Executive Director Mark Krikorian, Senior National Security Fellow Todd Bensman, and Director of Policy Studies Jessica Vaughan with the Center for Immigration Studies explained how immigration – both legal and illegal – into the U.S. must be reduced in order to balance out the nation’s rapidly rising foreign-born population.
In October 2023, the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey showed that 15 percent of the U.S. population at the time was foreign-born, which is the highest percentage that any U.S. government survey or census has ever recorded, according to the Center for Immigration Studies.
“Most immigrants in the United States are legal immigrants, so if you’re going to reduce the percentage and the numbers, it has to be done through reducing legal immigration,” Krikorian said on Thursday’s episode of The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy.
Bensman, going off of Vaughan’s point of how the U.S. immigration surge has been a “social experiment that’s been forced on us,” noted how no other country in “world history” has had an “open border” that allows 100 percent of everybody who gets to the border, in.
In regards to coexisting with immigrants in the U.S., Krikorian touched on the issue of “Americanizing” newcomers, explaining how the foreign-born population is not being assimilated to U.S. values and culture as it once was as patriotism among native citizens decreases.
“Numbers are the issue here because today’s immigrants aren’t really that different from immigrants of a hundred or two hundred years ago,” Krikorian explained. “You know, some are good, some are bad, most of them are just regular people like everybody else, but the number and the percentage of immigrants are unprecedented. And that has an effect. We actually are pretty good at assimilating newcomers, but at some point It doesn’t really work very well.”
“In a modern society, mass communications and transportation makes it easier not to assimilate…Is our elite patriotic? Do the people who run our schools love America and teach immigrants to love America? Of course not and this is a problem. The immigrants aren’t doing that to us – that’s our problem. We need to fix that before we can successfully Americanize newcomers,” Krikorian added. “Now even our kids are being de-Americanized, if you will, but at least American kids of American parents have roots and family history… Immigrant kids, essentially, have to be adopted into America, and what we’re telling them is that, no, America stinks, George Washington was horrible, all that stuff’s bad, and you would never want to become a part of this. Well, what kind of recipe is that for successful Americanization?”
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
