In this episode, we discuss the impact immigrants from war-torn countries have on the U.S. food stamp system, and why they should be prioritized over other immigrants from other countries. Plus, we debate whether or not immigrants should be allowed to work in the United States.
00:00:31.520You'll be able to look at that and say, okay, these communities, if it's Armenian, if it's Assyrian, if it's Persian, if it's this, I want to know about it.
00:00:38.940And then from there, you have to sit there and say, when people come here from XYZ country, they make America a great place.
00:01:21.060Then it's Dominican, Caribbean, native, Puerto Rican, Cuban.
00:01:23.740So if I look at this number here, keep going all the way down, Rob, keep going all the way down, all the way down, all the way down, all the way down.
00:01:38.120I'm not sitting here saying, well, you know, but if you go all the way to the top and you look at SNAP,
00:01:42.320why, so why are we inviting more from Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq?
00:01:48.400I mean, I need to study this in more depth, but certainly the Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq, I mean, these are people, I imagine, predominantly who have fled war-torn countries.
00:01:59.320So they, by definition, when they come to America, you're going to be in poverty.
00:02:02.780Yeah, but, you know, when America was founded, it's about getting the best to come over here, right?
00:02:07.080Like you run a business, you have one of the top shows, and when it comes on to debate, you're running the number one show in the world when it comes on to debate.
00:02:13.580I don't think anybody is doing a better job than you when it comes on to the debate shows.
00:02:17.880But you would sit there and you would say, all right, can we look at the last 100 hires that we made?
00:03:42.660Much more arguable to go after where bin Laden and his people were in Afghanistan.
00:03:46.780So I look at Iraqis, right, who were displaced by a war, which many people, including me, would say was an illegal war in their country that caused utter devastation.
00:03:57.900And they come to someone like the United States, which has been the home for people like that ever since its inception and is lauded around the world for that, for being a place that you can come to, right, from places like that.
00:04:10.720But is there not a particular duty of care?
00:04:14.380Maybe you don't think there is, but is there not a duty of care to people who come from a war-torn place like Iraq, where the United States, along with the UK and other countries, wage that war, in my view, completely wrongly, in a way that caused their displacement, caused them to lose their homes, maybe lose their loved ones.
00:04:39.500But certainly in that case, you've got to think, well, OK, if they're the ones who are getting the SNAP benefits, OK, what is the correlation between the ones who were displaced because of the actions of the United States and the UK and the other allies that fought the Iraq war on their presence here in the United States?
00:04:57.080And is there a duty of care towards them?
00:04:58.620I don't think we should lose in the mix of all this a compassion towards genuine asylum seekers, particularly from countries ravaged by wars, which we may have been complicit.
00:05:09.500In starting, in my opinion, on a false pretext.
00:05:14.180Yeah, I think that is a—I would sit there again.
00:05:18.040I would sit there and I would say, if we're looking at anybody that's coming in, if we caused some of this, let's see what we can do about it.
00:05:26.560Now, of course, somebody in America could say, well, you caused all of it, right?