have, the ideas of individual rights, the ideas of capitalism and liberty, then we should fight for those ideas. It's Americans who teach at our universities that the Founding Fathers were, you know, were terrible human beings.
By contrast, immigrants tend to like America. People come here because they want to pursue their happiness. What we need is to give them the intellectual framework, the idea of individual rights, the idea of liberty and capitalism.
If we stand for those ideas, they will assimilate. If we reject those ideas, we've only got ourselves to blame. [swoosh] Here at Stossel TV, we stand for those ideas.
Individual rights, liberty and capitalism. If you want to hear more about that, subscribe and hit that notification bell.
