Open Borders - Threats Of Terrorism And Tyranny – with Todd Bensman – [Ep. 216]

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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So you have likely heard the phrase, every town is a border town. It's one I've used often. It's one I've tried to help people understand as we are suffering under the implications of a wide open border.

With me to discuss is Todd Bensman. Todd is a senior national security fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies. He's a former counter terrorism intelligence officer, and he's the author of the brand new book, Overrun: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History. Todd is a repeat guest. I've asked him to come back many times because he is one of the most informed and most accurate voices when it comes to what is going on with our immigration system and the Southern border. And so Todd, I thank you so much for returning to the podcast. 

Todd Bensman: Great to be here. Thank you. Always happy. 

Linda J Hansen: Well, thank you. And you have such good information. I want to direct the listeners to a recent testimony you gave in Congress regarding the implication of the amount of illegals coming in from China. Can you speak to the listeners a little bit about what you shared in that testimony? 

Todd Bensman: Sure. We're in the midst of, as you know, a 3 year-long mass migration crisis without historic precedent. I think without historic precedent anywhere in the world. I mean, you know, 10 million people, I'm not even aware of any World Wars that had that kind of movement of people. 

But you know, a part of it is that we are seeing a lot of Chinese nationals crossing the southern border now, 50,000 of them in the last three years total, but half of those just in the last 4 or 5 months. So the numbers are really escalating. And there were members, Republican members, of the House that, the Homeland Security Committee that wanted to hold a hearing to learn more about what's going on because the rate of incoming is just, you know, spiking, sky high right now. So, what's that all about?

So, anyway, I was one of 4 expert witnesses that came in, 3 of them for the Republicans. I was there for the Republicans and one for the minority. And, you know, my testimony was pretty much to just lay out that, number one, they're not, they're all probably, most of them are probably economic migrants coming to, you know, upgrade already pretty good nice lifestyles in China to, you know, even better lifestyle in the US because we're letting them all in, but that they're committing asylum fraud in large numbers as well, because we're finding their destroyed passports and destroyed identity cards all over the river, all over the U.S. side of the border and also on the Mexican side, which is always a surefire, you know, piece of evidence of asylum fraud, because it shows that they passed through safe countries already or had asylum in another place, and they don't want that evidence to get into the hands of the U.S. authorities for when they claim asylum here, which is asylum fraud and it's prosecutable. 

But aside from the fact that they've illegally entered and broken one law and now they're getting ready to break a second law with, by, you know, defrauding our asylum system is the fact that some of them, without a doubt, have to be agents of espionage, that they are coming as operatives and intelligence workers to do what the Chinese have been doing here for years, which is to steal our stuff, to hurt us. They are strategic rivals. They are spying on us all the time for years and years. They get their operatives in here any which way they possibly can, whether it's the legal Visa system, which has been under a lot of pressure, prosecutorial pressure here in the U.S. for the last 4 or 5 years. Now, maybe, it's going to be the southern border. I mean, almost assuredly, I told the Congress. They are already here coming in over the Southern border and they'll be coming in for years to come. And we'll find out about it in the next 5 or 10 years as we catch them. 

Linda J Hansen: Absolutely. And, you know, not only are they here covertly, but they're here overtly, too, as we've seen, you know, even police stations, Chinese police stations, basically in big cities around the U.S. And so, we should never be so naive to think that our rival enemy in a sort would, not use every single way they could to undermine and spy and interfere with the health and wellness of American citizens and the vitality of our nation. 

Todd Bensman: Well, you mentioned these Chinese police stations . That, actually, you can't just throw that out without a little bit of a contextual backdrop to it, because it's actually one of the most unbelievable things that the Chinese government is doing here, which is to, their operations to suppress dissidents, people that are opposition voices to the Communist Chinese Party. 

This, I cite this, I talked about that in my testimony. You'll see it in the recordings of that testimony that there is a Biden DHS Homeland Security Threat Assessment for 2024. This is the current government's threat assessment about the threat from the Chinese Intelligence Services. And in that DHS document, they disclose that there are these unsanctioned “Chinese police stations.” 

They put it in quotes in the U.S. that are set up to house Chinese operatives who go out and surveil Chinese Americans who are here in opposition to the CCP and they will use physical harassment, physical force, and rendition, mainly, kidnapping to get them out of the country to put them in prison or beat them up or kill them or whatever, all over the United States according to the DHS current 2024 threat assessment.

I just thought that was worth mentioning to you when you throw out while unofficial, they call them unsanctioned Chinese police stations. And that's a real thing. and it's an unbelievable thing. Part of what the Chinese are doing here in the United States, among many other, you know, nefarious and hurtful to U.S. interest activities. 

Linda J Hansen: Well, I'm really glad that you expanded on that because for people who listen to the podcast often who’ve heard me talk about that, but yeah, and I think we've mentioned it before, but there's new listeners all the time. 

And, you know, I think that the American public sometimes finds these things hard to believe. So, you know, it might take several times of actually hearing what is actually happening before people start to believe that it's as bad as it is. And, you know, we've always had immigration and, you know, the mainstream media makes it sound like if you're not in favor of this open border and this widespread immigration and flying people into the middle of the country, as we can expand on that a little bit. But, you know, if we're not in favor of that, then we [00:10:00] must be racist. And, you know, every other -ist that they want to call us, right? Or every other, phobic person. But, we are not. 

We're saying that our nation is a nation and a strong nation because we've had strong borders. And there's really no nation in the world that has ever opened up their borders like this. And even now we can see. Maybe you can expand on this a little bit, too. We can see what's happening in Europe where, you know, some of the countries in Europe are saying, “No more.” And they're actually starting deportation processes. 

And this is really important. You know, when we flood a country with people that are not our citizens or do not want to have the American way of life, it can totally change our country. Like you said, 5 to 10 years, we, we might not even know the full effect of this, but we need to be alert and very wise about how we handle it, because if it continues, I mean, there will be no America. There really will be no America. So what do you see happening in Europe and how can that be a lesson to America?

Todd Bensman: Right. Well, I was in Europe for about a month in November and December, just before the holidays. And, you know, I went to 9 countries to the borders along the, what's called the Balkan route, kind of coming up from Greece up through the Bosnia, Croatia, Slovenia into that. And, you know, the numbers are, as high as they were in the throes of the mass migration crisis of 2014-2015, which got international press.

I mean, there were just millions and millions of Syrians and Afghans and people from all over the Middle East pouring across the Balkan route. It got shut down when Hungary built a fence, which forced the Austrians to build a fence, which forced the Slovenians to build a fence. And it eventually did kind of shut it down, but all it takes is one weak link, and that was Slovenia. And that route is wide open again. Mostly Syrians, not good, and Afghans, also not good. And, they're looking at about, I mean, officially, they're counting like 300,000 or 400,000 detections a year of illegal immigrants, but the real number is in their asylum claims, which show over a million and a half.

So obviously the 300,000 that they detected is a tiny percentage of, you know, a minority percentage of how many actually are pouring into Europe right now. And I've done studies and, you know, the first chapter of my book, America's Covert Border War is all about what happened in 2015 when that mass migration event occurred, and it was just a bloody rampage of terror attacks from one end of the continent to the other that lasted for 5 years straight. 

People coming in that came in illegally over their borders, went on to conduct, you know, bloody terrorist attacks, like in Paris and Brussels. So those are the ones, the big ones that you know about, but running gun battles that went on and on for hours on end in the streets of Paris and in small towns and in Germany. And that's what they got. And that's why the Europeans are shifting to the right over this, to anybody, any politician that will agree to just shut it down. They don't want it. 

Linda J Hansen: Well, it makes sense to shut it down and, you know, immigration is one thing. Illegal immigration, flooding our borders and destabilizing our nation is another. One of the things we haven't touched on yet is the cost to the American taxpayer for funding all of this. And we are actually funding so much of the expenses for the illegals.

So often we are providing transportation. We are providing hotels or apartments, housing. We provide many with cell phones, visa cards, food, clothing, medical care. In many places around the nation, sometimes schools or veterans facilities have been closed to the intended user. And they are being opened and used as places for illegals to be housed or to be serviced, and this is all at the taxpayer's expense. We are paying for this while our taxes go up. Inflation goes up while our citizens are not served well. And what would you say to citizens who are upset about that? 

Todd Bensman: Well, you know, I think that it's time honored. It's a time honored subject for debate and discussion in the United States. We are allowed to talk about, you know, impacts to our budget, our national budget, and what what our representatives do with our tax money. We're allowed to talk about that. That's fundamental. 

Except in this case, nobody really wants to talk about this one. You can't get much of a big public debate or even an accounting of what we've spent. There are some accounts of what we've spent. It's in the hundreds of billions of dollars, but we don't really know because we don't want to know. 

So all of the normal watchdog agencies that would try to tally the totality of what we're just handing out at the federal, but also state and local levels, because a lot of locals have their own little municipal programs. And, you know, there's the school districts and, you know, there's lots of places where you can bleed out and not really see it.

You know, it's like they say a death by a thousand paper cuts, right? By a thousand cuts. So we don't know. I mean, honestly, I can't really say. I also know that my organization, Center for Immigration Studies, just put out a pretty good report that showed that about half of the millions of people that came in remain unemployed. Maybe more than half, they're on the dole. They're just receiving, you know, indefinite amounts of money for just years. 

And when they try to shut it off in places like Denver or San Diego ran out of money and said, “Well, we've got to kick everybody out of all the, you know, shelters,” everybody goes and protests about it, you know, or when New York says, “Look, we're, going to turn you out of the 5-star hotels that we rented for you 2 years ago, where you get room service and, you know, 3 square meals a day in the beautiful Roosevelt Hotel or whatever,” they're picketing on the streets about it. How dare you? kick us out of these fancy hotels in New York that, you know, we've grown accustomed to this standard of living? You know, so, I mean, we don't really know what the totality is. Nobody really wants to know. And it may be years, if ever, that we get the total number of dollars that we handed out during this period of time, and it's going to go on for years. 

Linda J Hansen: It will. The expense will continue to impact all American citizens for generations, I imagine. And, you know, people often think, “Well, they're just inept. The administration is just inept.” They don't know what they're doing. And I would say, “No, they definitely do know what they're doing.”

It is the planned destruction of America. It is the planned destruction of our system of government, the way that we have. And, you know, as all these illegals come in, we can see in so many states across the nation efforts to make sure they are able to vote. And I think it's just insane. And so I would say, people pay attention to what's going on at your local and state levels when it comes to election law and voter registration and election integrity because elections are for American citizens, not for non-citizens.

And we want to make sure that only American citizens vote and there's legislation in the Congress right now, too. You can take a look at that and make sure that you let your voice be heard on the Hill so that you can tell your legislators you only want American citizens to vote. I mean, we are paying the taxes. We are the ones that are here and we've always been a welcoming nation, but we are not welcoming terrorists or people who will not contribute and support our American way of life. 

And one of the other things that is happening, too, is, you know, the powers that be that want to take down cultures as a globalist and the Marxist, communist, one of the best ways they do that is to divide and to create a division. They'll do it by race. They'll do it by ethnicity. They'll do it by parent to child. They'll do it by gender. We can see it so clearly. It is just a textbook pattern that they do every time they try to destroy a country. 

And I think, too, one of the things that they'll do here is pit illegals against citizens. And it's just another dividing factor within our nation that destabilizes. You know, America is a nation that is united, has been united, and united we stand, divided we fall. So we need to stand for our constitution and the principles that made America great, and keep our elected officials accountable.

So, this mass illegal immigration that is destabilizing our entire nation and upending the economies of local communities and state governments, you know, this is just horrendous. So we need to stand up as the people of America and use our voice. 

Todd Bensman: Well, it's an important election coming up. The polls are all showing that this issue is, you know, an apex concern among, likely American voters, right up there with or even exceeding concern about inflation. This is a major issue in the campaign. People are already being, you know, saying, “Look, we're voting, we're moving from the Democratic side of the aisle to the Republican side over this.”

People that were, traditionally Democratic constituents, you know, people that were on that side of the aisle in a lot of the cities. I don't know whether it remains to be seen how impactful that is. But Pennsylvania is, you know, one of the most important, swing states and there's new polling out of Pennsylvania showing that, you know, black and Latino voters have moved decisively over to the Republican side of the aisle over this issue alone. 

So it's very, very impactful as an issue, as an electoral issue in the upcoming election. If Biden wins this campaign after years of these policies, that should be read as tacit approval by the majority of the American public, I mean, assuming there's no election fraud, that, you know, they're okay with this, in which case, you'll probably see the Immigration and Nationality Act dissolved or kind of set aside like the Federal Marijuana Law right that nobody pays any attention to anymore. So there's a lot at stake when it comes to this issue in this coming election.

Linda J Hansen: There really is and so listeners. I really encourage you to get educated about this. Todd has these great books, America's Covert Border War and Overrun. You can get those anywhere books are sold. 

But pay attention to what he writes. He posts often and we’ll give you his information. You can also go to the Center for Immigration Studies. There's so many podcasts and things that are really out telling truth, but don't listen to the mainstream media about this because they will paint anyone who is against illegal immigration negatively.

And so we just want to make sure that people are aware and can vote accordingly. So we can see that this impacts us, our Homeland Security. You've talked about the threat we have to Homeland Security with these potential terrorists coming through and the Chinese engagement and involvement in security and surveillance.

And we can see that it impacts us monetarily as our tax dollars are used in enormous unaccountable amounts for not only funding the health and welfare of these illegals for months, sometimes years on end, but their transportation into the country. And then also just funding the problems that arise because of this untold immigration.

And so I just want people to think through, like, if you're looking at the security of your family, you're looking at the prosperity of your business or your family, you're looking at the safety in your neighborhood, you're looking at the sovereignty and stability of your nation, this is definitely an issue that we have to address. And it will not just take the Todd Bensmans of the world, although Todd is fantastic and a wonderful voice, but it will take all of us because there's big money behind this. People are being bought off and they are just destroying our nation. 

So if you want a free country and a safe country for you, for your children, for grandchildren, you absolutely have to stand up and get involved. So Todd, where would you say people should find you to get your latest information in a most timely manner?

Todd Bensman: Right. Well, you know, I work for the Center for Immigration Studies, so you can go to cis.org. but you can also find a lot more at my website, ToddBensman.com. You can sign on to my newsletter there and find my social media. And most of all of my publications end up there as well when I publish.

Linda J Hansen: Well, listeners, I truly recommend that you do that. He always has timely relevant information, well-written, and he is one of the best resources when it comes to understanding our border issue and our national security needs, especially when it comes to immigration. 

So Todd, thank you so much for all that you do for our nation. I often refer to you, in your presence and in others, that you are a hero and a patriot. You have risked your life to get information on this issue, and we appreciate it and you work tirelessly. And so it's really, I mean, I mean it sincerely when I say it's an honor to promote your work and to help my listeners be educated through your work. So thank you so much. 

Todd Bensman: Thanks for magnifying it, too. Thanks. 

Linda J Hansen: Well, it's an honor. Thank you.

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