Vivek Ramaswamy: observation

Transcript context

…Fair enough. And I would call those even, not even criticisms, but just thoughtful questions. Even to somebody who’s really aligned with doing this, those are thoughtful questions to ask. So I do want to say something about this point on how we think about the breakage of the rule of law in other contexts. There are 350,000 mothers who are in prison in the United States today who committed crimes and were convicted of them. They didn’t take their kids with them to those prisons either, right? So we face difficult trade-offs in all kinds of contexts as it relates to the enforcement of law. And I just want to make that basic observation against the backdrop of if we’re a nation founded on the rule of law, we that there are trade-offs to enforcing the law, and we’ve acknowledged that in other contexts. I don’t think that we should have a special exemption for saying that somehow we weigh the other way when it comes to the issue of the border. We’re a nation founded in the rule of law. We enforce laws, that has costs, that has trade-offs, but it’s who we are. And the easiest fact I can cite is 350,000 or so mothers who are in prison and did not take their kids to prison with them. Is that bad? Is it undesirable for the kids to grow up without those 350,000 mothers? It is, but it’s a difficult situation created by people who violated the law and faced the consequences of it, which is also a competing and important priority in the country. So that’s in the domestic context. As it relates to this question of mass deportations, let’s just get very practical because all that was theoretical. Very practically, there’s ways to do this. Starting with people who have already broken the law, people who have not just broken the law of entering but are committing other crimes while already here in the United States. That’s a clear case for an instant mass deportation. You have a lot of people who haven’t integrated into their communities. You think about the economic impact of this, a lot of people are in detention already. A lot of those people should be immediately returned to their country of origin, or at least what is called a safe third country. So safe third country means even if somebody’s claiming to seek asylum from political persecution, well, move them to another country that doesn’t have to be the United States of America that they passed through, say, Mexico before actually coming here. Other countries around the world are doing this. Australia is detaining people. They don’t let them out and live a normal, joyful life because they came to the country. They detain them until their case is adjudicated. Well, the rates of fraud in Australia, of what people lie about, what their conditions are, is way lower now than in the United States because people respond to those incentives. case is adjudicated. Well, the rates of fraud in Australia, of what people lie about, what their conditions are, is way lower now than in the United States because people respond to those incentives. So I think that in some ways, people make this sound much bigger and scarier than it needs to be. I feel we’re taking a deeply pragmatic approach, and the North Star for me is I want the policy that helps the United States citizens who are already here. What’s that policy? Clearly, that’s going to be a policy that includes a large number of deportations. I think by definition, it’s going to be the largest mass deportation in American history. Sounds like a punchline at a campaign rally, but actually, it’s just a factual statement that says if we’ve had the by far largest influx of illegal immigrants in American history, it just stands to reason, it’s logic that, okay, if we’re going to fix that, we’re going to have the largest mass deportation in American history. And we can be rational. Start with people who are breaking the law in other ways here in the United States. Start with people who are already in detention or entering detention now. That comes at no cost and strict benefit. There isn’t even a little bit of an economic trade-off. Then you get to areas where you would say, okay, the costs actually continue to outweigh the benefits, and that’s exactly the way our policy should be guided here. I want to do it in as respectful and as humane of a manner as possible. The reality is, I think one of the things we got to remember, I’ll give you the example I gave with the Haitian case in Springfield, town that I spent a lot of time in growing up in Ohio. I live about an hour from there today. I don’t blame the individual Haitians who came here. I’m not saying that they’re bad people because in that particular case, those weren’t even people who broke the law in coming here. They came as part of a program called Temporary Protective Status. Now, the operative word there was the first one, “temporary”. There have been all kinds of lawsuits for people who, even 8, 10, 12, 14 years after the earthquake in Haiti where many of them came, when they’re going to be removed, there are allegations of racial discrimination or otherwise. No. Temporary protective status means it’s temporary, and we’re not abandoning the rule of law when we send them back, we’re abandoning the rule of law when we let them stay. Now, if that has a true benefit to the United States of America, economically or otherwise, go through the paths that allow somebody to enter this country for economic reasons, but don’t do it through asylum-based claims or Temporary Protected Status. I think one of the features of our immigration system right now is it is built on a lie and it incentivizes lying. The reason is the arguments for keeping people in the country, if those are economic reasons but the people actually entered using claims of asylum or refugee status, those two things don’t match up. The reason is the arguments for keeping people in the country, if those are economic reasons but the people actually entered using claims of asylum or refugee status, those two things don’t match up. So just be honest about what our immigration system actually is. I think we do need dramatic reforms to the legal immigration system to select purposely for the people who are going to actually improve the United States of America. I think there are many people, I know some of them. I gave a story of one guy who I met who is educated at our best universities or among our best universities. He went to Princeton. He went to Harvard Business School. He has a great job in the investment community. He was a professional tennis player. He was a concert pianist. He could do a Rubik’s cube in less than a minute. I’m not making this stuff up. These are hard facts. He can’t get a green card in the United States. He’s been here for 10 years or something like this. He asked me for the best advice I could give him. I unfortunately could not give him the actual best advice, which would be to just take a flight to Mexico and cross the border and claim to be somebody who is seeking asylum in the United States. That would have been morally wrong advice, so I didn’t give it to them. But practically, if you were giving him advice, that would be the best advice that you actually could give somebody, which is a broken system on both sides. People who are going to make those contributions to the United States and pledge allegiance to the United States and speak our language and assimilate, we should have a path for them to be able to add value to the United States. Yet they’re not the ones who are getting in. Our immigration system selects for people who are willing to lie. That’s what it does. Selects for people who are willing to say they’re seeking refugee status or seeking asylum when in fact, they’re not. And then we have policymakers who lie after the fact using economic justifications to keep them here. But if it was an economic justification, that should have been the criteria you used to bring them in the first place, not this illusion of asylum or refugee status. There was a case, actually, even the New York Times reported on this, believe it or not, of a woman who came from Russia fleeing Vladimir Putin’s intolerant, anti-LGBTQ regime. She was fleeing persecution by the evil man, Putin.…

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