Immigration - A Privilege, Not A Right – with Rosemary Jenks [Ep. 234]

Linda J Hansen: Welcome. Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the Prosperity 101® Breakroom Economics Podcast. My name is Linda J. Hansen, your host and the author of Prosperity 101® Job Security Through Business Prosperity: The Essential Guide to Understanding How Policy Affects Your Paycheck, and the creator of the Breakroom Economics online course.

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Now, for the episode. In my last episode, I interviewed Rodney Scott, the retired chief of the U.S. Border Patrol. I'm focusing these two interviews back to back on the immigration crisis because I believe it is essential that citizens understand the enormity of the problem and how it is affecting their daily lives.

Today, my guest is Rosemary Jenks. She is the co-founder and policy director of the Immigration Accountability Project. IAP's mission is to educate voters on the immigration related actions and inactions of elected representatives so they can make informed decisions and participate fully in civil debates regarding how immigration policy serves the national interest.

Thank you Rosemary previously served as Director of Government Relations for Numbers USA, and prior to that was Director of Policy Analysis at the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington, D.C.-based immigration think tank. Rosemary has testified before both the House and the Senate Immigration Subcommittees on several occasions, before the bipartisan Jordan Commission on Immigration Reform, and before numerous state legislative bodies.

She received her J.D. with honors from Harvard Law School and a B.A. in Political Science from the Colorado College, and she's a member of the Virginia State Bar. Rosemary, I've been wanting to get you on the podcast for quite some time. I'm glad we finally got it scheduled, and I appreciate your work so much, and I've heard you on many interviews, and it's just an honor to have you with me today.

Rosemary Jenks: It's an honor for me to be with you. 

Linda J Hansen: Well, I know that I have heard many interviews that you have done. And I mentioned before, before we were recording that I've been wanting to get you on for quite a while, because I think your experience just is so immense. And your wisdom just adds so much to the national conversation about immigration.

And in the previous episode the one directly before I did this one I interviewed Rodney Scott, which I mentioned, and we talked about the differences over the years in immigration policy. From, even the early nineties to now, and you've been involved in the immigration policy issues, for at least that long.

And I'd like to hear your perspective a little bit on what it was and what it is and what direction we need to take to make sure our country can remain America, the land of the free. 

Rosemary Jenks: Well, it is really interesting because back when I started this in the early nineties there were a lot of Democrats in Congress who were actually really solid on immigration reform the need for border security, and actually the need to relook at legal immigration to see how it was actually impacting the country, were the numbers too high or too low or, did we need a different balance?

I remember President Clinton talking about the need for more border patrol agents, the need to secure the border. President Obama said that a few times before he then waved his magic wand with his phone and his pen and granted amnesty to the DACA recipients. But now the issue is so polarized.

There are. I mean, maybe a couple of Democrats in Congress who will actually vote for real border security, but the vast majority of them absolutely will not. They will not vote for anything that doesn't include amnesty for all of the illegals who are here. And that is just something that we as a nation can't countenance because, I mean, every parent knows if you reward bad behavior, you get more bad behavior.

So if you reward bad illegal immigration, you're going to get more illegal immigration. And we have seen this over and over the Reagan amnesty of 1986, which Reagan has said afterwards was his biggest mistake as president. He granted amnesty in exchange for enforcement. At that point, it was workplace enforcements.

We made employing illegal aliens illegal, and we were supposed to enforce it. Well, we got the amnesty, but we never got the enforcement. And the result was we had 3 million illegal aliens given amnesty in 1986, or as a result of that law, and by 2000, we had 11 million illegal aliens in the country. So we just got more because they thought, well, why not?

Why wouldn't I come to America if eventually I'm going to get my amnesty? The same is true today. And we saw that on day one of the Biden administration, actually before day one, when candidate Biden said on the debate stage. I welcome all of them to surge to America. They did. They listened.

They believe what we say. So if Congress and the White House are saying the borders are open, or we're going to give amnesty, they are going to come because America is a place a lot of people want to live, and rightly so. It's a great country. But the fact is that Americans have a right to decide who comes and who gets to stay.

Immigration is a privilege. It is not a right. No one in the world has the right to enter our country unless we give them permission. So we need to have a national debate about what is good for America and, how many people we want to let in every year right now, legal immigration is that an average of 1 million every year and the vast majority somewhere around two-thirds of those are very low skilled and have very low education levels. 

So they're competing with low-wage, low-skill Americans. For jobs, for resources, for housing, for, public education, all of the things. And then we have this massive flood of illegal immigration on top of that. It's not sustainable for our country and we're seeing that everywhere we look these days. 

Linda J Hansen: It's absolutely not sustainable. And there's a tipping point. There is definitely a tipping point. And, just like your own bank account at home, right? Eventually like, yeah, you may be able to have, credit card debt, or you may be able to have a car loan or, whatever it is, but if you are not creating enough income to actually pay those things, even if it is a debt, or your daily expenses that aren't a debt, whatever, if you just don't have enough money to pay it eventually there's a tipping point, cars get repossessed, homes get repossessed.

They go into foreclosure, I mean, things happen. There's a consequence. And it seems like in America, then, our country just prints more money or something, it's just insane. It's like, there's no consequence, but American citizens are beginning to see the consequence because it is becoming so much more widespread.

It is becoming more felt by the average American citizen. So whether it is watching these illegal immigrants coming in, in the last. Four years, basically three-plus years under this administration that the floodgates have been opened and we're seeing millions and millions of people coming into America, illegal immigrants that we are paying for, and they're not only coming at ports of entry, but they're coming all throughout, they're being flown in to different parts of the country.

I've heard that the amount of population increase is equal to about 36 states. So when you talk about the amount of illegal immigrants that have come into the country and it matches the population of 36 of our states, and that I'm estimating that. So fact checkers, I might not be right on that.

So, but it's close. We can sustain that because they are taking, they're not giving back in. We, the American taxpayers, the ones who are working extra, we're paying our taxes. We're raising, our children and trying to be honest and contribute to our communities and build our businesses and things.

It's the businesses and the American citizens who make that difference. For the economy, they pay into the government and the government is just shelling out all this money and we just don't have it. We're going into 1 trillion debt every hundred days and increasing this and it's just unsustainable.

So we're coming upon an election season. I know. You work for a nonpartisan think tank, so we have to look at policies. We're not telling people who to vote for, but we want people to think very carefully about the policy issues that are behind each candidate or party or platform.

And decide like, did these policies help me or hurt me? When we see the rise of fentanyl, we see human trafficking, child sex trafficking, labor trafficking. We see the crime in small towns across America. I, for one say this hurts. 

Rosemary Jenks: Well, and that's the thing. If you look at the money trail here, our tax dollars are being used to pay these non-government organizations, the NGOs, to facilitate people coming from South America, from the Darien Gap, all the way up through Central America and through Mexico to the United States. We're paying for that. We're actually funding that. And then we're paying for them to come into the United States and be spread around the country.

The average education level of an illegal alien is 10th grade, so these are not computer programmers, they're not going to be working white-collar jobs, they're going to be working construction and landscaping and meat packing, and poultry processing. Those are the jobs that they're going into if they're getting work permits, and most of them are under this administration.

But then they're getting taxpayer-funded housing, they're getting taxpayer-funded food assistance, they're getting taxpayer-funded medical care, they're getting taxpayer-funded education for their children. And by the way, a lot of these, the children, are not literate in their own language, let alone English.

So we have to find translators in tiny little towns in America, have to find like Creole translators, or some of this, the ones we would assume speak Spanish, actually speak dialects of Spanish that are not even in written form. How do you find a translator for a language that's not even written so, and then you get to the criminal justice costs that we're paying, the drug crisis costs that we're paying it's just a tsunami of money that is flowing out of our pockets to people who then turn around and send, if they're working, they send a good portion of their money back home in remittances.

So it's not even being spent in the US economy. It's actually being sent abroad. So it's a loss situation for us. And we're going to have to stop the bleeding. First of all, I mean, if your basement is flooding, you don't just start mopping it, you turn off the water, we have to turn off the water.

Before we can start the cleanup, but we definitely need to do the cleanup and get our house in order and then, have a serious debate about the direction we want to go in. What is beneficial for us as Americans in terms of who we let in and who we don't? Because immigration is a public policy, just like any other public policy.

So, the public policy should benefit Americans. Full stop. We don't decide any public po we shouldn't, at least, decide any public policy based on foreign interests. It should all be about what is best for America. And that is our right as American citizens. It's our government. We hire them, we pay them, and we have the right to make these decisions whether they like it or not.

Linda J Hansen: Exactly. And America First does not mean America Only. And to be against illegal immigration does not mean we're against immigration. America is a melting pot of immigrants and, but I mentioned in the last episode too, there has not been one single legal immigrant that I've ever spoken to that doesn't beg me to help stop the flow of illegals.

They see what is happening to America. They see the control of the cartels. I know you were involved with the Center for Immigration Studies as well, and I've interviewed Todd Bensman several times. So, listeners, I invite you to go to my website, prosperity101.com, go to the podcast tab, and you can research all the interviews I've done with Todd Bensman.

I interviewed Ben Birkwam, who is the reporter. He does reporting for Real America's Voice and has just done so much on the border. Tom Holman Rodney Scott. I've interviewed Susan Tully with the Federation for American Immigration Reform. There's been several interviews that I've done over the years on this immigration issue.

So if you are really interested, you can go and then go to these organizations and go follow Rosemary's work and see the in-depth information you can learn and what you can do to help stop this, because, not only do I want these podcasts to always be helping educate people. Right? I want people to become more aware of the issues, but it doesn't stop there. It doesn't help if we just know, and we don't do. We have to be full of, as Steve Bannon says action, right? And we need to have action. 

We need to hold our elected officials accountable and, you and I were talking about for recording about the importance of helping employers educate employees about why runaway immigration, illegal immigration is actually harmful to their families, to their livelihoods. 

But we also have employers on the other side of the fence that like to speak out of both sides of their mouth. Can you address that a little? 

Rosemary Jenks: Yeah, I mean, one of the biggest draws for illegal immigration is employers who are willing to hire cheaper foreign labor at lower costs than they would pay Americans.

And it's a real problem. The nonprofit organizations, the NGOs that are funneling these people into our country. Oftentimes have agreements with employers in the United States, especially meatpacking plants and poultry processing plants and other food service companies that want cheap labor.

And for an employer, you can't really blame them too much because, every employer wants to maximize profits. And that means lowering wages. Well, the problem with that is you're harming your community. You're pushing Americans out of those jobs, and you're suppressing the wages in those jobs.

There are many towns in the Midwest where the meatpacking plant provided solid blue-collar middle-class jobs for Americans 30 years ago. Now, they're only employing cheap foreign labor at reduced wages. It's dangerous work. People are getting hurt, and the employers are still profiting, but they've basically given up on caring about their community.

So, there are definitely two sides. There are a lot of employers who use E-Verify and they're very conscientious about only hiring American workers or legal workers, and God bless them because that is what we need. We need employers who actually realize and take in the fact that bringing these large populations of illegal aliens into a community drives up housing prices, it hurts American kids' education prospects because of the English as a second language and all of that stuff.

It increases drugs and gang violence and all of these things that are so bad for our communities. And employers really are the draw for this because everybody crossing that border, with very few exceptions, is coming here for economic opportunity. They're not coming because they're being persecuted in their home countries.

There may be gang violence in their home countries, but guess what? It's probably not as bad as it is in some of our cities. But they are coming for economic opportunity. And it's the employers in this country who are willing to hire them that is driving this. So, we need employers to be more community-minded, to remember that they are part of our American communities.

And again, God bless those who do. 

Linda J Hansen: And when you talk about economic opportunity, it isn't just good people coming for economic opportunity. You better believe that the cartel leaders are coming for economic opportunity. There's big money in drug trafficking, the fentanyl crisis. There's big money in labor and sex trafficking.

There is big money in this and cartels are controlling several parts of our border. They're literally in charge as this administration is often asked border patrol to not enforce the law. And we see that all over the nation when people are not enforcing what is current law, whether it's election law or just laws against certain crimes or things when people do not enforce the law.

Before we get into the election aspect of this in terms of citizens voting, I do want to just mention to people. You had talked about how we are paying for people to be put up in hotels and we're paying their transportation and their education costs, their college education, their food, everything.

I saw a interview the other day. Someone said that 157 hotels in New York City, like really great hotels, were filled with illegals. And I saw a gentleman the other day. He was in a live interview and it was one hotel, it was filled with army people. They were guarding the doors. They were guarding, they were at the front desk and it was a center for, and it's just heartbreaking to me to see we are paying for that.

So, the economic effect of all of this is just in little towns across the nation for a long time, they never felt it. But I mentioned to you how the little town in Wisconsin, where we raised our kids. They just recently had a gang member from Venezuela, one of the worst gangs, worse than MS13, they said he was arrested as he was assaulting a woman in a little teeny town, less than 6,000 people.

And this is just coming everywhere. So, the NGOs are spreading them everywhere. They're helping to transport them. And if you'd care to share what some of those are so people can actually look, I think that would be helpful. And I think it would be a surprise to some people because some of the names.

And I think, in terms of the names of these non-government organizations we equate with helping, they're just great. They're generous and they help in time of need. But an interesting thing happens when people get sucked into money. And I think this has happened.

Rosemary Jenks: Well, some of the, almost all of these, the main organizations are faith-based organizations, Catholic Charities, Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, now called HIAS Church World Service. There, if you go on the website of the Health and Human Services Department and look for Office of Refugee Resettlement, you'll find a list of 10 major refugee resettlement contractors.

Those are the main ones that the federal government funds to resettle all these illegal aliens, but then they have a network of somewhere around 350 other nonprofits, NGOs that they spread the money to distribute folks all around the country and actually on the HHS website, there's a map of the United States that shows the locations of some I don't think it has all of them, but if some of them so you can actually click on the dots on the map and see which NGOs are operating in which states and you'll find that Wyoming is the only state that doesn't have any of these.

Because Wyoming decided after the 1980 Refugee Act was passed the Refugee Act said that states should designate a state refugee coordinator. And only then could the NGOs go into that state. So Wyoming decided not to do that. And so they don't have any of these. I mean, they're still getting refugees and illegal aliens.

Don't get me wrong, but they don't have any of the NGOs officially in Wyoming. Every single other state has them. So you can find those on the HHS website. Amount of money that they're getting is astonishing. I mean, it is billions and billions of dollars. And yes, billions of it are coming from FEMA. By the way, the FEMA administration has a designated program called the Shelter and Support Services or something like that.

And Congress, this is all based on what Congress has done. So, Congress is to blame for this funding. Congress put money in that fund, and it is specifically designed to be handed out to the NGOs to facilitate illegal immigration. 

Linda J Hansen: And this is heartbreaking because we're recording this after Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton, and we can see that FEMA has not been serving the needs of the people hit by those storms, and not only are they using money to fund and support illegals and not our American citizens.

But there's been a lot of emergency aid sent to Ukraine and other foreign countries when our nation needs this money. We taxpayers pay into our government so that America can be taken care of and America can have needs met, and it's not that we want government to meet all our needs. I mean, I think you and I would agree.

No. In fact, like let's reduce the size and scope of government and get government out of our life and privatize everything we can because it's much more efficient, which we see in so many ways. But we just know that this is a money trail that just seems to never end, and it's a spider web of corruption and money that is it.

It's overwhelming at times, but it can be changed. One of the things that we talked about too, and I want to close with this because we're running out of time, but we talked about the importance of making sure that illegal citizens or even a legal resident who is not a citizen not be allowed to vote.

The law requires that only US citizens vote in our elections. And so, could you address that issue? Because we have illegals getting registered to vote. We have legal immigrants who are being misled into believing they can actually vote but they can't either until they are citizens. 

So could you address that and help people understand how they can prevent immigrants that are not legal citizens from voting?

Rosemary Jenks: Yeah. So part of the problem is, well, a big part of the problem is that non-citizens who are present lawfully and have a work permit, which is most of, actually the Biden administration is giving most illegal aliens work permits now, they're entitled to a social security number. So almost all of these people are getting social security numbers that are valid.

And then they are eligible. All 50 states issue driver's licenses including real IDs to non-citizens. The 19 states in the District of Columbia issue driver's licenses to illegal aliens. So they're getting driver's licenses, and they're Social Security numbers, which are the only two documents you need to register to vote across the country, for the most part the, a lot of states are using the motor voter law to automatically register everyone who comes in for a driver's license.

So a non-citizen comes in and says, I'm a non-citizen. Here's the proof that I'm not a citizen of the United States. And some of these states are automatically dumping them into the voter rolls. Oregon just announced that a glitch in their system automatically dumped non-citizens into the voter rolls.

Virginia just removed 6,000 and some non-citizens from its voter rolls. A lot of times the people at the DMV don't explain to non-citizens that you have to actually check the box and sign that you're swearing that you are a citizen. A lot of times these folks, when they go in to get their driver's licenses, they don't speak English yet.

So, they have no idea what the form says. They have no idea what they're filling out on a screen. So the problem is that it is a deportable offense. to register to vote as a non-citizen and to vote as a non-citizen. So they're actually ensuring that they will not be able to become citizens if they do this, and most of them don't know that.

Now, also, we have local officials who are actually essentially entrapping them because, for example, in New York City, the contract that New York City makes these migrant shelters sign, like the hotels, includes a requirement that the migrant shelter provide voter registration information and forms to every person, not every citizen, but every person, so either they're complying with the contract and doing that or they're violating the contract and not doing it.

We don't actually know. But my guess is they're complying with the contract. This is a—

Linda J Hansen: Yes, it is a huge problem and it's so hard to tell. I mean, I have often been a poll worker, and it's very hard to know when someone comes in to vote. Are they a citizen, or are they not a citizen? And you can't tell by appearance whether someone is a citizen or not.

And it's very hard to know, but you know, you mentioned how Virginia has been clearing their voter rolls of non-citizens. But I'd like to just let people know that the current administration Department of Justice also brought a lawsuit against Virginia for actually obeying the law and clearing the voter rolls of non citizens.

So, what's up with that? Right? So, I did the same thing in Alabama. They sued Alabama just recently as well. And it's insane. And people would think, well, why would they do that? Well, look deeper; there's nefarious intent in a lot of this. So we have to be awake and alert, and it is up to us.

We, the people, are the ones in charge of this government and we have just given up control to people who do not care about America, who do not care about the future of this nation and the freedom for individuals. So we have to step up and pay attention to these issues because policy matters, elections have consequences, ideas have consequences, and it takes a long time for these things to get changed around.

You can't turn a ship immediately, right? And it takes a long time to start to shift this back to a more sane, legal immigration type thing. But like you said earlier in the interview if your basement is flooding, you don't just keep mopping up the water, you stop the water from coming in.

So we have to do that. That is the first step. And then we can start to deport, which is an important part of what we're doing, especially those who are breaking the law in one way or another. And it's not going to be easy. And it's never, it's not racist. It's not a discriminatory. It's saying we need to protect America's interests and keep America first, so America can be strong to also then help other nations. 

Rosemary Jenks: Absolutely right. 

Linda J Hansen: Yeah. Well, do you have any other closing comments? And I'd like you to make sure you give your information to the listeners so they can contact you. 

Rosemary Jenks: I appreciate this conversation. It has kind of gone the gamut here.

We've covered a lot. People can find us at IAProject.org. We're on social media. All our social media is listed on the website so you can click the button and find us there. We would love any support anyone wants to give us. We have been working on this issue for a long time individually, but our organization is new.

So we are just getting on our feet and hoping that we can help turn the ship around as soon as possible. 

Linda J Hansen: Absolutely. Well, thank you so much and listeners go to IAProject. org and thank you Rosemary Jenks for being part of this interview and for your long time service to our nation through this issue. Thank you. 

Rosemary Jenks: Thank you.

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