Stephen Miller: This One Thing Can Stop Illegal Immigration

CLAY: We are joined by Stephen Miller and, Stephen, when Buck and I saw the great work that’s being done right now by Bill Melugin down on the border — he works for Fox News; it feels oftentimes like he’s the only journalist down there — showing the situation in El Paso, Texas, with a thousand people essentially waiting to come across the border. It’s never been this bad. How much worse do you think it’s going to get as we come up on the end of this year and begin 2023?

MILLER: Well, first, let me also agree with you about Bill Melugin and what an invaluable service he’s providing. It’s a huge indictment of the entire media and corporate press in this country that with a handful of minor exceptions, Bill is the only one down there reporting, providing imagery, providing video. And it shows you the media is not interested, first and foremost in profit, but in ideology, because imagine how much better the ratings would be on our on our dying nightly news programs if they sent cameras down there, too, and spent their whole broadcast talking about what’s happening on our border. They would double triple the ratings from Americans seeing us for the first time.

But they’re not going to do that, of course. To answer your question, the scariest thing is there’s no limit to how bad it can get. This is the fundamental math problem of illegal immigration and how we have to change the way we think about it. And what I mean by that is this: For most of the last 50 years, so we’re… Actually even going back further basically to the Eisenhower administration. Illegal immigration was a bilateral problem between Mexico and the United States, where Mexican illegal immigrants — mostly single adult males — would come to the United States. And this was, of course, a significant problem, but it was also a manageable problem.

Then what started happening with the availability of mass transit, the ability of people to be able to come from pretty much any country in the world and get to Mexico, even with only a relatively small amount of money, opened this thing up to the whole of Planet Earth. So now you have a situation where there’s a few billion people in the world whose financial situation would be better by comingto United States and even working for half of minimum wage. That would double or triple the incomes they’ve been living in on their whole lives, plus free medical care, free education, free everything. So there’s no limit, long story short, to how bad it can get and it will get unless the new Republican House can step in.

BUCK: How do we change this situation, Stephen? You know, you really were somebody who during the Trump administration, we could count on you when you speak on this issue of immigration, where there’s so much speaking of disinformation that’s out there — and honestly, so many obfuscations and lies the Democrats tell on this issue. One of the biggest ones is that they want it to stop. I don’t believe they want it to stop at all. I think that’s become abundantly clear. What does it look like to make it stop? How do we change the incentive structure that you just laid out?

MILLER: Well, fortunately, you invited exactly the right person on your show to answer that question.

CLAY: (laughing)

MILLER: There’s only one thing — not two, not three, not four, there’s one thing — that has to be done, and that is that we have to get a spending bill that is short term into next year. So that means 41 Republican senators have to block the omni. And I’ll return to that point in a second if we have time. So you end up in, say, January, February, you get a new House, government funding is going to expire, and you have to attach to it — to the appropriations bill — what in Congress talk we call an appropriations rider.

And that extra policy that rider would say in sum/in effect, “None of the funds in this act or any other act shall be used to release any unlawful alien into the United States.” So you would be creating a federal prohibition against a single federal dollar being spent to release any illegal immigrant. So that would be a criminal act. If anyone in the administration releases anybody, that’s a crime. So you’re required to use the tools in our laws, be they remain in Mexico, or safeguard agreements and or better legal procedures to deport anyone — or Title 42 — to deport anybody that you encounter in every single instance.

Any member of Congress who is talking right now about giving back to more resources, more immigration judges, more anything is complicit in the problem, because if you hand a torch to an arsonist, they’re just going to burn things down. Biden will use every extra border agent, every extra helicopter, every extra jeep, every extra bed, every extra everything to get more illegal immigrants further and deeper and more quickly into the United States. Biden inherited a system of flawless deportation. I know because it is what it was what I was doing every single day. I’d be on the phone in the morning with the State Department.

Let’s say we got a group of 50 unaccompanied minors from six different countries. That morning. We’d be on the phone with their embassies saying, “We’ve got kids. Get your shelters open. Find their families. Find the relatives. We’re getting a plane. We’re chartering a flight. They’re going to be here tomorrow.” And you do that three or four days in a row and they stop coming. Now we don’t have the time it takes me to talk through all the regulations and all the policies and all the memoranda and all court things to get to that point.

What matters is we got to that point so that by 2020, no one in this country could stop us from deporting people who came here illegally. And we were doing it. And then Biden came in and he tore it all down on purpose. Everything that’s happened for two years is deliberate, and any member of Congress who doesn’t understand that is part of the problem. What Biden needs are not tools, but handcuffs — handcuffs that stop him and his administration from releasing anyone else into this country.

CLAY: Steven, you and I were on Sean Hannity show. I believe together, if I remember correctly, right after one of the Twitter file revelations and you said something that I then brought on this show and echo — and I want to give you an opportunity to make the case for this audience as well — that we must have primetime hearings associated with the Twitter file revelations. Why is that important? What should it look like? And what do you think the impact would be if the House Republicans make it happen?

MILLER: Yes, this is critically important. Thank you for bringing this up. So the people who watch congressional hearings during the day are people like us and your viewers and listeners. There’s a massive portion of this country who are not sitting around at 11:00, flipping through the cable channels, watching the day’s hearings or C-SPAN where Republican hearings are relegated to. And we know from the coverage of the Twitter files that there will be no coverage of any of these hearings. Whatever people see or hear will be filtered through their media intermediaries. So, the only way to get information of this existential importance about the survival of free society is to copy from what they did with their January 6 Select Committee.

“You care about democracy? Well, nothing is more important than survival of the First Amendment,” and you hold primetime hearings that nobody can ignore, that nobody can avoid. By making a select committee, you ensure that you put your best members on it who can get to the point. Because the problem with some of these hearings, however well-intentioned they are, we have 70 members of Congress showing up. You lose the plot pretty quickly after the first three questioners, and the next 4 hours is kind of inscrutable in many cases. So the Democrats have established a precedent. It’s now up to Republicans to follow it.

BUCK: We’re speaking to Stephen Miller was a senior adviser to former President Trump in the White House. Stephen, I wanted to know what you think about what we’re seeing right now with president — former President Trump’s announcement. And just have you talked to him? How’s his mind set? You know, there’s a lot of people throwing polls around right now. A lot of a lot of early talk about how this is looking. What do you see with the Trump 2024 situation as it stands right now?

MILLER: Oh, I mean, I’ve lived through this cycle of the media trying to cast a negative shadow so many times that I can’t even recall. The truth is, is that no matter who you talk to, it’s clear to everybody that President Trump is inherently the mega favorite going into any Republican primary, and that the issues that he ran on in 2016 and 2020 have now been proven so right and to such an extent that the argument for his reelection is greater now and stronger now than it even was in his first election or the 2020 campaign. And I return even to, of course, the issue that that we started with today, which is border and immigration.

People don’t realize how many wars you have to go to to secure the border. In other words, you don’t just have to fight every single deep state lunatic inside your own government and all the corporate press and all the softies in Congress. But you have to fight every single foreign country that does not want to participate, does not want to play ball. You know, one thing I think people oftentimes don’t even realize when it comes to illegal immigration is that every country has a veto power over you. If they shut down their airport, if Guatemala says, “We’re not taking any illegal alien families. We’re poor. We’re broke. We can’t handle them.

CLAY: Stephen, we had Ann Coulter specifically on, and we got people fired up — as you can well imagine, that’s her job. She said, “Trump… We have to move on from Trump,” and she effectively started making the argument for DeSantis. When you hear people say that as somebody who was a Trump guy. What do you think about the argument of, “Trump’s got one term left? Given his age, it’s time for him to move on, and somebody like Ron DeSantis — another generation — should come along.” That’s the argument she made last week. How would you characterize that argument? What would you say in response to it?

MILLER: Well, I think the generational argument cuts in the other direction, which is that President Trump would be uniquely able to come into office and hit the ground running. Because we pick up exactly where we left off, and we immediately, number one, re-implement the policies we have put into place. Number two, we had. We have an entire shelf stable, full of executive orders and policies that take it to the next level, whether it be getting rid of birthright citizenship or completing the job of decoupling from China and so many other issues that you would be able to complete immediately.

And the message that’d be sent to the world on day one is that we are going to snap back instantly to these America First policies. Every world leader around the world knows where we’ll stand, and we’ll be able to move at lightning speed. And — to your point — because it would be the second of only two available terms, you wouldn’t have to spend the second half of your first term worrying about reelection or worrying about campaigning. So, you’d be able to have a remarkable degree of efficiency. And then, of course, at the end of that term, then that’s when you, of course, will be able to hand off to a new generation of leaders. And so, again, I think the generational argument works almost exactly in the opposite direction.

CLAY: Good stuff, as always. Stephen Miller @StephenM on Twitter, fantastic idea on the primetime hearings. We’ll have you on again soon. Hope everything’s going well. Did you finish season five of Cobra Kai? You good? You caught up now.

MILLER: Yes, and everyone who hasn’t already, get onto Netflix and watch it. You will not regret it. Best season yet.

CLAY: It is a lot of fun.

BUCK: Thank you. Thank you, Stephen, for joining us.