WTH: Does Trump Support Legal Immigration? Ramesh Ponnuru and Michael Strain Debate
What the Hell Is Going On
AEI Podcasts
4.4 • 633 Ratings
🗓️ 31 October 2024
⏱️ 61 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
President Donald Trump has routinely said he supports immigration, as long as it’s legal, including when Marc interviewed the former president for the Washington Post. Then in the pages of National Review, Marc’s AEI colleagues Michael Strain and Ramesh Ponnuru debated the extent to which Trump supported legal immigration during his presidency and now on the campaign trail. So, we are bringing Strain and Ponnuru onto the pod to debate the extent of Trump’s support for legal immigration, and how he might and should address immigration reform in a potential second term.
Ramesh Ponnuru is a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he studies politics and public policy with a particular focus on the future of conservatism. Concurrently, he is the editor of National Review, where he has covered national politics and public policy for 25 years, and a columnist for the Washington Post.
Michael Strain is the director of Economic Policy Studies and the Arthur F. Burns Scholar in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute. He is also the Professor of Practice at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University, a research fellow with the IZA Institute of Labor Economics, a research affiliate with the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and a member of the Aspen Economic Strategy Group. Dr. Strain also writes as a columnist for Project Syndicate.
Read the transcript here.
Read Marc’s interview with President Trump in the Washington Post here.
Read Michael Strain’s article in the National Review here.
Read Ramesh Ponnuru’s article in the National Review here.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This podcast is brought to you by the American Enterprise Institute. |
| 0:03.0 | If you like what you hear, please subscribe, rate, review, and share. Thanks for listening. Here's our show. What the hell's going on? What the hell is going on? What the hell is going on? I don't know what the hell he's talking about. You don't have to know what the hell is on it. What hell's the matter with these guys? We don't know what's going on. What hell's going on? |
| 0:01.1 | Who in God's name knows what it's all about. |
| 0:29.3 | Hi, I'm Danielle Pletka. |
| 0:30.8 | And I'm Mark Tiesin. |
| 0:32.0 | Welcome to our podcast. |
| 0:33.5 | What the hell is going on? |
| 0:35.4 | Mark, what the hell is going on today? |
| 0:58.4 | Well, what the hell is going on is we're exploring one of the reasons why AI is so awesome, which is we all disagree and we write about it. So I went to Mara Lago and interviewed Donald Trump. And one of the things I did... Really? You haven't mentioned that. Yes. One of the things I did in that conversation is I explored, I was very intrigued with a policy proposal. |
| 1:13.9 | He's put forward, though not talked a lot about, which is that he wants to give a green card to every foreign student who comes to America and finishes either a four-year or two-year institution, academic institution in the United States. There's about a million foreign students in America every year. |
| 1:18.5 | That's a heck of a lot of green cards. And that's a very vigorous policy of support for legal |
| 1:24.1 | immigration. And so I wanted to explore that with him. And so I talked to him. I had an extended conversation with him about legal immigration. |
| 1:30.2 | I asked him to share his family's immigration story. |
| 1:33.1 | He told me about how his father came over as a five-year-old with his grandfather to Alaska to join the gold rush and started building hotels, which kind of presage where he would end up being. |
| 1:42.3 | Instead of searching for gold, he built hotels for the people who were searching for gold. |
| 1:46.5 | His mother came from Scotland and loved the queen, but became a proud American, and that he's a supporter of legal immigration. |
| 1:54.4 | I asked him, do immigrants make America better? And he said, yes, they do. So we had an interesting conversation about his proposal and all the rest of it. And then our colleague, Mike Strain, wrote a piece in National Review explaining why I was wrong and why Donald Trump was not, in fact, a supporter of legal immigration, and that he would probably reduce legal immigration and cited a number of reasons why. And then our colleague Ramesh Pannuru wrote a piece responding |
| 2:19.3 | to Mike, which basically mediated between the two of us and said that he's actually probably more |
| 2:24.3 | of a supporter of legal immigration than Mike suggests. But who knows what the hell Donald Trump |
| 2:28.6 | will do when he's president, if I'm summarizing these things fairly. And so we decided, |
| 2:33.3 | let's bring them on the pod and talk about it. |
| 2:36.3 | Yeah, we really, and we really cover everything. I mean, I don't want to put in any spoilers, |
... |
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