On today’s episode of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words,” Victor David Hanson and Jack Fowler call out Sen. Elizabeth Warren for insisting illegal immigrants aren’t getting federal health insurance.
The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Victor Davis Hanson: The other thing is, when you have 12 million people coming in illegally [as discovered] in the Yale study of 2019—I want everybody to listen to this because I get these people that write to me and say, “You’re just lying about illegal immigration. There was only about 6 or 7 million and [former President Joe] Biden only left in five. And if you say 12, most of them were legal.” No, we have at most a million legal people come in, and we have somewhere between 10 to 12 [million] illegal entries. We don’t know if the entry is equivalent to a person, but it was probably 8 to 10 million people. And the Yale study of 2019, six years ago, said all of the estimates are wrong, and there’s more likely 21 million people.
Let’s say average another 3 or 4 million, 25 plus, we probably have 35 million, and we know we have 53 million foreign-born. So, it wouldn’t be unusual to have 35 million of them here illegally. So, when [Sen.] Elizabeth Warren gets on TV and starts screaming that you’re lying, there’s no such thing that illegal aliens can get federal health insurance, she should just go to any emergency room in California.
And I’ve done that twice, as I said earlier, in the last two years and the first time there was not one person speaking English [out of] maybe 70. The second time I think there was a person speaking English, but they were from an English-speaking country or where English was a second language.
And when I started talking to the person, they were very surprised that I had a private Medicare Advantage. They don’t see that. Everybody either has no ID or they’re on Medi-Cal. And if you think that’s crazy, 40% of people who reside in California are on Medi-Cal.
Jack Fowler: Yeah.
Hanson: So, Ms. Warren, just because you write in that there will not be illegal aliens getting Obamacare, does not mean that when somebody comes in here, they don’t have an infected tooth or twisted ankle. And when they do have that, and they have a lot, they go to the emergency room and no one says, “No, you can’t come in. You don’t have means.” And then somebody pays for that. We don’t care about the program or the name of the payer, but it’s the federal government.
Fowler: Right.
Hanson: And when you have 10 million people coming in, it’s a huge cost. And that’s what the Republicans are trying to tell you.
Fowler: Layered onto that, Victor, is the explosion of disability, Social Security disability …
Hanson: You know, I get really upset about—
Fowler: … 35-year-old men who are bad-backed.
Hanson: No, it’s not just that. My son got a D because he has attention deficit disorder. So, he’s disabled and he needs to get [disability.] I mean, I think it’s great to have disability for people who have severe mental, you know what I mean, Downs, absolutely. But when you have people who are gaming the system …
Fowler: Yeah, of course.
Hanson: I had an aunt that had severe polio. She was shrunken. They said she had been a beautiful young girl about 9, and she got in the swimming pool, I think, in 1924 or something, polio, and then they took her to the Shriners and they did 19 operations to break all of her bones to straighten them and she ended up incapacitated. And they could not get disability in the ‘60s for her. And finally, my grandfather took her in. She was like 55, 60 years old. And he said, “Watch her write.” Her hands were like claws. I went with him and there was a gruff old guy. “I don’t know about this. I don’t know. Can you walk?” And then she wrote it and he goes, “I can’t understand it.” My grandfather says, “That’s the point. She can’t write a check.”
So, then he gave her [the disability], and she was so happy. I think she got $130 a month. And when she died, she said to me before she died, she goes, “I want to have an inheritance for all five of my nephews, I think I have about $6,000. Can you believe that? $6,000.”
What I’m getting at everybody, there was an ethos. A [John F. Kennedy], “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” And that permeated all these programs.
Fowler: Yeah.
Hanson: When you have people who have never had the American experience, and they don’t know anything about your culture, your language, and you decide to let in millions in one big fell swoop, then you better have a Marshall Plan for civic education. You better say, “We have at every Walmart, at every Home Depot, at every Target, we have a little booth where you sign up for English lessons and tutorials about the American experience,” but we don’t.
Instead, we give them filtered down DEI. You walk one inch into the United States, you have claims against the racist country. And that’s a disaster.
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