(Daily Signal)—I want to talk about illegal immigration. You know, this is the point in our history that we’ve never been before. We have not a porous border, but no border at all. We’ve had somewhere between 10 [million] to 12 million illegal entrants since the Biden administration began.

There is no real corpus of immigration law. It’s been destroyed. We’re at a historical period in our country, where 55 million people, never such a large number of people born outside the United States, that are residing here. In terms of percentages, almost 16% of the population was not born in the United States.

That’s an enormous task of assimilation, integration, [and] civic education, and we just haven’t been doing any of that. So, what are we going to do? Well, the first thing is: We need to stop “catch and release.” We need to make entrants, legal entrants, go back to their country if they’re applying for refugee status. You cannot come here, and then say you’re a refugee. You must ascertain that and prove that at the consulate overseas.

We’ve got to finish the walls. It’s a 2,000-mile border, and we’ve never quite been able to continue. We’ve got a wall or fence or somehow obstruct the entire 2,000-mile border. That will save manpower. It will save time and cost, and it will have an enormous deterrent effect.

The next couple of things are a little bit trickier. I think that whatever your status is, if you are sending money back to a foreign country from the United States that is singled out as a source of illegal immigration—Mexico, Latin America, for example—then the United States government should put a 10% to 20% or 30% tax on all the remittances.

That would earn us up to maybe somewhere around $20 billion. And that would also deter Mexico, to take one example, that depends on remittances as its largest source of foreign exchange—greater than tourism, greater than its oil revenues. And yet, so often the American taxpayer—state, local, federal—through generous subsidies, free up the cash so that the illegal resident can send it back for social necessities that the Mexican government itself is responsible for, so we’re subsidizing everybody but ourselves.

I think it’s very important that we start looking at the countries that are the source of illegal immigration in terms of security. A Sudan, a Syria, terrorist countries that support, countries that support terrorism like Venezuela, the Middle East, especially Iran. Russia, as well.

Why would we let them send people here that we have no background checks, have not adjudicated their status? So, we should have a travel ban, an immediate deportation, and immediate consequences for the mother country that knowingly sends these people here. And that, too, would be a deterrent.

We’ve got to also look at anchor babies.

The 14th Amendment didn’t really ever say, as sometimes [is] alleged, that if you’re born in the United States, then you’re an automatic citizen. It says if you’re born in the United States, and not subject to the laws of another country. All the people coming, in some sense, are subject to the laws of another country.

So, we have to redefine that, either through legislation or renewed attempts in the courts.

Europe, the Left always looks for guidance—17 [European] countries don’t even allow it. And the other 13 or 14 have restrictions that qualify it. So, we’re the only country in the world that gives unqualified citizenship to people who happen to be born here and then anchor an entire family.

Why not also put a 10-, 20-year ban on people who have been detained here illegally and stop them from applying for a green card or legal readmissions for 20 years? That would be a very powerful deterrent.

In other words, we would announce sometime in February and say, “We want all of you to know, all 12 million who came here during the Biden administration, to take the first iteration of cohort, you have 30 days to go back. If you do not go back to your country, and you are detained, arrested here in the United States, you will be deported, but you will not be given any chance to get a green card for 10 to 20 years,” depending on how the courts or legislation adjudicates it.

And finally, I think it’s time to look at how we deport people. The first 500,000 who have committed a crime, it will be no problem. There’s unanimous consent. They should be deported immediately. They’re wreaking havoc on the American population.

The next iteration, the 1.5 [million], 1.7 million people who have already gone through the system, they’ve been adjudicated, they failed to show up for the court hearings. Or they left detention when they were facing deportation.

Those would be the next group that would face deportation. The third group of people, as I said earlier, from terrorist countries or terrorist-supporting countries, no one is going to sympathize with their residents here.

The fourth group is a little trickier, but I think we could pretty easily find hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of able-bodied residents who are on public assistance and who have not been here five years. If you haven’t been here five years, you came during the Biden open-borders era.

You were on welfare of some sort, and you’re able to work. You should go back home. That would leave a large group of people who have been here five years. They’ve never committed a crime. They’re not on public assistance. And they want to get a green card, not citizenship, a green card.

I think if we had won public opinion and support by deporting the most egregious offenders, say 10 [million] to 12 million, then I think in a bipartisan fashion, we could work out a system for the law-abiding, the productive, and the long-residing American residents and allow them to pay a fine to recapture legality and stay in the United States.

It’s going to be a tough road to restore border security, because the prior administration didn’t believe in it. But I think now that the White House, the Senate, and the House are in Republican hands, it’s absolutely possible. It can be done rather quickly.

Thank you very much. I’m Victor Hanson for The Daily Signal. Please subscribe to The Daily Signal for our next episode.

(Daily Signal)—I’m here in California. I’ve been a lifelong resident of the state, fifth generation to live in the same house. I had a house in the Sierra, and it would almost burn down three years ago during the Aspen Fire, and I’m speaking on the evening when you’ve all heard about the disastrous fire in Los Angeles.

As I’m speaking on a Wednesday night, there have been 15,000 acres, 1,000 structures destroyed. Nobody knows how many people are killed or missing. And how do we characterize this? Everybody’s talking about the Santa Ana winds, climate change—I mean everybody, the people in power.

But it was preventable. And once it started, this fire, it could have been assuaged. You could have had it lessened, that the severity didn’t have to be as catastrophic. So, I would characterize it as a DEI–Green New Deal hydrogen bomb. It’s something out of “Dante’s Inferno.”

And what I mean by that is, it’s a systems breakdown, a civilizational collapse. When you look at the people in charge, [California Gov.] Gavin Newsom flew in, to sort of do these performance-art stunts, but he has systematically ensured that water out of the Sacramento River and the watershed of Northern California would go out to the sea, rather than into the aqueduct, so Los Angeles didn’t have sufficient amounts of water.

He bragged not very long ago that he blew up four dams on the Klamath River. They provided 80,000 homes with clean hydroelectric power. They offered recreation, flood control, irrigation. He blew them up.

California’s fire management, whether we look at the Paradise Fire or the Aspen Fire near where I’m speaking, it destroyed 60 million trees. We have no timber industry in California. [Newsom’s] dismantled it.

We don’t clean the forest. We don’t let loggers come in and have a viable livelihood by harvesting trees. It’s sort of considered natural to let these things burn or to at least create the conditions in which they will inevitably be burned.

It’s almost as if we don’t like humans. We worry about grubs and worms and birds and the ecosystem.

The second breakdown was the mayor, Karen Bass, was in Africa. You tell me why the mayor of the third-largest city in the United States at fire season, when she had been warned and warned for days on end that the Santa Ana winds were up to 100 miles an hour in the evening, and there was a danger of fire, and she goes off to Africa for the inauguration of the president of Ghana.

With all due respect, Mayor, but who cares? You have an obligation to the 6 million people of greater Los Angeles. And then we have the fire chief. I don’t really care that she’s LGBTQ, I don’t care [about] any of that. All I do care is her emphases. She’s been bragging for the last two years that her goal was to make sure [the Fire Department] was diverse and inclusive.

That can be good if it’s competent. But when you announce that 70% of your hiring will not be meritocratic, but will be based on diversity, equity, inclusion, then you’re not putting the interest of your constituents first.

There were not even enough, there wasn’t enough water pressure in Pacific Palisades. Pacific Palisades is not where I live. It’s one of the wealthiest, most exclusive neighborhoods in the United States. If they don’t have water, then no one’s going to get water, believe me.

There’s not enough insurance. There were famous actors that didn’t have insurance. Why? Because industry is overregulated, it’s fraught with people who make fraudulent claims, and the insurance industry knows that California is hostile to it, but more importantly that it will never clean up its forest or take preventive, time-tried, ancient protocols to lessen the dangers of fire.

And so put it all together, whether it’s a deliberate policy to not store water, not preserve water. Last year was one of the wettest years that we’ve had. We’ve had three out of the last four years have been very wet. We had a huge snowpack. We had rivers that were running in 19th-century fashion, but out to the sea to save the delta smelt.

So, it was a total systems collapse from the idea of not spending money on irrigation, storage, water, fire prevention, force management, a viable insurance industry, a DEI hierarchy. You put it all together and it’s something like a DEI-Green New Deal hydrogen bomb.

Gavin Newsom was fiddling, as he’s almost Nero Newsom. And this has been something that is just unimaginable, this system’s breakdown.

And to finish, what we’re seeing in California is a state with 40 million people. And yet the people who run it feel that it should return to a 19^th-century pastoral condition. They are decivilizing the state, and deindustrializing the state, and defarming the state, but they’re not telling the 40 million people that their lifestyles will have to revert back to the 19th century when you had no protection from fire, you didn’t have enough water in California, you didn’t have enough power, you didn’t pump oil.

So, we are deliberately making these decisions not to develop energy, not to develop a timber industry, not to protect the insurance industry, not to protect houses and property.

And we’re doing it in almost a purely nihilistic fashion. And Karen Bass should resign. She came to the airport, back from Africa. She had nothing to say. She was confronted at the airport: “Why were you in Africa? Why did you cut the fire department?”

They cut the fire department by almost $18 million. They gave fire protective equipment to Ukraine’s first responders, and she had nothing to say. She had nothing to say because she couldn’t say anything.

I don’t want to be too pessimistic or bleak tonight, but this is one of the most alarming symptoms of a society gone mad, and if this continues, and if this were to spread to other states, we would become a Third World country if we’re not in parts already.