Victor Davis Hanson

speaker

2,022 appearances 16 recordings 5 series first heard Dec 2024 last heard 23 Mar

Victor Davis Hanson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 2.

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The Victor Davis Hanson Show · History of Income Tax Amendment 16 and News of the Week · 1 Mar 2025 podcast

I don't think any of them are going to buy it. No, I can guarantee you our audience was not going to buy it unless they wanted to have a comic relief.

Comprehensive immigration reform.

That was always a lie. Yeah. They caught what they called comprehensive immigration was to try to fool. two or three senators into thinking that they were going to have a solution when it was basically amnesty. And people are not stupid.

When Ronald Reagan signed the Simpson-Mazzoli Act of 1986, which really took the Border Patrol off the border and gave I-9 forms to the employers, there was massive fraud. I know that when I was farming in those years, it was a joke. You had to keep records of I-9 forms, and somebody would give it to you, and then you'd had no idea who they were. You had no idea, and no one ever checked.

And the old system, they called it La Migra, and they were everywhere, and they stopped. But my point is that That was a complete failure, Simpson-Mazzoli Act. So the border was open. Obama opened it at first to get running. Remember, he said it's only legal. And then he got elected, and then he kind of opened it.

And then when he was up for reelection in 2012, he kind of remembered it's only legal. But then he just opened it wide. Trump came in with it. He started... Everybody criticized him because he didn't build the new wall. But the old wall, he did 500 miles of it. It wasn't a wall. It was under George W. Bush. It was just a rickety fence. So he worked. And what did they do?

He tried to get the military, the Secretary of Defense... opposed him. I mean, you had Jim Mattis at Secretary of Defense and John Kelly. They were not on the MAGA agenda. They weren't. Rex Tillerson was not on the MAGA agenda. He had a team that did not believe that you should stop all illegal immigration. He tried. Then they cherry-picked judges. Then they said that he was putting them in cages.

Remember that? I was on an NPR broadcast, and I tried to very carefully say the cages were made by Barack Obama. He inherited them. And they're not cages. They're facilities that if you didn't have that security, you would have no security, given that 90% of the people do not show up for their deportation or their immigration status hearings. And then after I got off...

The host that was interviewing me started trashing me, which you never do in journalism. You don't interview anybody. If you want to interview somebody and you don't agree with them, you ask them tough questions. You don't have them go off and then start attacking them when they can't. And that's what happened.

My point is that with all of that, if you look at the last year, he's finally stopped it. He had no more catch and release. You had to apply for refugee status while you were in a different country. He beefed up the Border Patrol, and they were starting to build the new wall, 20, 30 miles. They just started. And then the election happened.

And then Joe Biden, for the first year, if you look at that first year, he was just saying, well, I'm not for illegal. And what I mean is the fumes of the Trump administration had deterred people. Don't go north. But they didn't. And then Joe Biden, somebody said, well, you know, Wait a minute. In 2020, in the primary, he said, come north. Remember that? Hey, everybody, come north.

We're not going to do anything. Maybe we'll try it. And they started trying. And then by the second, third, it was off the charts. And then Donald Trump comes in and they say, wow, he didn't do anything in the first 30 days. Yes, he did. But it's just beginning because he's getting the message out that you will be deported.

The other really important thing to remember is here's the left's argument. Donald Trump said he was just going to get 500,000 criminals. Well, they're hard to find. But here's the point. You go in, you hear there's two cartel members in an apartment building. And so you go in and one guy's got his nephew there and one guy's got his girlfriend, his buddy but there's no felony record on them.

So you get the two people and then you just, what do you do? I'm not allowed to ask your immigration status because we're giving de facto amnesty for anybody who entered illegally. Oh, don't tell me whether you did or no. They're not going to do that. They're going to say the law says you cannot enter the United States. By the way, you're next to these criminals. Can I see your...

I don't have any. I entered in legal. Well, you're going to be deported. Oh, my God. They deported people who weren't criminals. They were criminals. They broke the law. What is it you don't understand? There is either a law or there's not a law. If they're not criminals, then anybody can come across the border.

That's a felony, by the way. And I think some of our governors got that message when they were bragging. Was it the New Jersey governor bragging he was going to put somebody illegally above his garage? And then somebody said, well, we're going to charge you with a felony. If you don't believe that, everybody.

If you don't believe that it's against the law to come into the United States without documentation or permission, then just leave your passport at home when you fly in from Holland or Britain or France. Just leave it back in your hotel or tuck it into your suitcase and say you don't have one and see how far you, a U.S. citizen, get by trying to enter the United States without a passport.

I've seen it in my 50 years. At least...

five times and these are people who somehow got on a plane either without a passport but more likely somewhere in their overhead luggage they dropped it or in the seat and they come in there and you can see what happens they have no passport the person at the window in all five cases that i saw they call security and they take the person into a room i don't know what they do but i have a feeling they

make sure they're legal or they're US citizens and they go on a computer and find out and maybe they find them or they let them come in with a Xerox version. But you cannot do that. And if a citizen can't do it, why would you allow a foreign national to do it?

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