How the Massive Immigration from the Border Impacts California | Jim Righeimer

When Title 42 goes away, more people are going to come across the border. They're showing videos right now in Mexico, like neighborhood community parks where there's thousands of people just like camping, waiting for these things to end so they can come across the border easier. Why do you think these people are coming to California? In California, basically it's just free health care if you get across the border. We're handing out so much stuff for free and you can't keep on overloading people here and thinking, oh it's just no problem. My guest today is Jim Brickheimer, co-host of The Weekend Answer with KRLA and former mayor. The problem constantly is you want to give good benefits to your residents, but once you say it's for anybody who gets across the border, more people come across the border. There is a record number of people crossing the border illegally. California has the most generous benefits for illegal immigrants, including health care and education. Are we going to face a financial crisis in California in the next few years? Stay tuned for an insider's perspective. I'm Siamak Khorrami. Welcome to California Insider. Great to be here again. We want to talk to you about a phenomenon that's happening at our border and in California. Governor Newsom was at the border. He was concerned about the influx of immigrants that would come illegally after Title 42 is gone. We provide a lot of benefits to the illegal immigrants, right? We provide benefits to illegal and legal immigrants at the country. Americans are very much a giving people. The problem that we're having is that not only are people coming here because of the problems they have in their country, but we're handing out so much stuff for free. In California, right? In California, more so than the rest of the states. Let's take health care. You can't get the federal government to subsidize health care for illegal immigrants. In California, the state government comes in and covers those dollars. They first start off with the DACA, kids under 26 years of age. They gave them full Medicaid, depending on what their income was, so full insurance. Then they went ahead, people 50 years and older, they gave them the full thing. I think they added another 287,000 people at this last bill they passed this last month before the legislation closed down. Basically, it's just free health care if you get across the border. On top of that, you add education. We had that whole issue with Prop 187 back in the day, and it was a big fight and all that. But the reality of it is education is, there's different numbers people argue about, but 10, 12, 14, 15,000 a year per student. You come across the border with two, three kids, and that's $45,000. I guarantee you that person who came across the border isn't paying $45,000 in taxes to pay for that. We're all paying for it. The problem constantly is you want to give good benefits to your residents, but once you say it's for anybody who gets across the border, more people come across the border. It looks like he's concerned about the costs. Well, let's back up for a little bit. Governor Newsom is running for president of the United States. Don't listen to what he says. Look at what he does. If you looked at the- Because he said he's not running. He says he's not running if Biden runs. Well, Biden may or may not run. Who knows? He's an older man. A lot of things can happen between now and then. He's clearly running. It's a full-on campaign stop when you see what he's doing. He's a governor of California, and he's talking about all these international issues. First off, he's saying he cares because he realizes how the doesn't make any sense. When Title 42 goes away, more people are going to come across the border. They're showing videos right now in Mexico, neighborhood community parks, where there's thousands of people just camping, waiting for these things to end so they can come across the border easier. He wants to just get ahead of the curve, saying he's concerned about the money. He's already voted and signed legislature to pay people for their health care if they come across the border. A few months ago, right? Wasn't it? It was at the end of the legislative session. Then they passed it, and he's all excited about it. Then he says, well, I don't want people to come across because it costs so much money. Really? Basically, for anybody to think there's a problem at the border, if you think people coming across the border is a problem, there's a problem. But the White House is very clear. The people that run the Democratic Party and the left is very clear. It's working just fine at the border. 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Once again, visit birchgold.com slash california and protect your savings with gold today. So how does it work at the border? If people show up and they just want to get in, they can get in? Yeah, they just come in and get in. They could go ahead and tell them. They just say it's asylum and there's no rules for asylum. Asylum used to be, I'm the opposing party politically. They're trying to kill me. I need to get out of here. But what it is now is, hey, life's not good in the country I'm from. And understand, people coming across the border, these are not Mexicans anymore. Very small percentage. South Americans, Central Americans, but people from the Middle East, people from Africa, people are getting on planes. To go to Mexico. To go to Mexico, buying airplane tickets to come into this country. Because in the end, once you get across the border and you're here for a few years, the longer you're here, the better chance you're going to stay. And somebody always does an amnesty. At some point, they say, oh, these people have been here for 10 years or 15 years. Let's give them an amnesty. Or let's not give them an amnesty. Let's just give them a green card so they can work here. And this is the Republican line. We're going to give them a green card so they can work here, but they're going to have to get back in line. Well, if the line to get in the country is in the country, who cares? It's when the line says, if you're from Germany or from Denmark, you have something to lose and you want to come to the US, it's 10 years to get a permit to come in. But people in Europe and stuff have things to lose. When you come across from a poor country, you've got nothing to lose. You don't really care. So you'll come across. And because it takes so long. So the whole thing is, if they just say, oh, you've got to wait five or 10 years, but you can be in the country with a work permit and you can work here. Well, you're here and they're never going to send you back. So Jim, what do you think this kind of health insurance, health insurance is very expensive here, right? Right. It's not something, how much does it cost us? Well, it's interesting because we wanted to go Medicare for all. And even people in the California legislature couldn't pass it because they realized. Right. But they're getting very close to it now. They're getting very close to it. Medicare for all is basically a single payer where there's no insurance companies in between anymore. It's just, you go to a doctor and the bill gets paid by the government. So when you say to somebody, come across the border and we're just going to give you free health care. The first way they always pass it is they say it'll cost so many billions of dollars. And I'm not going to say the numbers because they'll drive you crazy. But let's say they're saying, I think it costs for these next 266,000 people like $4 billion. But it's not really $4 billion because we're already paying money for them to go to the hospital now when they get sick. And we don't get reimbursed for that. So we'll subtract that number because that's already being paid. Well, it's not like it's being paid for somebody. It's just they're subsidizing systems. And so the cost maybe really is $4 billion. But even when you divide it by the number of people they're getting insurance for, you come out and say, well, that number comes out to, you know, $1,800 per person per year. That number's not right. Because it should be a lot more expensive. It's a lot more. But when you pass a bill or legislature, you always want to show how it's cheaper than it is. And you pass it. And then once the bills come in, you go, you never said how much it would cost. I mean, you might say how much it costs or estimate how much it's going to cost. But once you pass the bill, the bill doesn't say, hey, you can only spend this much money. It says, do this service. And if the service now costs four or five times as much, you won't. The other problem that we have is that we have no housing. I mean, California has no housing. We just had a whole mayoral race based on, in LA, based on getting affordable housing or getting homeless people off the street. And we're having tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people walk across the border with no place to live. And people are acting like that doesn't affect housing. Of course it affects housing. People come from these other countries. They find family members that they know here, or they find some other place and they double up and triple up, whatever. They rent a room. Exactly. And it keeps the rents high because there's more people here looking for the housing. There's no magic here. And so, oh, we're going to go solve the housing problem. They're building one bedroom apartments and stuff in LA at a half million dollars plus a piece. I mean, plus like a half million, and then you'll hear numbers of 800,000 for one bedroom apartment. It just doesn't, there's not enough money on the planet earth to pay for people's housing who just come across the border. And just, oh, we're just going to house them and somehow solve it on top of our people with, you know, most of our homeless situation in California is mental health, alcoholism, drug addiction, those kinds of things where our problems are. And we think we're going to solve it with housing. We're not. But having people from around the world, just cross the border, they have to sleep somewhere and they're going to be in housing and that's, and there's not enough available. So what do you think would happen if this influx increases into California? It just gets, it just, everything gets worse. But you have to understand, like when you look at the populations changed in California and people talk about people leaving and we're not really sure. We're not feeling it in the housing. Yeah. People are leaving, but we're not seeing it in the housing. Right. Because it's all full already. And the people that are coming into the country. So for years they've been saying, well, the population of California really hadn't gone down. Of the people who live in the United States of America, leave one state and come to another state. When you balance that all out, coming and going in California, it's been going down for 10 years. The only thing that kept the population up was foreign immigration. So whether that's legal or illegal immigration, that was always going up. You're also getting people from these third world countries who think downtown Los Angeles that has pup tents all over the place and blue tarps and people defecating in the street and the power goes out. It's not a big deal to them because they're from countries that are like that. They're from third world countries. So they can accept it. The people that can accept it are the ones that are leaving. Those are your best and brightest. You've got people with good jobs, good education, people that have choices. They leave. Retirees, government retirees, good pensions, they're living in Idaho. They're moving to Montana. They're moving to Colorado. They're moving to Arizona. Why be here? You got a nice pension check working in the government. Why spend the money here and be here? We all love it here. I mean, we love the weather and that's the main thing. But at a certain point, we call it the weather tax. At a certain point, the weather tax gets to be too much. And you can't have all these tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people come into the state from completely different cultures from around the world and somehow think we're going to keep this melting pot working out. It doesn't work out. So what is the difference between these guys and the people you mentioned that would come legally, the people that want to immigrate here? Is there a difference between the types of people that are coming? Yeah. So in general, I mean, obviously, there's a lot of people coming across the border who are just good, hardworking people that want something better for their kids and their family. This doesn't make them evil. But we have a set of rules here. And in order to run your country, you have to keep those rules. So I call it like the lifeboat. Think of the United States as a lifeboat. If you overload the lifeboat, everybody drowns. The whole thing flips over. You just can't keep on loading it up. Does that mean we can't be compassionate to people? Does that mean that we don't want to bring people in? I think the last numbers that I looked at is we still, as a country, immigrate more people here legally in our country than the rest of the world combined. The numbers just aren't even close. Because we've always been a melting pot culture. We've always been from some other places. You're from a different place than I'm from. My family came from Ireland and Germany and all those places years ago. So we've always had that. But you have to have a system in place to say, what does your country need? What kind of labor force does it need? What kind of education does it need? So that you just don't over swamp the lifeboat. I forget who said these lines first, but it's basically like you need a border wall. You need an extremely high border wall to keep people from getting in. But you need big wide open doors to get people through. That means through a process. Jim, we had a chance to actually talk to one of the retired border patrols about their experience and what he sees on the ground. What is the job like and what they're going through now. Because it seems like they've been told not to take action. They cannot really send people back, but their job is really to protect the borders. So let's take a look at that. I think the worst thing that's going on right now is with my agency. I think this probably applies across the board too. The border patrol secures the perimeter of the country. That's its job. And the people doing that take a lot of pride in what they're doing. You've got the OFO, they handle the ports of entry. And you know, Air and Marine, of course, they do what they do. The border patrol handles everything in between, everything else. So I think across the board we have this image that we're the knights standing on the wall guarding the castle and keeping the Huns at the gate and controlling who has access to the country. We've got our population inside the castle and we're standing on the wall keeping everybody else on the other side until they use the front door. And so that's fun. You know, it works great until you get a new administration that comes in and opens the front door. And everything that we did for all these years is no longer relevant. So when I say there's nobody watching the border, I'm being very serious. There's nobody standing on the wall. So there's very little control over who's actually using the front door. And the reason is because all these knights that used to be standing on the wall are now down taking care of kids, driving people around that are just being released into the country with little if any guarantee that they're ever going to show up for their court date. So what are we doing here? Why did any of my co-workers die in the line of duty? So it's very hard not to internalize that. So when we start talking about mental health, that's going to follow you home. And when it starts following you home, it takes a toll on your health and your home and your career longevity. And yeah, the spokes start coming off of the wheel. And next thing you know, you have a bunch of people that are just zombies showing up for work. And I can't wait to stop doing this. So you've got people that went into a profession that said, I'm going to be the frontline to protect the border of the United States. They take an oath. They basically put their lives at stake for it. They're now in a process where the administration is saying, well, we told you you're here to protect the border, but really we just want you to kind of facilitate things. And by the way, we've got all these people coming in there at asylum. So here's a lot of paperwork you have to do. Meanwhile, you've got the drug cartels bringing in drugs. They'll rush in a thousand people over here and then bring drugs in around the corner. So for people that work in that business who signed up for something different than they're doing, it's really rough on them right now. One of the things I don't people are aware of is that border patrol people who've been in that job, there's a level of suicide amongst some of these workers. It's just a horrible situation. When you think about it, your whole life, this is what you wanted to do. You want to protect the border. You want to do the right thing. You caught the bad guys, or at least the people that shouldn't be here. You kind of set it right. And everybody just says, well, just let them go. Let them go. It's happened at the border. It's also happened with our local police where they arrest people for stealing and they're let out before they're even... The paperwork is done. The paperwork's not even done and they're let out. Anybody wants to have a job where they feel like they're getting something done and they're moving forward on it. And if you're at the border right now or a local police officer, he or she's not feeling like what they're doing is making any difference. There's very few, even with the Title 42, there's very few that get pushed out of the country. It's just a mess because nobody's really trying to stop it again. The process is working perfectly well for the White House, the administration, and everybody else who feels that it's okay. I mean, not to be mean on it in there. I'll give it the most charitable way I can to people that like this process. There are a lot of people, good-hearted people just think the rest of the world's really bad and we got to save these people, let them come to our country, and they'll be better off than they are there. That's maybe the charitable way to look at it. The other side to look at it is we have to have processes. We have to make sure people in our country get housing or get taken care of or at least have the ability to buy housing or go to decent schools. And you can't keep on overloading people here and thinking, oh, it's just no problem. Also, the people that want to come here legally, those engineers in India and other countries that want to come, they're applying for these visas. I think they're falling behind in the system too, right? Well, there's a whole issue with that is you obviously want to get the highest educated. I mean, it's kind of like you have people come from around the world to go to our best universities in the world and after they get educated, we kick them out. Probably not the brightest thing to do. Also, when they're going to our universities, they're here for four or five years, they're younger, they melt in better. They're learning the language, they're learning the culture, they're being part of it. When you have people that have no assets, no real education, and I'm not saying everybody coming across the border doesn't have assets or education, but a vast majority don't. The people that are crossing kind of like that, I call it a bum's rush. Just rush the gate. Just rush the gate and get into the concert. Nobody has to have a ticket. Those people are overloading the system. So there's a lot of people that we want to come. There's also the other side of that, that we had a situation, and it still happens in the Silicon Valley, where you have people already in the United States that have their visa that are afraid to cause a problem at work or leave somewhere because if they lose their job, they lose their visa, and they have to go back to their country. There's arguments that said a lot of people are being brought over here because these engineers are cheaper, and they're competing against people that were born or citizens of the United States driving the wage down. This also happened in the aerospace back a few years, where you started saying, hey, wait a second, they're bringing in people from outside the country to do aerospace work, and some of the engineers here said, well, we have no way to negotiate our wages because they can find people cheaper than us. Now, what do you think the impact would be on California? So do you think this whole government going to the border is kind of like a political? Yeah, it's clearly a political. Because it doesn't make sense, because he just signed the law to give benefits. Right, right. I mean, it's all the time you hear somebody say, the White House spokesperson just said this last week that the previous administration left them a broken, destroyed process. They just say it. What was destroyed or broken? Nothing. They were putting up a wall. They were doing a good job keeping people out of the country and having an orderly process. There was nothing broken, but they just say it. So you got to look at what they do, not what they say. So having Newsom saying, you know, I'm not running for president, but I'm down here at the border. I mean, come on. That is a campaign stop, is all that was. So that when they go to the primaries, you can say, I've been to that border. Let me tell you the problems that have been there. And everybody goes, oh, that's interesting. It's elementary, quite frankly. Do you think this whole illegal immigration here in California, with the benefits that we just brought on board, do you think it's going to impact us to a point where we will see it? Well, it already is. I mean, it already is. I mean, drive around, you know, what were normal neighborhoods in Los Angeles County. They're just, it's getting worse and worse. You cannot keep on bringing people in and thinking, you know, it's like when we look at different situations for housing and they come up with programs to help people buy a house. Okay. That's just to help the demand. Right. We don't have, we don't, we don't have a demand problem. We have a ton of demand. We have a supply problem. We don't have enough houses, but you keep on bringing people in and think like they somehow, what, they just hide in the corner. They hide in an alley. You don't see them. They live somewhere. They live in a house. They live in maybe an over, you know, a crowded house, but they're going to live in housing. You know, they're going to get some kind of work, legal or illegal work, and they're going to live in housing. And we don't have that excess housing around here. He pushes up the costs. Jim, some people argue that we need these people. And when they come here, they, they provide value because they work. Right. And they're going to pay taxes. And then from the taxes, the benefits are paid. Okay. So a person that's making 35, $40,000 a year that has a couple of kids that cost us 10, 15,000 a piece to educate, it's getting healthcare that's costing us thousands of dollars per month in no way, shape or form is paying enough in their taxes to pay for themselves. They say they pay for themselves, but they don't get close. What it also does is you've got a lot of employers who maybe aren't paying people what they need to pay them to take care of themselves and take care of the services they need. But as long as you have people that'll come in and do the job for cheaper, we, as, as Americans end up subsidizing it, all the taxpayers subsidize it. So if I'm giving you food stamps and I'm giving you, you know, the, they don't use food stamps anymore. I'm showing my age. They give you credit cards. Now, if you're using those cards, that's paid for by the taxpayer. So clearly people coming in for a 15 or $20 an hour job, if they have a family in any way, shape or form are not carrying the load. They just aren't. In general, but we've always had that in the country where not everybody carried the load for themselves, but people moved up over time. They moved up, but you can't have people just rushing across the border and have so many that you can't absorb them move up. It doesn't work. Do you think the state leaders, because for me, it's hard to, to think that they want to get more votes because it's a very democratic state. You can't get more blue than this. So what do you think they think about this? Do you think they are wondering that we could get hurt in the process if we have a lot of people coming and providing the benefits? Back to, back to how I looked at from a charitable standpoint, there's just a lot of people that think we should help everybody in the world. I mean, these aren't evil people think, think that they just think differently than other people would think about, Hey, we still have to have a process. We still have to make sure that we don't just change the whole culture of the United States. But from, from several ways, from the, the political look at it, there's a whole thing for elected officials to make that part of their party happy. I mean, think about where we are at now with people of color. Okay. I got to tell you, I, you know, I'm just a white Irish German kid, right? I, and I meet certain people. I don't know if they're just have a little bit of tint or they're mixed race. I'm serious. You just don't know. And all of a sudden, who is it? Megan and Harry. I didn't know that, you know, she was black. I had no idea she was black, but all of a sudden, Oh my gosh, you know, the, uh, the Royal family's upset because really do we, does anybody in California in 2022, look at somebody and say, think about their race, the tone of their skin. Yeah. Nobody cares, but they bring that up constantly because there is a group of people that are, because it works, it keeps on going and it makes people feel like this group I'm part of. So you keep on adding it on. And I'm like, okay, I don't know if they're from the middle East, maybe they're Italian. I, you know, you just don't know now, you know, white guys like me, we just kind of stand out and you kind of figure you're Irish German somewhere, English or something. And, and that's it. But the rest is just mixed. And, you know, that's a good thing. That's a good thing. One of the things in culture and in the United States is we've always been mixing. Now it wasn't as much color, but you know, the Italians and the Irish, you know, 50, 67 years ago, they got in love and they get married and they have kids and, and different, um, nationalities get together. Now we have more races getting together. That's a good thing. It's not a bad thing. So it shouldn't be looked at. Oh, these are just people of color. I don't care. Most people don't care. So Jim, it looks like politicians are saying something and they're doing something completely different. Right. What else is new? They've always done that. And it's getting worse and worse. Right. Because I used to be a politician. Remember, I've taken this class. I was mayor. Yeah. I mean, I understand why they do it. And I, and, and, and again, don't blame politicians if it works. I mean, the public needs to, you know, read the newspaper, you know, read the epic times, and then you learn more things and you find out what's going on, you know, be a little bit more educated. So is there another way, is there a way for the public to do something so the politicians pay attention to our real problems? You know what the, the public usually doesn't really get involved until they're really upset when things really, really go wrong. And that's too bad because a lot of things take time to go wrong. And, and, and some things you just can't fix after a while, but it's usually at a certain point, people get upset enough and they'll do something about it. Um, thought it was going to happen this last year with the quote unquote, what red wave, which did not happen. A lot of other issues happened with, uh, um, you know, the abortion issues came and got involved. Birth control. I mean, all sorts of crazy stuff got involved and, and it caused problems that people weren't as upset enough, but you know, there's inflation. Now people are going to start losing jobs because we're, you know, we're raising rates and that's going to make a difference. That's going to also hurt for the immigration issue is people start losing jobs who've been here a long time. They're competing against people that'll take a lower wages, you know, and it's always amazing to me where the, the unions always support the democratic party at the democratic party is just letting people come in, which is depressing wages. Jim Rickheimer, cohost of the Weekend Answer at on KRLA. It was great to have you in California Insider. I really enjoyed being here. Thank you. We want to ask you to sign up to our California Insider email list. You will receive exclusive updates on our upcoming documentary and get the latest inside stories on everything that's happening in California. Go to insiderca.com and sign up. Thank you for watching. Please click the icon on the left to subscribe to our channel. We bring you the most pressing issues California is facing with straightforward and in-depth interviews. See you in the next video.