Joe Rogan had British activist and writer Maajid Nawaz on his podcast last week, and the three-hour conversation is worth your time. I found Rogan’s discussion of illegal immigration in the United States noteworthy, so I’ve transcribed that bit (which comes at 1:15:53) below:
ROGAN: “Our situation is even stranger because we scoop everybody up, put them at the border, and then, depending on what you believe, distribute them throughout the country on either buses or however they are doing it.”
“Now, if that is true, if they are just allowing people to come into the country undocumented, you have to wonder like, ‘What’s the motivation behind that?’ And also, ‘What is the motivation about this push to try to allow undocumented to vote?’ It’s like, are you letting people into the country as a bribe so that they’ll vote for the people that let them into the country versus the people that wanted to secure the borders and build the wall? Are you essentially stocking your pond? You’re bringing in more people that are going to go with your agenda?”
“There’s this thing in this country, there’s this massive contradiction, right, where you can’t have someone need to have a driver’s license or identification to vote because that is racist. But you can have them need to have a driver’s license or identification to show they’ve had proof for vaccination. But you can have someone come in from across the border and not check them for vaccination, not vaccinate them, and not check to see if they have COVID.”
NAWAZ: “It’s crazy, right? This is what I mean by politicization of all these debates.”
ROGAN: “It’s so inconsistent. And they are both simultaneously existing from the same people. Where they are espousing one thing that literally contradicts the other thing.”
Rogan is entirely correct about the Biden administration’s completely contradictory rationales in support of COVID-19 mandates, against photo identification for voting, and for letting illegal immigrants into the country without even testing them for COVID, let alone making them prove they are vaccinated.
However, I am a little less cynical than Rogan about the motivations behind Biden’s open borders policies.
First of all, Biden’s not letting every migrant apprehended for illegally crossing the border into the country. It’s actually a little less than half. But that still means almost 1 million migrants have not only been let into the country since Biden took office but also often bussed and flown to their final destination, as Rogan points out.
More importantly, I don’t think Biden and the Democrats are trying to “stock the pond” with compliant immigrant voters. I think they genuinely care for the well-being of the migrants and only want what is best for them.
Where I disagree with Biden and Democrats on open borders is that I don’t think mass migration is a win-win for everybody involved. Yes, the migrants benefit by coming to a much better country, and yes, wealthy Americans benefit from tons of cheap labor. But Americans without college degrees often lose jobs to migrants, and those who keep their jobs often suffer lower wages. Biden and the Democrats either don’t believe these trade-offs exist, or they don’t care.
Right before Rogan turned to the subject of illegal immigration, Nawaz said, “That’s why I never believe it is just about that one person. And unfortunately, what we’re witnessing at the moment, I suppose we can come to this later, but what happens when that faction [the bureaucracy] is no longer serving the interests or the values that country is meant to be built on, then you have a situation where the state is no longer serving the people, which is what I believe we are in at the moment.”
On immigration, the United States is absolutely in a moment when the state no longer serves the people.
