Immigration Realities – Issues and Answers – with Todd Bensman – [Ep. 290]

Linda J. Hansen:  Thank you for tuning in today. My name is Linda J. Hansen, your host of the Prosperity 101® Podcast, where we seek to unleash the power of employers to reclaim and preserve America by Connecting Boardroom to Breakroom® and policy to paycheck. Employers educating employees about public policy issues that affect their jobs can lead to greater employee loyalty, engagement, and retention, and to an increased awareness of the blessings and responsibilities of living in a free society. 

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Thank you so much for joining with me today. It is always a pleasure to have you in the audience, and we appreciate the time you're taking to tune in. If you are a regular listener, you know my goal is to inform people on issues of importance to their business and personal lives, and to help people understand policies that affect freedom and flourishing for future generations.

We have discussed immigration many times, for it touches every segment of society and impacts every community. Every town is a border town when immigration policies allow for open borders, financial fraud, rampant crime, and cultural upheaval. How do we continue our promise of freedom to immigrants while protecting the rights of American citizens?

With me to discuss these important topics is a favorite returning guest, Todd Bensman. In previous episodes, Todd was serving as Senior National Security Fellow for the Center for Immigration Studies. He then went on to serve as Senior Advisor to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the National Counterterrorism Center. 

He is now serving as a Senior Research Fellow for the Heritage Foundation's Border Security and Immigration Center. He has testified before Congress and written extensively to alert the American people regarding the negative national security implications of open border policies. It's an honor to welcome him back to the podcast.

Thank you, Todd, for joining me today.

Todd Bensman: Thanks for having me. It's good to be back. It's been a little while.

Linda J. Hansen: It has. You couldn't really be on my podcast while you were serving in the administration, but I appreciate your service. Thank you so much for stepping up to the plate and taking on that role.

Your experience and insights are so critical to helping to keep this nation safe. So thank you. I thought I'd ask the first question.

What is it that led you to be so focused on the immigration issue?

Todd Bensman: Well, first of all, I live in Texas, so you really can't get too far away from it. And then secondly, I was a reporter for 20 plus years before I ever got into any of this. And I was down in San Antonio, not too far from the border, and started covering it and really kind of caught the bug.

So I was writing stories and going into Mexico and really just found that it was about the hottest story that you could find in Texas. And from there, I just got to know so much about illegal immigration and border security and especially the national security threat, a link to all of it, that I kind of became a victim of my own success in a way. Because, then I was recruited to join the Texas Department of Public Safety, Intelligence and Counterterrorism Division based on that reporting I did and ended up doing even more border stuff.

So it just kind of kept piling on, and I still find that it is just the most interesting human story that you could find anywhere. I mean, people rushing the border, trying to cross it legally, and cops and robbers and drug trafficking and sex trafficking and all kinds of human interest stories related to it. It's just a fantastic story. And it's super important for homeland security and also the economy.

Linda J. Hansen: Well, it truly is. And it's super important for the educational systems, for our families– thriving. We just see the effects of illegal immigration as having such an impact on our nation financially in so many ways.

As you have served so often in these roles and have written extensively, you've traveled so much, you've been in the thick of things at the border and in other countries. You've seen what has happened throughout many, many years. Could you talk about how immigration was treated before the Biden administration?

And then what happened right after his inauguration? And what happened to our immigration system and the security of our nation during his administration?

Todd Bensman: Sure. Well, really, the mass migration surges would happen periodically, mostly by labor migrants, people that were economic migrants coming to work in the 1990s. And it really kind of peaked out in about 2000.

The Clinton administration put a new law on the books that was supposed to really curtail a lot of the loopholes and abuses, but it just ended up opening up other ones that nobody had thought of. And so it's one of those problems that's a whack-a-mole kind of issue. So we've always had large illegal immigration crossing the border.

The question was always, how do you manage it? This one or that one, whether it's all children, whether it's Mexicans, whether it's Central Americans, whoever's surging at the time has a unique set of circumstances driving it. And so that's kind of how we've always managed the border with the laws that we have in place.

Asylum, our asylum law was always a really big magnetic draw. All they have to do when they come in is say the magic words, I'm afraid to be returned home. And we let them in pretty much forever.

Win, lose, or draw on their asylum plane. So these are sort of in place all the time. Then when Biden got into office… every president has always tried to at least wrestle it to the ground.

They had a surge of Central Americans, whoever was in office would try their best to get it under control. When Biden entered office, though, all that went out the window. It was the polar opposite.

It was the first time we'd ever seen a president just open the spigots wide and let them all rip, let them all come in the maximum possible numbers that we could let in. We would let in and process officially into the country in a way that was overwhelming. It just created more illegal immigration because the people ahead of them were getting in.

So the whole world saw that it was wide open. And this was the first time that an American president has not tried to get it under control. They never tried to, they just said, let it go.

You know, let's just bring in as many as we can. And by the time it was all over, nobody really knows how many, but we think about maybe 10 to 13 million people came over that border in a very short amount of time and flooded into all the U.S. cities. And then that was what caused the election of Donald Trump.

I mean, if you want to talk about impact, the very first impact is that Trump was elected on that. So while they were doing that to the country, they didn't realize that they were handing Donald Trump the presidency. At the time, they thought maybe nobody would notice, but every big city in the country noticed big time.

Everybody noticed because you couldn't avoid it. There were so many millions of people. So Trump locked it down in about one day, the whole thing.

And we have seen the lowest numbers crossing the border ever in the history of record keeping at the border. Nobody has been allowed into the country. Literally nobody, zero or statistically zero.

Anybody has been allowed into the country. And all it took was a flick of the switch, which was to say we are no longer accepting asylum at the border. Because remember what I said about asylum? Those magic words. If you say those magic words, we just say, well, you're turning around and that's it. So nobody's going to spend $10,000 for that outcome, right?

It’s a financial cost benefit return on investment calculus at that point. So that's where we are today. And then the administration, the Trump administration is trying to clean up the mess on the interior about what happened.

They call it mass deportation. And that's what we're seeing now. All the fighting, wrangling is over that, not about the border anymore.

Linda J. Hansen: Mm hmm. Yes. Well, and there's so many other problems that came with the open border policies of the previous administration and the cartels.

Maybe you could touch a little bit on the crime with the cartels and the trafficking and how that also spreads into the rest of the country. But then beyond the cartels, I also want you to talk about the jihadist influx. 

You know, during that administration, we saw so many military aged men crossing. No women and children. I mean, not that they never came, but I mean, we saw hundreds and hundreds and hundreds, thousands of military aged men coming. And where were they coming from and what was their purpose?

And asylum, just correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding of asylum laws is that you could claim asylum if you truly were endangered. But if you were already in a neighboring country where you had safety, you weren't eligible for asylum here. Is that correct?

Todd Bensman: Well, it is correct technically, but in the practically speaking, it's not correct because there's a process to get to know. And the process to get to know is years and years long. So the game really is just to start the process and then you get in.

And who cares what happens after that? Because usually they're not even coming after you. There's almost no deportation.

Your odds of even surviving the Trump administration might be pretty good, even though they're doing a lot of deportation. Imagine prior presidents, right? So that's the game is to just get the process started.

You can't do it under Trump because he has invoked something called 212F of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which allows a president to just, because I feel like it, not grant the ability to apply for asylum. And he's doing that. And any president could have done that at any time.

And keep in mind that people that are claiming asylum, the millions and millions, they're economic, they're labor migrants. They're coming in to work. They're not persecuted.

That very few of them are ever going to get, even if they got to a hearing, would ever be granted asylum anyway. They're rejected at 80, 90%. So even those ones, but getting to your question about the cartels, that's a wicked problem.

It's not going anywhere. We are at war right now with the Mexican cartels. The Trump administration has declared nine of them plus some gangs, Trinidad and Tobago, to be foreign terrorist organizations.

So they've been able to bring to bear a tremendous amount of intelligence, attention, and resources to that problem. And to have the Mexican government do kinetic operations on fentanyl labs, so fentanyl's down. 

But you're just not going to really get rid of the cartels very easily. They were making billions on human smuggling. So they've obviously lost that profit center completely. There's no money to be made there really at all.

So they've switched to cocaine. That's what they do. They switch to whatever the money-making thing is.

So now we're seeing records amounts of cocaine coming into the country, much less fentanyl, at least. But cocaine still kills about 1,500 Americans a year. Fentanyl was killing a lot more than that, 100,000.

But I'll tell you this. If you go to the border, I have been down there a few times recently. And it's pretty much dead. You've got a lot of Border Patrol and military servicemen and women down there. And they don't have a lot to do. So when a drug trafficker starts to come over, man, they're on it.

Everybody's rushing to have some action down there. It's really kind of something to see. But they're still smart even at that. They're using a lot of drones, drone technology, very sophisticated tactics to lead the drug traffickers through the cordon into the country. Still a lot coming on trucks through the ports of entry. And so I don't think that we're going to be knocking out the cartels anytime soon.

But we're certainly managing them down. They're feeling pain that they haven't felt probably ever, the way things are. And that's always good.

Linda J. Hansen: That's always good. Progress is good. And we never know the lives that are saved.

But could you tell us also more about the whole terrorism aspect of what we're dealing with, with open borders? You wrote about this, and I want people to know for sure about your books that you've written so they can pick them up and learn more from you.

But this is a very, very important aspect. And we're seeing the rise of this around the nation as these communities have blossomed, the communities where Sharia law is in force, or they're really wanting to create their own community and way of life. And we're seeing this all over the nation.

So please tell us more about the terrorism aspect of what we're dealing with regarding the borders.

Todd Bensman: Sure. Well, one thing that was unique about the Biden border crisis, that 10 million plus that came in, is that the multinational diversity broke every record. We had 170 countries represented coming over that border from the entire Muslim majority world.

Everywhere that there was, you name it, Syria, Iraq, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan. We had thousands and thousands coming in. Young men coming in from places where terrorist organizations operate, spread their ideology.

It's ingrained in a lot of the communities there. And so we don't really know what we got. They came in over the border. They were let in. The Trump administration is trying its best to revet them, to find and locate and vet them again. Those ones that came in.

We did have a record number of people from those countries that crossed, who were already on the terrorism watch list that we happened to catch. About 440 of those that we actually interdicted, it got our hands on. But we don't know how many have got through and into the interior either.

Those are just the ones we caught. We did have one from Mauritania, proceed from the border from Tijuana up to Chicago and conduct the first known terror attack. That was in October of 2024 in Chicago.

Attacked the Jewish community with a gun, shot one, big gun battle. They wounded him. The police charged him with terrorism, actually was charged with terrorism. Guy comes in from Mauritania. And he survived to face trial, but then he hanged himself in the Cook County Jail. So we never got to really see that.

I did write a three part series on that case. You could find it under my name. First Blood is the name of that series. I wrote a whole book about this issue called America's Covert Border War. It's right there behind me on the wall. 

But in answer to your question, we've had quite a few terror attacks in the interior of the country from people that came in. We let them in on visas. We just didn't vet them very well. We had an Afghan from the war that we brought in on an SUV, an SIV, special immigrant visa.

And he shot two National Guardsmen in Washington, D.C., for example. Hopefully he was fully vetted and that he obviously went bad after he got here or he came in that way. That's the problem. We never know. And so I would say that that threat remains locked inside the interior. That's the bad news.

The good news is that not very many are coming in now because of the way the border is. But the bad news, because there's good news, bad news story, is that the way Trump has the border right now is very fragile. Another president could come in and in one hour on the first day could reverse the whole thing and they'll be flooding back in again.

Something to watch for the election in 2028. That's going to matter a lot, who you vote for in 2028.

Linda J. Hansen: Absolutely. And, as we think about the midterms too, we need to be thinking carefully about who we're voting for and whether or not they would be supporting secure border policies because, a president can do so much. But if we have better laws enacted through Congress, that would be most helpful.

So what would you say to business leaders who really want to help make a positive impact regarding immigration in our nation? You know, I often talk to employers about how they can discuss these issues with their workplace and help employees understand that open border policies don't help them. When we're paying our taxpayer money for these immigrants to come in and live off our dime, or they're committing fraud with our government programs, or they're taking our jobs away from American workers, that's not helpful.

And so how would we explain that? Or what would you say to employers who need to explain this to their employees? But also, what would you say to the employers who are tempted to go for the cheap labor?

Todd Bensman: Well, I would warn those employers not to get yourself addicted or dependent on that labor, on illegal labor. I know it's cheaper, it spreads your profit margin, it brings more money home, your bank account grows, but one day we're going to come and take them all. And you're going to be on the hook.

So I would argue that for your own self-preservation, and you could end up fined or worse, because I think worse might be coming with the Trump administration in terms of criminally penalizing employers who knowingly hire, especially subcontractors. You need to know who your contractors are hiring for their subs. 

But anyway, the whole complex is difficult for employers to have to navigate because there's a tension between making a fatter profit and having a better profit margin, keeping expenses down and doing the right thing, which is to hire legal labor.

There is plenty of legal labor. I would argue that the H-2A visa, for example, unskilled labor, there's no cap on that. It's plentiful. You just have to pay a fair wage and can't push them around like you can illegal aliens. Some people call them labor serfs. It's a serf system where you hire illegal aliens because what are they going to do?

Complain when you abuse them or short them on their check or violate their rights in different ways. I get that, but it's wrong and it's illegal. So just stick to the law and you're good. You're always good. It's like they say, if you tell the truth, you got nothing to worry about. But at some point, you're going to lose your labor force all at once.

And we're hearing people complain about that right now about the Haitians. Even though we've known that their temporary protected status under Trump is actually temporary, that is not permanent. Temporary protected status means it's going to go away and they're going to lose their work authorization.

So you better plan for that, prep. Go find American workers. It's a lie that there are no American workers willing to do jobs like that. There are plenty. The unemployed labor pool of American working age men and women is at 22%. There's a new report out of the Center for Immigration Studies about this. Who are just off the books because they can't find jobs, but they want jobs.

So the point is, follow the law or you're going to lose your labor force and you're going to suffer for it. It's not going to be worth it.

Linda J. Hansen: Very good. And I really try to encourage employers, just like I would say to politicians, don't think like the next election or for employers, the next quarterly report. Think about the next generation.

We really need to think ahead to preserving freedom in America. And you mentioned American workers who can do jobs. I have talked with you before about the truckers.

The problem with commercial driver's licenses being given to illegals who don't know our laws, can't read our road signs, can't speak our language. And sometimes their license, their CDL license will even say, no name given. And oftentimes those same documents will say useful for driving or voting purposes.

So, I mean, it's just a hornet's nest of issues. But I noticed more recently the administration has started their freedom haulers program, encouraging veterans who have had experience in the military coming in and being given these truck driving jobs or the opportunity for this. So there are American workers.

We should not be hiring these illegals when we have people who've served our country and they want to work. We need to pay them a wage that is right and good and really focus on freedom for the future generations. Those that look at just the cheap labor or the surf mentality, like you said, it will all cost in the end.

And eventually, if we stay that way, we will lose our freedom. Before we close, I just want to add one more question. And that is really, what should people be looking for in terms of some of the things with the terrorism?

There's so many things, whereas they've gone throughout the country, we don't know where these potential terrorists are. And, we don't want to scare the American people, but we need to be aware of what to do. And then if they see something, who should they be contacting?

Todd Bensman: Right, well this is an off and on problem. It rises and falls with the number of attacks we have. You know, right after the New Orleans attack, the vehicle ramming attack, that horrible slaughter up there. I mean, we've actually had quite a lot of these things.

People always want to know, but I think we have really good reporting systems in place since 9-11, you know, see something, say something. You can call your local fusion center, your police department. There are suspicious activity reporting websites, SAR, the SAR, National SAR Initiative.

You can Google that. I think that when you see something suspicious, you want to make sure that it actually is something real because you don't want to tie up our law enforcement guys in something that… just you should make sure you know that it really feels wrong. But if you see something, say something.

And there's plenty of… I would say law enforcement agencies that are fully trained to take and receive this reporting. I guarantee your local police department, your fusion center, there's 78 of them across the country. They all have phone numbers and they're begging people to call in if they have a problem.

So just go look at it, write it down, put it in your phone, go take care of business when you see a need.

Linda J. Hansen: Well, it takes all of us to make sure our nation can be free for the future. So employers, please hire Americans, hire legal immigrants, like Todd said, hire legally. That's great. Then everyone can prosper. Our nation can be safer and we can have a flourishing for future

Before we go, I'd like people to know how they can contact you. I'd like them to know how they can order your books and learn more about what you do so that they can stay abreast of these issues.

Todd Bensman: Well, it's Todd Bensman. You can contact me at todd.bensman@heritage.org if you need to email me. I also have an X account, Todd Bensman.

I don't know that X, or I forget how they do that. Truth, Social, Gettr, LinkedIn. My books, Overrun is the whole story about what happened during the Joe Biden administration at the border and beyond. And America's Cover Border War, they're both available at Amazon. You know, go check them out.

Linda J. Hansen: They're excellent. And I'm so grateful that you've written them. Is there anything else you'd like to let the listeners know or be aware of before we close?

Todd Bensman: No, not, not really. You know, just make sure that you are voting in a way, coming up in a way that, fits with how you feel about illegal immigration. I'm mainly about illegal immigration.

The legal immigration, that's a legitimate discussion point. I don't think that there is any discussion point about illegal immigration. Make sure whoever you vote for is against it.

Linda J. Hansen: Good point. Good point. So, all right.

Well, thank you so much. I look forward to having you back again. I'm glad that you are able to do interviews again.

So we'll keep up with you. And in a few months or whatever, we'll have you back to keep things current. But we're so grateful for the work you do, helping our nation.

And just thank you. Thank you so much.

Todd Bensman: All right. Thanks for having me.

Linda J. Hansen: Thank you again for tuning in to this episode of the Prosperity 101® podcast. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please, subscribe, share, and give us a great review. Don’t forget to visit Prosperity101.com to sign our Employers Unleashed™ pledge, to access our entire podcast library, or to discover resources for use in your workplace. Let us know how we can serve you. Contact us today at Prosperity101.com.