The Ricochet Podcast - The Rumps You Leave Behind

Episode Date: March 21, 2025

Immediately upon the president's return to office, we discovered that stopping the flood of illegal immigrants across the border was as simple as closing the spigot. While the crisis may be over, the mission has yet to be accomplished. Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies and host of the Parsing Immigration Policy podcast returns to discuss what follows the end of the beginning efforts to correct the long-neglected immigration mess.Plus, Rob, James and Steve look forward to the dismantling of the Department of Education; they do their best to ignore the psychopathic attention-seekers in the Middle East; and James finally turns the tables on Rob for a good old-fashioned troll.- Opening sound this week: Border Czar Tom Homan on using the Alien Enemies Act and President Trump on closing the Department of Education

Here's what you're really asking, Steve. You're not asking what scholarly works I'm reading. You were saying, are you reading St. Basil the Great? Yes. Yeah. Are you reading John Chrysostom on wealth and poverty? Yes. Oh, these are all lived, by the way. Like, there's not one of these guys that isn't... I mean, there's not one of them. Well, I've been saying for a long time, the only people who can rightfully talk about social justice are the medieval Catholics, and everyone else should shut up. Yeah, these are late antiquity. Right. Lovely apostolic fathers, you know, that's a good one. That's a page turner. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet podcast

with Stephen Hayward and Rob Long. I'm James Lilings. Today we're going to talk to Mark Krakorian about, of course, immigration. So let's have ourselves a podcast. You say to those who think you're using a 200 year old law to circumvent you, Prusik. And no law is not as old as the constitution. we still pay attention that don't we we're going to be returning education very simply back to the states where it belongs and this is a very popular thing to do but much more importantly it's a common-sense thing to do

and it's going to work absolutely it's going to work welcome everybody to the ricochet podcast number seven hundred and thirty three and we have a surprise for you today and it's gonna work. Absolutely it's gonna work. Welcome everybody to the Ricochet Podcast, number 733. And we have a surprise for you today. Yeah, you got me, James Lollix in Minneapolis, you got Stephen Hayward probably in California. But we have Rob Long, who I guess has come out of the monastery on the East Coast, tonsured in his robe, with the little white,

Benedictine belt and the rest of it. Welcome back, Rob. It's always good to see you. And you know, I have to say, it's like, I know that says seminary is a Princeton Theological Seminary. And so people have this idea of it, like that, you know, walking around in robes. When I had dinner, I don't know, last year, around this time with Greg Gutfeld on our one of our regular dinners. And I was like, Hey, listen, by the way, I'm just going to this Princeton Theological Seminary. And he's like, really? Wow, that's amazing.

So what does that mean for the show? You can't do the show anymore? I said, no, I can, Greg, I can do the show. It's Princeton. It's not that far away. So they'll let you out for the show? Say, well, Greg, it isn't like they don't let you out. Like you, I can leave anytime. It's a school. I'm getting a graduate. you out for the show? Well, Greg isn't like you. They don't let you out like you.

I can leave any time. I said it's a school. I'm getting a graduate. It's a graduate school. But even now, he doesn't quite figure out when I show up at the show. He's like, so like, are you like out now? What? How does that work?

Like, no. So, yes, I it's a normal graduate school in the sense that I'm surrounded by younger young people. And I'm learning that. Pete I would never assume even in an old monastery that they would keep them on the grounds. I mean, they were not, it's not like they were forbidden to go out, just to stay where they were, made their job, their life, the contemplation easier. But yes, of course, you can go, I mean,

it is a bit ridiculous. Does he think perhaps that you would be chained to a desk, you know, doing an illuminated manuscript with a quill or something like that? I think he was hoping for that. That was his goal, like, just like to have me come a bald head, except for one little thing of hair coming out. Believe me, that was my goal too. We're going to trouble you with worldly matters now. And Stephen, any worldly matters or the last, oh, I don't know 17 minutes

or something like that right well I refresh Twitter about every 30 seconds to see the latest federal judge imposing some kind of restriction on the Trump administration because they seem to comment about three or four a day right now well are they gonna stand up is, hey, you know, the guy's got a point? What is going to be the end result of all this? Are the judges discovering brave, bold, new powers previously not allocated? Or is this something that they are entirely entitled to do? Well, four very quick points. One is Trump has had more, I think, federal judges interfering with his plans than happened in the entire 20th century. In other words, temporary restraining orders or injunctions.

Second, there's three parts to it. One is his power to fire people in the executive branch. That's one of the legal issues. The second one is his power over spending, and that has many parts to it as well that depend a lot on what the specific language of a congressional statute might be. So that gets tangled in a hurry. Then the third is, and this is the most controversial part, is can a federal judge, who's supposed to just be a trial judge in their district, can they issue nationwide injunctions and

restraining orders? And this has never been reviewed by the Supreme Court. Several justices have said they don't like this practice. And so I think that's the big question right now. And I think that's the one that they're going to have to confront at the Supreme Court very soon. Robert Leonard I think it's all to the good. I mean, all these things aren't the same. I mean, I really don't think that the chief executive has the right or the power to change the way Congress has chosen to spend money.

I mean, in a way, Congress has got to do that, I think. On the other hand, why the chief executive can't hire and fire everybody in the executive branch of government is baffling to me. That has to be one of the chief definitions of a chief executive of a branch, right? You get to pick who your staff is all the way down to the guy who, you know, I don't know what, makes the coffee. So all these things need to be teased out. We have been so lazy as a country for so long, and basically allowing, if you're on the left, you think, it's great that the president has all these powers because he's my guy. And then if you're on the right, you're like, it's great if the

president's like powers, because he's my guy. And the minute that changes, everybody acts like, my God, how did this happen? You fascist dictator, you know, it'd be good for us to sort these things out. And I think sort them out along the lines that the founders originally did, which is that, yes, you know, you got a bunch of people elected and they get to choose how they're going to spend raise and spend your money. And then you have an executive chief executive who gets to, you know, CEO the whole thing. I don't know that. See that that system seemed to work. I mean, people blaming Trump for this, as much as I would love to blame Trump for everything bad. It's like, no, this is the logical conclusion of a thing that began in

1931 was after you are elected. conclusion of a thing that began in 1930, when was FDR elected? Yeah, 1933. Pretty much, that's what it is. Some of it's older than that though, Rob. I mean, the question about whether the president could withhold funds that Congress had appropriated starts with Thomas Jefferson. So it's never been entirely sorted out. A simple way, I think, for listeners to think about it, because it can't get technical, is to say the Constitution says that, or we say that the Constitution says that Congress has the power of the purse. What that really means is the power to put money in the purse. And the President is the one who takes it out of the purse and spends it for the purposes to which it's been appropriated. If the appropriation is vague, and many of them are, then I think there's more latitude for a President to say, no, I'm not going to spend it's been appropriated. If the appropriation is vague, and many of them are, then I think

there's more latitude for a president to say, no, I'm not going to spend it on this or that, or this is a mistake, or something like that. That's what Jefferson did 200-plus years ago. If Congress is specific, and we're all familiar with the scandals of earmarks, you know, a clause in a bill that says, I want $6 million for a post office in my district, that's specific enough that the president has less discretion. And so it's somewhere in between there is where we are, a bit of a no man's land.

And finally, after, as I say, 200 years of intermittent impoundments by presidents, I think we're now gonna finally clarify this. And Congress will either have to do its job better or we're gonna have to sort it out. Yeah, I mean, everyone's afraid of the answer, right? No, the left is afraid of the answer and the right is afraid of the answer, right? No, the left is afraid of the answer and the right is afraid of the answer.

Left is afraid that the answer's gonna be, the people don't want any of this. And the right is afraid the answer's gonna be, the people want all of it. They want all of it. And that's why we kept at Merky for so long. I mean, I would actually be willing, my grand bargain to everybody is to say,

look, all earmarks, fork barrel spending, all okay, fine, go right ahead, 100%. Knock yourself out. In exchange for never writing in any spending or spending authorization bill the phrase the secretary shall. Or at the secretary's discretion, they shall. That to me is, I'll give you the Robert Byrd Memorial Traffic Safety Building, numbers one through 97 in West Virginia, in exchange for never ever saying again, the secretary shall.

Right. People don't, in general, want all of it. They want their part. They want the part that comes to their community, perhaps. They want their social security, their Medicare, and the rest of it. But when it comes to many of the things that we learn government is spending on,

I don't think they're very popular, and I'm very happy that the other side has chosen a variety of hills on which to die, which are not particularly attractively, aesthetically,ically politically or intellectually you want to make the argument that it is necessary for somebody to work half the year so that the entirety of the money to contribute to the tax coffers should go to an agency on the other side of the globe which then uh... uh... pumps it

into an NGO that is studying disinformation technique in scotland no not gonna happen and when people realize is what's going on, we think, well how did this happen exactly? Well, it's because we haven't had specific budgets, but we've been ruled by continuing resolutions, which is like stuffing a burrito full of something, eating it halfway and then putting it aside and then restuffing it next year and everything gets rolled over and rolled over until the ingredients are all intermingled and it's a mess and no one knows. Burn it down and then build it up. That seems to be the idea. Now no one's ever tried this

before but if they... you can actually find speeches by Bill Clinton and Barack Obama talking about the need to go through government line by line. Bill Clinton was all about that government efficiency project but Barack Obama said he was gonna go line by line is it only bad when the other side does it well or did you just know that nobody really meant it at all in the first place which i think is the case but uh... you know we'll see education department is going to be the big argument now and this one is shaping up to be as clear-headed and is non uh... inflammatory and it's a rhetoric is everything else rhetoric is everything else. I love the fact that people

say seventh graders can't read, fourth graders can't count beyond five, college students can't write a paragraph, and this is the time to destroy the Department of Education. No, actually that's the argument for perhaps changing what we've been doing thus far. Where do you think this is going to go, guys? Well, I think there are many programs in that the Department of Education oversees that are driven by statutes. So Trump can't just wipe those away at the stroke of a pen or with Obama's phone if he borrows it. But he could move them to other departments.

I think that's what's really happened in the executive order is let's move certain student loan programs and certain other grants and aids to other departments and break up the monopoly of the Department of Education. By the way, the rump you leave behind is some of the really bad and ideological stuff, and that might make it easier for Congress then to kill it. Or the latest idea is, see if you can't wrap getting rid of the Department of Education in the reconciliation budget process later in the year that will require only 51 votes so it will get around the inevitable democratic filibuster. Maybe that will work and we'll just have to see how it goes as Trump likes to say. But I think Trump, as usual, is on the attack and has them back

on their heels and that's fun to watch. I haven't heard anything you said since you used the phrase, the rump you leave behind. This is actually a torch song from 1942. Rob? Yeah, I think it's, I mean, look, this is a thing that, I mean, this is a thing that conservatives have been like dreaming about. Like this is, it's crazy. And then, and now that it's happening, it's like, well, wait a minute.

Is it really happening? I mean, I kind of don't, I kind of, I will not believe it's happening until the, I see the for rent, you know, office space sign in the building. But it is, you know, and I have no doubt and no lack of confidence that the Trump administration can fumble this and make this a disaster for them and also not accomplish it. Just toxify the topic because they're toxic in a lot of ways. But the simple argument is, you know, is your child, is your children, as George W. Bush said, is your children being educated? Is it better or worse? Do you think that it's better for there to be a pot of money in D.C. that's sort of sprinkled around the nation or you that it's better for there to be a pot of money in DC that's sort of sprinkled around the nation or you think it's better for all that to go back to your neighborhood

and your school? And I just don't think anybody, I mean, if you look at all the surveys of people and their education, they generally believe in school choice. Like that's actually a very popular idea, school choice, school vouchers that tends to be popular. And then when you say to those parents who are in favor of it, okay, it's going to be popular. And then when you say to those parents who are in favor of it, okay, it's going to be a little chaotic. Obviously, for the first two, three, four years, they always say, well, then I'm against it because I have jury rigged and sorted out my kid's

school and I don't want to mess it up because I figured it out and I don't want to mess it up. And then that's usually when the school choice of initiatives go down. Arizona is a big, big, Arizona is a fantastic, you know, Governor Ducey in Arizona is a great hero for this, right? So the question is whether people are going to have that psychology is going to be applied to this too. Like I generally agree with your idea, say some voters, that the Department of Education is foolish and hasn't really accomplished the mission, but I'm not sure I want to throw

it away. And I think it's a subtle argument that the Trump people are going to have to make. It's something that I see all the time on Twitter. There are two ideas. One, the Department of Education is a tremendous waste of money and we should give it back to the localities. And two, when you look at these crazy school boards and the things they're saying. I mean, so, okay, right, fine, so we'll have to do something about the local school boards then too.

If they really, if the Trump administration really wanted to get everybody on board with dismantling the Department of Education, they would push through an America first classical Western aesthetics, patriotic agenda that must be filtered down to every single school district and taught. And the follicles on fire would be extraordinary all across the spectrum. This would be seen as another attempt, Nazi-like,

to take the culture and indoctrinate it from the top down, which I tend to suspect is being done nowadays anyway, just from a different direction. Steven, anything before we go to the guest portion of our piece? Well, let's just remember that federal aid education didn't start till the 1960s, which is relatively recent. When education started getting really better. Yeah, well, and I mean, how did generations of American children ever get educated without federal dollars? And then second, I sometimes challenge people or defy people.

Tell me one thing about public education that the Department of Education has improved with data, right? They collect lots of data, and you can't. They've had no effect on it. And finally, the constitutional point, you know, the point that's starting in the 60s, it was the late James Q. Wilson used to say, because there's nothing in the Constitution about education. It's not in the enumerated powers of Congress. It was left to the states and that was, he said, that was the moment when we

crossed the line, constitutionally, to saying Congress can now appropriate money for anything and blur the, and erode federalism further and so forth. So I think it's long overdue to get rid of the department and then it will get better as I think for all the reasons Rob knows and has advocated for so long True. Well, at least employers will be happy about it because they'll get better workers Doesn't that sound like some horrible thing? You just want a bunch of drones? No, they just want people who can make change without having to consult an app on their phone I mean if you're a business owner, for example You might have felt frustrated with hiring or you just might feel totally lost completely when it comes to each other

It's been going so long. I forgot how these these segways go I hope you had. I'm glad that I'm not going to interrupt them because... No, I mean that's always a problem. Is that still a problem? I can't remember. It'd be bad for business. Ah, winsome thing that people right now are no doubt recalling with nostalgia and wishing

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we thank Bamboo HR for sponsoring this, the Brigashe podcast. Now we welcome back to the podcast, Mark Recorian, executive director of the center for immigration studies and the host of the parsing immigration policy podcast a lot of plosives in that one and you can find that excellent series right here on the ricochet audio network mark how are you I'm doing very well thanks for having me back speaking of plosives and peas and all the rest of these things we have a new paradigm in town it seems. Customs border protection released a report, 71% drop in encounters at the southern border.

What massive government program was put into place that did that? Did they actually build a wall while we weren't looking? Well, no, climate change ended, poverty ended, all of those things ended and magically the flow just stopped. In fact, what happened was the policy changed. The reason people were coming is because they could get away with it and they could succeed. Under Biden, it was worth paying smugglers. It was worth taking the risk of going through Mexico because your odds of being released

into the United States were very high. Now they're not. So why spend the money? Why take the risk? I mean, in fact, we had a couple of guys go down to different parts of the border last week and there were parts of the border where there were days where there were zero gotaways, zero attempts to cross, you know, particular sections of the border, zero. It's not clear that's ever happened, at least not in the 21st or 20th century. So, it's a huge change. There's just no question about it. And it's, you know, elections have consequences. Steve Hayward Yeah, Mark, it's Steve Hayward. Actually, James, I'm in Dallas today. I'm on the move as always.

So Mark, I actually want to do is say congratulations. This is your moment. You've been toiling away on this issue for as long as I can remember, and with, I'm sure, all kinds of frustrations over the years with both parties, but especially the last administration. One question just for information, because I do tend to leave this to you and don't chase the numbers myself. How has the composition of illegal immigration changed over the last 10-20 years? I mean, years ago it used to be, we thought, anyway, Mexicans. But gosh, in the last few years it's been people from all over the world, right, who managed to get themselves first to

Central America and the Darien Gap and then caravan up to the U.S. I was always amazed, by the way, that the media wasn't more curious as to what that was all about and who was organizing and paying for that because that did not happen spontaneously. But anyway, I mean, what is the composition and how has it changed over the years and what should we learn from that? I mean, the stock of illegal aliens here are still mostly Mexican just because a lot of them came a long time ago but the new illegal flow is actually less than half Mexican. There's still some Mexican illegal immigrants coming, still a significant number but you know there's no, there's just not that many people left in rural Mexico. The transition from the countryside to

the city has now, they've gone through that. Now half of those people came to our cities, but the fact is that transition is done. And so the Central Americans obviously made up most of the flow at one point and it's diversified beyond that now. We've got South Americans, Caribbeans, and we have increasing numbers of people or we did under Biden coming from

what they call extra-continentals. You name it, they were coming from there. I mean, one of our guys went down to various parts of Central America over the past few years. He was running into people from Tajikistan and Eritrea, and you name it, large numbers of people from China and India, just because there's a lot of people there. But yeah, they're coming from all over in a way that really wasn't the case before.

Yeah, I mean, the reason I thought to ask that is I recall, gosh, 30 years ago now, around the time of Prop 187 in California, some economists at Stanford— Almost 40 years. Almost 40. Oh, is that right? Come on, man. Yeah, you're gonna make us feel— It was only yesterday! I remember some economists at, I think at Stanford, maybe at Hoover, saying, as Mexico economy grows and their people move from rural areas into cities, Mexican illegal immigration

will diminish. But, well, maybe that's happened, and that's why I asked that question. The second one is, as I say, in general, you must be looking with some satisfaction at an administration determined to do something about this. So give us, you know, we're at day 60, give us a balance sheet. What do you think the Trump people are doing well? What do you think they should do better or differently? Well, I mean, if you ever have a problem like this, the first thing is you turn off the

faucet before you start mopping up the floor. And they've done that very well at the border. I mean, that's just the border crisis is over. It doesn't mean no one is ever gonna cross illegally, but the border crisis is over. The jobs that are now ahead of them, and it's not so much that they've fallen down on the job, it's just sort of like the next steps is,

and this is something people don't think about, new illegal immigration is now gonna be mainly visa overstayers. And so dealing with that issue of people coming in legally and then just never leaving is something that one administration after another has never really grappled with. These guys are gonna have to. And then the people who are here illegally, can you unwind, you know, eight to, well probably more like nine, 10, 11 million illegal immigrants that the Biden people let in? I don't think they're going to be able to unwind all of it,

but the point is unwind as much as you can. And this is where the challenge is going to be, not just looking for the rapists and murderers, because, you know, they're bad. Every one of them should go, but most illegal immigrants are just working stiffs. They're not rapists and murderers. That's why what they need, worksite enforcement has to be stepped up significantly. And part of that needs to be universal e-verify, the online system. So when you hire somebody, you actually check whether they're telling you the truth about who they are and what their social security number is. Those are the jobs ahead of them.

It's not that they have fallen down on the job because they just started, but those are the things that they're now gonna have to grapple with. Yeah, I'm really glad you mentioned the visa overstayers because one of the terms that has driven me nuts for years now is, no, no, we can't call them illegal immigrants. They're undocumented and I always raise my hand and say, wait a minute, many of them have documents. They're in violation of those documents. That's called illegal. Okay. Let me shift gears for minutes because I know Rob wants to get in with some more general questions. I want to take us overseas for a minute, and I don't know how closely you follow the immigration controversies

in Europe, but it seems to me they're behind us. But I just read the headlines and I see that, I think, is it right that Sweden last year had net migratory outflow? You see various countries starting to realize, boy, we've made a big mistake, we can't assimilate all the people we've let in, some of these cultures are actively hostile. Whereas, you know, I mean, Mexican immigrants, they may not speak English, but they're kind of from a Christian or American continental culture, so we have it a little bit better off than Europeans do. But are you involved at all or following in Europe?

And how do you expect that story is going to unfold? Is it going to follow ours? Yeah, I mean, I always tell Europeans, look, we have real problems in the United States, but holy moly, I'd rather have our problems than your problems. Yeah, we actually have a network of restrictionist think tanks. We've got one in Paris, one in Jerusalem, one in Budapest, and yeah, so we do follow it. And the interesting thing is the one country in Europe, well, yeah, the one Western European country that does not

have a kind of so-called far right, whatever you, however you want to define that movement is Denmark because the left of center government there is actually restrictionist. So in other words, they've co-opted the issue that the, and look, I'm a right winger. I mean, I'm not a copilot, but I'm saying, you know, they don't have, they've taken the oxygen out of the room for those guys. And you would think that, you know, they don't have, they've taken all the oxygen out of the room for those guys and you would think that, you know, the British and the French and the Germans would understand and they just, they just don't seem to yet and I gotta say if you're Viktor Orban you're saying fellas I told you so, you're gonna listen to me and you didn't.

I think you must have seen that New York Times story that noted the Denmark experience and saying, huh, maybe Democrats should take a look at that anyway. Sorry, Rob, go ahead. I was to say, you know, Mark was going to get on here with his socialist Scandinavian axe to grind. You love Denmark so much. I got a question of a general question because it just, I mean, it seems to, I mean, although it has been exhausting and it feels like it's been 90,000 years,

Trump has only been president for two months, right? How does that, how does it work just in terms of the hose? Where, I just get this idea that, you know, it's a garden hose with a big sprinkler on one end and that's the North, that's the border, the Rio Grande. And that people come up and where do they hear and how do they hear and what effect does it have on them when they are wherever they are trying to make the decision? I'm really just speaking about just about people Mexico and Latin America and South America. The other people I'm assuming are sort of a longer tail, right? What is it that discourages them? Is it that they see something in the news? Is it rumor? How does that work? Well, I mean, look, every single one of these people has a smartphone. So that, you know, word travels fast.

I mean, it doesn't, it's not that hard to send out a message to people that the party is, you know, the party is over. And in fact, when Trump took over, there were a lot of people kind of in the pipeline coming up to take advantage of, Biden had created these, frankly, I think unlawful programs to

parole people into the United States. So that, in other words, instead of them jumping the border illegally, the Biden administration admitted them illegally. And so a lot of these people had appointments and what have you, but then that was just canceled. They stopped it all at 1201 on inauguration day. And, you know, they're going back. If you could, if you could, you know, this is an unfair question about percentages. To what percentage, what percentage of the problem is solved by boots on the ground, actual border enforcement, the things, physical things happening IRL.

Walls. Yeah, walls. And to what extent is it, can you leverage the smartphones and the rumors and the fact that like if I'm in some village somewhere and I'm not going to take the chance to come all the way to the border and not get in and I'm not going to give him some coyote $5,000 of my hard-earned money because he thinks he can maybe, what I'm hearing is that I'm not going to give him some coyote $5,000 of my hard-earned money because he thinks he can maybe, what I'm hearing is that I'm not going to get in, to what extent are you, does that have an effect? Just the fact that federal government has made a credible

argument no more. And is that going to step on the hose somehow? What percentage of that is going to stop the flow? Yeah, I can't come up with a percentage, but you can't have one without they're both necessary and they're, but neither is sufficient because if you just tell people, okay, you're not going to get in, but then if they walk, they can just wander across the river or wait across the river. I mean, heck, I've waited across the Rio Grande into the United States myself. It's not that difficult to do.

There are parts of it where there's no water at all. You just walk over a dry riverbed depending on the time of the year. You did it just as an experiment, right? Yes, exactly. Actually, I stopped right at, I didn't go into the Mexican side because there was border patrol agent watching and I might have had to, he made him made me go to the port of entry all the way and then cross anyway. But the fact is you need to have that but on its own it's not going to do it. There is this idea that well we just build a wall tall enough and a moat deep enough and all the rest of it and it'll all work. No you need to have all of it you need to have enforcement outside the country where the State Department makes it tough to get a visa and all of that you need to have enforcement at the

border and you need to have enforcement inside the country too. So that for those people who do get by, they have, they have make it as difficult as possible to live a normal life here. You can't get a job. You can't get a bank account, can't get a driver's license. You need to do all of that stuff. I can't come up with a percentage. Let's just say it's 33 and a third percent each, you know? It's pretty good though. Yeah. So my other question was that I remember when all of these arguments were happening, this

is pre-Trump, right? And the immigration hawks, you said something like e-verify. They would kind of roll their eyes. No, no, no, no, no, no. That, slow down, my friend. Has Trump in a way kind of cut the Gordian knot here by being incredibly tough, both verbally and also administratively on border crossings? And has that given him or given the Trump administration the kind of, I don't know, leverage or credibility among the other folks to say, okay, now we

actually do need e-Verify? Because I can remember, I'm old enough to remember that when you, people talk about e-Verify, we're like, you guys are, that's like, yeah, that sounds like amnesty to me. Is that, has that helped politically? Are we, are we really in a different moment or, or is it just a moment? Look, the point of e-Verify is to keep people from getting jobs. In a sense, what potentially could happen, the kind of thing you're talking about where do you build up credibility so that you can then be Nixon and go into China kind of thing. You know what I mean? That's sort of the issue.

And we are just, you know, we're nowhere near that. We're not even at the beginning of the end. We're at the maybe the end of the beginning, you know, as Churchill said. In other words, the kind of thing where, and look, I'm a squish on amnesty, honestly. I mean, I'm not as much of a squish as you are in a lot of things, but on amnesty,

this is Rob you're talking about there. No one really is. Like the minute they get close, I get it. I get it. I go farther. So it doesn't mean there's no way to win. But the point is you can't do it until you've solved the problem. And we haven't solved the problem. We've just literally, we literally just stopped making it worse and are beginning to solve the problem. So I actually, the way I would kind of game it out in my head is that in the second J.D. Vance administration, after the illegal population had shrunk by half or more. After the earth is lava again and smoking ruin.

The earth is lava again and a smoking ruin. And we have in place, we have in place the enforcement systems necessary, not just de-verified, but like a checkout system for foreign visitors. We don't have one. It's amazing. We've tamed sanctuary cities. Then is the time for a Nixon going to China deal. But the deal is not the deal that they've always talked about

where we promise to enforce the law tomorrow for a hamburger amnesty today. The deal is we amnesty the people who were left, rip off the band-aid, not a lot of BS, about 13 years of jumping through hoops, just get it over with, in exchange for deep permanent cuts in legal immigration. So I guess my question is like, if you split it into two groups, right, there's the, I

mean, not the one is more legal or more illegal than the other, but there are the visa overstayers. And that seems to me to be, that's actually where Europe and all those lax European countries seem to be excelling. They are really, really strict about that stuff. And they're really, really strict about where you can work and where you can't work. That doesn't seem like the hardest problem for us to solve. In fact, it seems like the easiest, like low hanging fruit, right? It's basically a computer.

I mean, it's like, you know, and then some kind of government, you know, oversight on employment and payroll tax, which they already do. It doesn't seem like it should be, I mean, obviously it's a higher scale than say what happens in France, but it's basically what the French do. You cannot work here. Yeah, I mean, yes, we're a bigger country. Our rules are looser, we have a more decentralized system, so it is harder for us to deal with, but yes, the key is employment. Making it as difficult as possible to live a normal life here as an illegal alien.

And jobs are number one, but also driver's license and what have you. Look, states are authorized to give driver's licenses to illegals. They just have to be different from the ones acceptable for federal purposes, you know, getting on an airplane, for instance.

So the challenges are different here, but, and it's not quite, you know, Belgium or whatever is just easier to control, even though they don't have the will to control their own country. We're a bigger place, it's harder to control. Have you been to the border? I mean, holy moly, there's no way you can stop everybody everywhere from coming across. I mean, it's a gigantic thing. So-

Well, that's always been the argument about employment control. But I just mean that the spigot of airport arrivals, that hose is so much narrower. Yeah. And it just feels to me like that shouldn't be that hard. It shouldn't be. And we have done better since 9-11 at the check-in part, at screening people before they get in and knowing who people are. It really is the checkout part that's the problem.

Because they've done some experiments on when you would check people out when they're leaving. Do you do it at the jetway? Do you do it at TSA? It's not insuperable problem. No one has really ever wanted to bother with it. In fact, Janet Napolitano, who was Obama's first DHS secretary,

actually testified that, yeah, you know, we really don't care. We're not working on that. Even though Congress has mandated, I don you know, we really don't care. We're not working on that. Even though Congress has mandated, I don't know, nine times now that they come up with an electronic checkout system for visitors. So, yes, it's not that hard, but you have to have the will and want to put the time and the money into doing it. And that's my point to Stephen's question,

is that that's a challenge that is lying down the road for this administration Let's talk about the deportations which have been very high-profile Put a bunch of guys on a plane taking them off shacking them shaving their head and shoving them in an El Salvadoran prison The effect of this perhaps has been to concentrate the mind of people who might otherwise have just lolled around the country and thought they wouldn't be caught or not. Do you think they're just going to be better about not being caught or is this one of those things that encourages self-deportation with alacrity? Well hopefully it will and but the thing is the president always talking about getting you know gang members, rapists, criminals out of the country.

It's all good. Obviously, everybody's for that. But most illegal aliens are not, you know, raping gang members. And so if you're not a criminal, you figure, OK, well, you know, I'm OK. I'll just keep my head down and it's not going to be a problem. That's my point about why you need worksite enforcement, because if you raid, first of all you get much higher numbers because you send five ICE agents to go after one criminal because it's labor-intensive. The same five ICE agents raid a warehouse or something like that, you can come up with 20 illegal aliens. And most of them are going to be normal people. I mean gang

member, you'll still find some criminals because gang members often have day jobs as well. But most of those people are going to be ordinary folks that's how you can get some self-deportation going not if you're just talking about TDA you know gang members and rapists and murderers so that's the challenge that's ahead of them and we're told constantly that if we do do that, then we're going to suffer a labor shortage that means the vegetables and the fruits will rot in the fields and that nobody will be able to get anything from the back of the store because there's nobody back there to stock it in the first place. It doesn't seem a particularly compelling argument for unlimited untrammeled immigration,

but is that the case? Do we have a period ahead where we have to adjust and figure out new ways to do things because the Pool of illegals are going to be paid under the table quietly and not enough is going to shrink. No I mean on a national scale that's a ridiculous argument There will be particular places particular companies that will be I mean somebody's gonna be inconvenienced frankly by trying to Change the way we're doing things, but the idea, first of all this is a process, it's not an event. There was this movie a number of years ago, A Day Without an Immigrant, and like everybody wakes up one day and all the immigrants are gone. I think maybe it was just in California and they were joking about

people in alleys with raincoats selling vegetables secretly, you know, under the table, all that kind of nonsense. It's, that's, I mean, it was a funny movie, but it's not the way things work. You would have a gradual process of shrinkage of the illegal workforce. And, you know, the market would adjust. And I know that because Uncle Adam Smith told me that's the way things work.

And, you know, we've seen that in all kinds of areas where let's say, you know, there's fewer people working, you know, available for a bakery to hire in Chicago. That happened, there was a raid, they got a lot of illegal aliens out. Well, guess what? They hired locals who in this case were black who weren't able to get hired because the workers were all Mexican, they raised the wages, they passed the net wider for looking for employees, and they look into new, less labor intensive ways of doing their work. This isn't rocket science. And so yes, if 11 million, 12, well actually now it's more like 16 million illegal aliens, if they disappeared tomorrow, yeah, absolutely it would be enormously disruptive. There's literally no way that's going to happen and so it's one of those things that, you

know, it's a hypothetical that's irrelevant to even respond to because it can't and won't happen. Mark, thanks for joining us again and would you please come up with a book or something so we can push it here? Yeah, I got to come up with a new one. I have a book from before, but it's too old and Penguin ran away from it. So maybe when, maybe when Rob gets ordained because I outrank him now, I'm a deacon. But if he gets ordained, then I'll be able to outrank him. You're a deacon of the Armenian church, though, right?

Yes, I am. But we're all part of the Holy Apostolic and, you know, right? Yeah, you guys have those great hats though. I might be, I might be looking into that. You got better outfits. I know that's not a reason to do it, but I, you know, it's not not a reason, put it that way. Although I don't have to wear one of those. I'm just a deacon. Thank you Deacon Mark. And we look forward to talking to you again about something that will no doubt be forefront for the next two, three, four, five years. Mark Rukorian, ladies and

gentlemen, see you later. Thank you. Oh, it's a pleasure. The Armenian... Okay, let me get this straight. Is there an Armenian Orthodox church that is separate from other... Correct me, Rob. No, I don't know much about the Armenian. I mean, all the Armenian churches I've ever heard of are pretty Orthodox. But is it different from the Orthodox Church? Yes. Pete Yeah. Okay. All right. Because I know that, you know, there's the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, and I think recently, if I remember correctly, they did some calendar adjustments so that Easter was not as far off. You know, am I right there? I think the same with Christmas. I think they adjusted it so that it's a little closer to the Western traditions.

Because all the Ukes I know would say Merry Christmas, and then they'd have their own like 14, 15 days later. Same thing with the Easter. Robert Kuhn Yeah. Orthodox Easter though is actually one of the great chaotic scenes in world religious celebration. They have a show like scenes from Diwali or something, or the water festival in Vietnam, or even parts of Ramadan, i.e. the end of Ramadan. And I mean, it looks crazy, but if you've never seen, you got on YouTube, the Orthodox Easter in Jerusalem in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. The bananas quality of that is so incredibly inspiring, crazy. It's like this fire everywhere. The idea that nobody dies, nobody gets immolated

multiple times in that celebration is just crazy to me. And somehow it all works. Pete Well, you mentioned these other ceremonies and celebrations in other religions around the globe, you know, roughly the same time. Why do you think that is? I mean, you go back to Roman times and you will find that there's particular celebrations around that particular time. What do you mean? You mean spring or...? Yeah, spring. Yeah, spring. Well, I mean, first of all, everybody has a different kind of spring, right? So if you're

in the Southern Hemisphere, Global South, your spring is different from our spring. It's a different month, so it doesn't really work at the same time of year. But we as Christians that the year, the church year is both symbolic and meaningful and that it coincides with equinoxes that aren't necessarily on the 25th of December or the 21st of March, whenever the spring one is, but they're meaningful. I mean, there's the actual days, specific days, specific days of Good Friday and Easter Sunday are, they're not consistent in the Gospels, right? But you know how you read it, Good Friday could be Good Thursday. I think it's in John. Pete Well, but it all appears, it's all within the same time. It's all these equinoxes. It's all the shifts, the things globally experienced in spring, for example,

it's got massive temperature swings, at least up here. And that can leave you waking up with the sweats. I knew it. I was just, I was searching for this and I was looking through that wonder like, what is going with it? Is he trolling me? Am I trolling him? I am, I am absolutely trolling you. Is this an episode of The Prisoner where we don't know who the dancer, who's the dancer, who's the dance? I threw that five minutes ago and I've been just sitting there and doing the window-verset. Oh man, I just look, line, and sinker. Good for you, James.

I knew what was going on, but okay. I kind of was looking at you, Steve, like, what's Steve's face? Is he green? What am I going? green anyway if I may reset and tell you about cozy earth because I really want to because it is spring and it's getting warmer here and you know but it could be cold one day and hot at night yeah I mean temperature swings yay you don't want to have an uncomfortable night and that's why you want to have the most comfortable sheets you can possibly lay down in and thankfully our friends at cozy earth have designed temperature regulating sheets that can possibly lay down in and thankfully our friends at Cozy Earth have designed temperature regulating sheets that can keep you covered and comfortable throughout the night.

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Don't think so. Uh, was the point made? Doesn't seem so because they're still saber-rattling and, uh, but there's a little space two or three days ago where people were convinced that, um, something big was going to happen to Iran and, uh, there was the usual contingent of people who say, oh, sorry, nothing ever

happens when it comes to Iran. What do you guys think? Well, okay, this Houthi business is tiresome at this point. Remember that the Biden administration came in, took the Houthis off the terror sponsor list of our State Department because we thought if we were nice to them, maybe they'd behave better. They didn't. Biden escalated a little, but it

seemed like Vietnam style, let's shoot a few rockets at them and a couple of bombs, and maybe they'll behave better, and they didn't. Israel has struck some hard blows against them several times now following rocket attacks, and now Trump seems to be saying, we've had it with the disruption of shipping there around the Red Sea. So, So then supposedly people say what Trump is really doing is signaling the Iranians, because Trump keeps saying the Houthians are the Houthis. Houthians. Pete Slauson Houthians, I like them. Pete Slauson That's right.

Houthians and the blowfish or the blowhard side. Anyway, they're the cat's paw for Iran. And look, James, I do think that if there's an attack on Iran, it's going to come out of the blue. And whether it's going to be Israel or Israel and us or Israel with our help, who knows. But I think that will be at a time of our and Israel's choosing. Because left out, of course, and I know you know about it, is that Israel has turned the Gaza War back on in a big way in the last 72 hours or so. Did they turn it back on or did they just resume the, I mean, if Gaza had released all the hostage, if the Hamas had released everybody, do you think that would be resumption

of the hostilities or do you think this is a reaction to Hamas not doing? Oh, I think it's the latter. I think, but they've sent troops, ground troops are back in Gaza. It's not just airstrikes. So I think it's on again. And yeah, I mean, there was some possibility that if the Hamas had released all the hostages, that we might have made a ceasefire stick and postpone it for another day. That's unpopular in Israel. But Hamas is so determined to go down with all flags flying and all people dying that Israel had no choice but to start it up again. Yeah, I also think they know more now. Every single one of those hostages has given them intelligence and they have a better map

of Gaza now and they have a better understanding of where to look for hostages. So they may be going in to perform some percentage of rescues, which would be disastrous for Hamas, right? I mean, like, you, you, you, you, every, every rescued hostage is one ship you can't bargain with. And that is clearly, that's clearly the, the, the, the Israelis preferred position, which is understandable. The, the strangest thing here is that I feel like we, we, we, we keep getting into this strange trap as American, sort of American policymakers, foreign policymakers, where we think that the people who are orchestrating the terrorism, Hamas or Houthis or whatever, or Iran, they have an agenda, a policy positions, they have goals they need to be addressed.

And the problem with that is that they don't. The reason the Houthis attacked is because we haven't been paying attention to them for a while and they want some attention. And it's not just the childless attention kind, is that those organizations only work if their own population is subdued and cheering for them. So they need to be attacked. I mean, Hamas doesn't see this disaster in Gaza as a disaster for Hamas. It's exactly what they want. They don't care that all these Gazans are dead. They really

don't care. It wasn't the point that those have always been pawns that you sacrificed for a larger point, which is power. So when we treat them, as we say, treat them with respect, or when we try a different diplomatic tack on all of these groups, we actually end up encouraging them to be more and more incendiary. And then the only alternative really is to attack them, which also makes them stronger, or makes them feel stronger. But that is, that's been the Israeli position all along, is that you have to, you have to keep going. You know, these, the blood, the cold blooded Israeli position is Hamas and its members must be destroyed. All of them must be destroyed. And we don't like to say that. It just doesn't sound right. But their argument, and you talk to Israeli politicians, Israeli policymakers, they almost always go to a kind of a public health

metaphor, a viral metaphor. The virus has to be destroyed. And unfortunately, that's people, and it's horrible to hear, it's horrible to think. It's a horrible position to be in. But the people that you're dealing with aren't operating under any other set of priorities. So if you're playing a game and the person you're playing with is playing by different rules, guess what? You're playing their game because they're playing by different rules. That's how that works. And there's no effort on the yet, or no public effort on the part of Hamas's paymasters to change that.

Sorry, that's not very uplifting. And Stephen, you agree? Well, I'm sorry. Well, I didn't know if we want to continue on this or not, James. I'll just chime in this way. You know, the mistake that American foreign policymakers have been making for decades with just about everybody is we think that everybody is going to be rational in more or less the same way we are.

And I think we're very slow to realize that while people can make rational calculations in the ordinary sense, there's often much deeper currents of thinking. So I could go back and give you examples from the Middle East for years, but what's on my mind right now is you may have caught the story a week or so ago where Trump sent some new guy with no experience in foreign policy negotiation to meet with Hamas in Qatar. And he said publicly, gosh, they turn out to be really nice guys. Really foolish, stupid things. And in fact, the Trump people have since pulled this guy back because he was an embarrassment. But you know, I can give you lots of examples where people in the Middle East, Hamas, Hamas

thought by the way on October 6 that Hezbollah was going to come in from the north, the West Bank would rise up and they were going to crush Israel at a stroke. That's sort of their view of how the world would work or should work. I could easily imagine some Hamas people thinking, ah, Trump secretly wants to put distance between himself and Israel. We're not on the ropes after all. Imagine some Hamas people thinking, ah, Trump secretly wants to put distance between himself and Israel. We're not on the ropes after all. All we need to do is hold out and we're going to win.

And as I say, this is sort of a deep conspiratorial thinking, or deep sort of perverse, contrarian thinking that's very deeply embedded in a lot of these really cult-like groups of people like Hamas and so forth. So, and by the way, gee, Trump, he's easily capable of confusing people on purpose or quite by accident or both, right? So I've got to think that the Hamas people are, they say, I mean, we think, and I think it's right that Trump is very pro-Israel, very supportive of Netanyahu, but I could easily imagine certain precincts of the radical era of mind thinking, no, there's something else going on here, and it's all very strange and Byzantine. Well, yes.

Pete It makes me think that if you stuck a Queers for Palestine bumper sticker in the back of a Tesla, it would make some people's heads in smoke would come from their call or like a computer that kirk had argued into an illogical position i mean this is one more interesting developments in the last week is the is the transfer of hatred of everything doge related in musk related onto the vehicles of the car so that now what used to be a sign of virtue that i care about the earth i'm not consuming the awful hydrocarbons look at me i'm electric is

now proof that you somehow are that you are if not a nazi sympathizer or tall yeah in actual not see yourself and when you have these coordinated protests apparently i can't forget what day is is is it friday saturday sunday everyone is going to rise up and go to the, they're going to go protest at the car dealership, which I find an odd thing. Now I can imagine if this was forward in the 1920s and people were concerned about some of his policies

in regards to the Holy Land, you know, but this is ridiculous. Well, James, I mean, this just shows you Trump's genius. Trump has accomplished one thing the Republicans have tried without success for 60 years and that's get Democrats to hate the Kennedys or at least one Kennedy. And he's now managed to get many people on the left to hate and get rid of their electric cars. Was that Senator Mark Kelly dumped his Tesla and bought a

Chevrolet Suburban? I was, this is amazing. Yeah, I love it. I was really, we had a, there was a, apparently there was a Tesla charger charging station around Fargo or something that was vandalized and the people on Reddit were saying, yeah, it's really weird, man. I mean, a couple of years ago, it was all the rednecks who were vandalizing the EV charging station and I, wait a minute, did I miss that part? Yeah. I don't think they cared one bit of the other. They laughed at them. Laughter isn't vandalism unless of course it's language in which case it's violence. But I don't know. I can't know. I think the people who were probably chopping it up were going for the copper. And I don't see the good old boys sitting around

saying, well we're done. We're done being sarcastic about Bud Light. Why don't we go vandalize a test list? I just don't see it. No. No, I don't. What I do see is that all of you are going to go to Apple podcasts. Didn't give us five reviews. What I do see is that you're going to go to ricochet.com and click on the member feed. Oh, oh, you can't. Sorry. That's right. You can't because you're not a member. But if for just, you know, coins for just a pittance, you can find out exactly what you've been missing all these years and the same civil center rights. Something else a civil no home on the internet that's ricochet.com you can read the main page and listen to the podcast all you like but you join and there's lots of stuff including

the right to comment that's right as rob has said for 732 podcasts you get skin in the game and that means a place where people are invested in the community working and that's why it's a great place. Exactly. So also, Cozy Earth for the sheets you want to regulate your temperature and make for a nice spring and Bamboo HR which will help you with the difficult parts of running a business you really don't want to think about but you got to do anyway. Stephen, thank you.

Rob, always a pleasure. Yeah, happy to be here, fellas. Give our regards to everybody back in the monastery, know, in the monastery, in the cloisters. And we'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet4.0. Goodbye. Thanks, fellas. Ricochet. Join the conversation.