Shadowing Practice: I Don't Care About Illegal Immigration - Learn English Speaking with Video
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I don't care about illegal immigration, and neither should you.
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Here's why.
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This was originally supposed to be a video on whether or not we should abolish ICE, but I feel like that's such an obvious no-brainer at this point that it would just be a waste of time.
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No, instead, on this episode of Progressive Primers, we're going to explain why illegal immigration is actually not a problem.
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I mean, yeah, like, ideally people should be coming in legally, but also ideally people should never jaywalk.
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Millions of people do it every day and nobody cares.
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Okay, so here's the essential grievance that the right has.
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Alright, so this is North America.
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It was formed around 2 billion years ago and today has a population of 600 million people.
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Here we have the border between the United States and Mexico, finalized in 1853 with the Gadsden Purchase.
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And here is Hugo.
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Now, what Hugo is gonna do is walk from here to here.
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The horror!
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The outrage!
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The disgrace!
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Lock him up and send him back.
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Except, what's the actual harm here?
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How does Hugo doing this harm anyone?
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Like, there's nothing.
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It's a victimless crime.
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It's very silly to be obsessed with this phenomenon.
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But I just care that people are breaking the law!
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But the parents have some blame here.
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Oh, for what?
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For wanting a better life for their kids?
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Isn't that what America is? for breaking the law.
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Do you though?
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I live on a college campus and I see underage drinking literally all the time.
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People have fake IDs, which is another crime.
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And I see restaurants that don't even check ID and sell it to obviously young looking students anyways.
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Another crime.
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Although the phenomenon has been on the decline, according to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism,
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five million Americans aged 12 to 20 admit to underage drinking in the past month.
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Unlike crossing an imaginary line, consuming alcohol actually harms lives.
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Where is the national outrage?
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Where is the Republican propaganda machine?
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Nobody cares.
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If we cared about illegal immigration simply because people are breaking the law, why not equally care about this or a dozen other laws that people break every day without consequence?
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Stop virtue signaling.
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You guys just don't like brown people.
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Here are three more crimes people commit every day that do more harm than crossing the border illegally.
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Speeding, in which 9 out of 10 drivers admit to, killed over 12,000 people in 2022 in the US.
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Over 2 million high schoolers in America use tobacco products, even though federal law bans it to people under 21 years of age.
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It's typically not illegal for minors to use tobacco products, but it is illegal to sell or distribute tobacco products to minors,
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which is clearly happening a lot because of how many kids use them.
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use is the leading cause of preventable death in the United States and kills half a million Americans every year.
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Yet we don't treat it like a national emergency.
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This survey found that there's 50 billion pieces of litter along US waterways and roadways.
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That's 152 items per US resident.
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The damage that littering does to the ecosystem is far worse than Hugo crossing an imaginary line without the appropriate paperwork.
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So why do we single out illegal immigration.
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Which, by the way, itself isn't a felony.
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Crossing the border illegally is typically a misdemeanor with the civil penalty of a small fine.
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Why do Americans list this as a top issue?
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Simple.
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The American people were gaslit into caring about it by right-wing media.
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The military needs to be deployed to our southern border immediately
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to stop the caravan of thousands of illegals pouring into our nation.
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Why did you vote for that?
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Why would you allow sex crime convicts to stay in the country that entered the country illegally?
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Why would you vote for that?
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They're eating the dogs, the people that came in.
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They're eating the cats.
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They're eating the pets of the people that live there.
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Yes, we should be a nation ruled by law.
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But instead of punishing otherwise innocent people, let's reform our immigration laws and grant mass amnesty to those who came here illegally.
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Ha!
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So you admit it!
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You want mass amnesty, you radical communist!
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Oh yeah?
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Well, is Ronald Reagan a communist?
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What?
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Of course not!
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Well, in 1986, President Reagan signed a bipartisan bill granting mass amnesty to three million undocumented immigrants.
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Huh?
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Yup, just like that.
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And this wasn't a compromise that he begrudgingly signed to appease Democrats.
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He actually supported this.
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In the 1984 election, he talked about it on the debate stage.
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I supported this bill.
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I believe in the idea of amnesty for those who have put down roots and who have lived here,
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even though sometime back they may have entered illegally.
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The consensus on immigration used to be the complete opposite 40 years ago.
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Here's how Republicans used to talk about immigration.
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Do you think the children of illegal aliens should be allowed to attend Texas public schools free?
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Or do you think that their parents should pay for their education?
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I would reluctantly say I think they would get whatever it is that they're, you know, what the society is giving to their neighbors.
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But it has, the problem has to be solved.
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The problem has to be solved.
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I don't want to see a whole, if they're living here, I don't want to see a whole thing of six and eight year old kids being made,
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you know, one totally uneducated and made to feel that they're living with outside the law.
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Let's address ourselves to the fundamentals.
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These are good people, strong people.
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Part of my family is a Mexican.
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Rather than making them or talking about putting up a fence, why don't we work out some recognition of our mutual problems,
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make it possible for them to come here legally with a work permit, and then while they're working and earning here, they pay taxes here.
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And when they go on to go back, they can go back and they can cross and open the border both ways by understanding their problems.
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This is the only safety valve right now they have with that unemployment that probably keeps the lid from blowing off.
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What changed?
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Simple.
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The Republicans lost control over the xenophobic elements of their party.
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Ever since the election of Barack Obama in 2008, The Republican Party has been non-stop about white grievance politics.
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People lost control of themselves after seeing a black man in the Oval Office.
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I can't trust Obama.
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I have read about him and he's not, he's not, he's a, um, he's an Arab.
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He is not.
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A woman named Marilyn Davenport is no exception to that.
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She's an elected Republican Party official in Southern California's Orange County.
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Friday afternoon, she forwarded an email.
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This is what Ms. Davenport forwarded, President Obama's head on a baby chimp's body, a mother and father chimp sitting beside him.
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And above it, the text says this, now you know why, no birth certificate.
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The NAACP points to the racial epithets allegedly hurled at black
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members of Congress by Tea Party members during the health care debate, and to the racist signs
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that critics say they've spotted at Tea Party events to support its conclusion
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that the Tea Party movement is a threat to the pursuit of human rights, justice, and equality for all.
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The Tea Party was a right-wing, libertarian, fiscally conservative movement within the Republican Party.
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Some members used the acronym Taxed Enough Already Party.
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It gained traction during the first two years of Obama's presidency and was the main backlash force to him.
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It stood for smaller government, lower taxes, cutting spending, and reducing the debt.
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All that stuff.
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The movement was backed by the Koch brothers, who were billionaire oil barons.
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The backlash the Tea Party caused led to the Republican wave in the 2010 midterm elections, in which many candidates described themselves as part of the Tea Party movement.
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But the Tea Party wasn't just about fiscal conservatism.
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It also had elements of the populist right, and one of the things they wanted to push the GOP right on was immigration.
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For example, Sarah Palin, former failed VP candidate and Tea Party member, said in 2016 that immigrants should quote, speak American.
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You want to be in America?
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A, you better be here legally or you're out of here.
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B, when you're here, let's speak American.
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In 2014, the Tea Party Patriots released a film called The Border States of America, which said that illegal immigration was quote, threatening the fabric of our nation.
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Herman Cain, another Tea Party member who ran for president in 2012, proposed an electrified fence along the southern border.
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Sound familiar?
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We will build a great wall along the southern border.
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Yes, the Tea Party in many ways was the precursor to Trump and the MAGA movement.
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Over time it became less and less about fiscal responsibility and more and more about fighting the culture war.
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So the Tea Party was a major factor in pushing the Republican Party right on immigration.
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But it wasn't the only factor factor.
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Local news is in crisis.
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By some estimates, more than 3,200 print newspapers have vanished since 2005.
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According to the nonprofit Rebuild Local News, the number of newsroom employees has declined 60 percent since 2000,
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a collapse comparable in scale to the coal industry.
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And on average, two newspapers close each week.
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The decline of local newspapers meant more and more Americans were getting their news from TV channels like Fox, or worse, Facebook.
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But it wasn't just the changing news industry.
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The rise in anti-immigration rhetoric is not totally made up and based off of nothing.
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There were real-world trends that created the movement.
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Starting in the 90s, more and more people started coming into the country both legally and illegally.
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It fueled a national conversation beginning in the Clinton years to do something about it.
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most of these people weren't actually crossing the border illegally, they rather came here legally and just overstayed their visas.
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Regardless, both parties started to move to the right on immigration.
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But why do Republicans care so much more about it?
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Well, you could say it's racism, and yeah, that's a part of it.
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But perhaps the most persuasive case made to Republican voters was the idea that illegal immigrants would vote Democrat,
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and immigration was just a way for Democrats to bring in more voters.
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Joe Biden's open border is killing Ohioans, with more illegal drugs and more Democrat voters pouring into this country.
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Elon Musk still spreads this talking point to this day, even though undocumented immigrants can't and don't vote.
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So now we're at today, where the anti-immigration movement dominates the Republican Party.
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And they make all the typical talking points.
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Mass amnesty?
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Nope.
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The Republican Party stands for mass deportations.
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By the way, how's that going?
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They claim their reasoning is sound and based off of fact.
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It isn't.
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Here are five reasons why all undocumented immigrants should be deported, and why they're wrong.
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According to the Institution on Taxation and Economic Policy, undocumented immigrants paid $96.7 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in 2022.
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More than a third of these taxes were through the federal payroll tax, which pays Social Security and Medicare.
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Fake news!
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Illegals don't get Social Security cards, so they can't pay the payroll tax.
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Well, they don't have Social Security cards, but anyone who has applied for a job knows that you can put down your individual taxpayer identification number.
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You don't need to be a citizen to have one.
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All you need is your name, date of birth, residence, and proof of identity.
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Not proof of work authorization or proof that you're in the US legally.
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So yeah, they do pay taxes.
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Well, it doesn't matter, they use more welfare than they pay taxes anyways.
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Ugh.
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As I said, research shows that undocumented immigrants pay tens of billions of dollars into Social Security and Medicare every year.
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But this is despite the fact that they are ineligible to receive Social Security and Medicare benefits.
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Social Security and Medicare aren't welfare?
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This is true, both are earned benefits that are universal, not means tested.
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So most people don't consider them to be welfare, rather social insurance.
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But when it comes to programs that everyone can agree are welfare, like food stamps and Medicaid, well, they're ineligible for benefits.
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All the stories you've heard about undocumented immigrants using welfare are either false or need more context.
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For example, an undocumented immigrant can apply for SNAP benefits for their American-born children.
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The same goes for Medicaid.
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But what about emergency rooms?
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Yes, a 1986 federal law signed by Reagan requires all Medicare
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participating hospitals to provide emergency care to anyone regardless of their ability to pay or insurance status.
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When I mean emergency care, I mean these hospitals simply have to stabilize the patients.
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Nothing is free in America.
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But that's bad!
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Like no, people shouldn't be left on the street to die just because they aren't a citizen.
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You wouldn't oppose tourists being denied access to emergency rooms, would you?
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A report from the Cato Institute found that immigrants, including undocumented immigrants, were a net fiscal surplus,
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meaning they contributed more into taxes than they received in benefits.
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From 1994 to 2023, immigrants created a cumulative fiscal surplus of $14.5 trillion.
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But they're taking our jobs!
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The immigrants are taking our jobs line has been repeated for centuries.
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It was actually the motivation for the first major immigration ban in US history, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882,
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which prohibited the entry of Chinese laborers for 10 years.
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It's basic economics, the law of supply and demand.
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If there are more workers chasing fewer jobs, wages go down.
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Additionally, immigrants tend to be more willing to accept lower salaries for quote, low-skilled jobs.
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Approximately 8.5 million undocumented immigrants have a job.
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If we achieve Stephen Miller's dream of deporting all of them, then his theory would suggest that real Americans would finally be able to have them.
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Except, no. What would actually result is a massive shortage.
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This 2024 working paper from the Peterson Institute for International Economics found
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that Trump's mass deportations could lead to a 1.2 to 7.4% decrease in GDP from the baseline by 2028, depending on how many are deported.
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It could also cause employment to fall by 1 to 7%.
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But won't employers just replace immigrants with Americans?
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Not necessarily.
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To quote the article from the Institute's website, the Trump campaign assumes that employers would simply replace the deported workers with native workers.
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But the historical record shows that employer behavior is far more complicated than that.
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Past experiences with deportations demonstrates that employers do not find it easy to replace such workers.
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Instead, they respond by investing in less labor-intensive technologies to sustain their businesses, or they simply decide not to expand their operations.
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The net result is fewer employed people in key business sectors like services, agriculture, and manufacturing.
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We do not yet know the full economic impact of Trump's mass deportations.
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They might not be as catastrophic as this paper projected simply
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because Trump has ordered his administration to wind them down because of all the public backlash.
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Still, we are already seeing anecdotal stories of deportations hurting farm labor.
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The Trump administration had to hilariously revamp the H-2A visa program
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that hires migrant labor to fill the shortage because there weren't enough Americans willing to take these jobs.
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The bottom line is that most economists agree that immigrants, documented or not, actually help the economy,
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since all workers are consumers and thus their spending drives economic growth.
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Well, who cares if they help the economy?
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They're dangerous!
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If anyone remembers my Zoron video, I revealed one of the oldest Republican tricks in the playbook.
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When the left is in power, focus on crime.
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Crime, crime, crime, crime.
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Crime is everywhere.
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On the subway, on the streets, in the bodega.
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Despite decades of declining crime in New York City, they'll highlight every incident, reacting with exaggerated concern.
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Now of course in reality, crime is actually at record lows under Zoran, so glory to Sharia law.
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But whatever, you get the point.
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Almost immediately after Biden became president, Fox News and Newsmax were screaming at the top of their lungs in despair over the so-called migrant crime crisis.
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They took anecdotal stories of undocumented immigrants committing violent crimes
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and then blew it up to make it seem like this was a statistically significant problem among undocumented immigrants, when in reality it was just a few bad apples.
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The most famous example being Lakin Riley, who was murdered by an undocumented Venezuelan immigrant at GU in February of 2024.
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The perpetrator had previously been arrested for smaller crimes numerous times, but he was always released.
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The reaction to Riley's death culminated in the passage of the Lakin Riley Act, which was opposed by all of these civil rights organizations.
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The act exploited the tragedy of Riley's murder to give the federal government unprecedented new powers and hurt due process.
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The law requires the mandatory detention of all undocumented immigrants who are arrested for even small crimes like shoplifting.
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The law automatically denies bail to anyone detained under it.
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Yup, there can't even be a bail hearing.
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And even if their criminal charges are dropped, they still have to stay detained until their deportation hearing, which could take years.
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The law also lets states sue the federal government
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if they believe they aren't doing enough to protect their citizens from paroled immigrants who commit crimes.
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This will essentially clog up the legal system and restrain federal policymaking.
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I say the bill exploited a tragedy because it made it seem like most immigrants were violent criminals.
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But of course the opposite is true.
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Immigrants commit less crime than native-born citizens.
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Even undocumented immigrants commit less crimes.
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Republican rhetoric is just not based on facts.
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This working paper found that immigrants are 60% less likely to be incarcerated than US-born men.
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And before the racists in the comments say, that's just talking about black people, the study also found that immigrants are 30% less likely to be incarcerated than white men.
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A Cato Institute study looked at Texas in 2019 and found
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that undocumented immigrants were 37% less likely to be convicted of a crime than a U.S.-born citizen.
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There is also no correlation between the increased presence of undocumented immigrants and an increase in crime,
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as an investigation by the New York Times and Marshall Project has found.
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Sorry guys, facts don't care about your feelings.
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And it's at that point where the immigration debate shuts down
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and people start bringing up weird racist dog whistles about losing our culture and losing our heritage.
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No, no, no, no, no, no, we are losing our way of life and our culture.
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There are millions of Mexicans coming.
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Oh god, really?
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And don't make this a race thing.
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You always make this a race thing.
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I would say the same thing if they were European.
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Oh yeah, so if the Swiss were like clogging and the Swiss...
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No, no, we allow them in and they think they own their...
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Now of course, this is just a bigoted argument that people have been making for hundreds of years.
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People said the same thing about the Irish and the Italians, and today, Americans all enjoy pizza and get wasted on St. Paddy's Day.
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I've already kind of addressed this argument in a previous video on birthright citizenship, and I don't feel like entertaining it any further.
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If you think more immigrants, undocumented or not, leads to America losing its culture, you're un-American.
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The overall point is that immigration, legal or not, is, on the whole, a net positive for the country.
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Yes, people should ideally be coming in legally.
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But have we considered that maybe if our system wasn't so broken, people wouldn't be coming in illegally in the first place?
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I mean, part of the reason why there was such a large spike under Biden was
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because our asylum system was totally broken.
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The Trump administration had a remain in Mexico policy, where if you claimed asylum from a Latin American country, you had to stay in Mexico before your hearing in the U.S.
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This was criticized because it meant asylum seekers could still be endangered in Mexico.
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Biden ended Remain in Mexico, meaning you could come into the country, claim asylum, and then it could be months or years before your asylum hearing.
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By early 2021, immigration information spread like crazy on the internet in Latin America, and there was a lot of people abusing the system for access into the US.
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You could criticize Biden for repealing Remain in Mexico, or you could criticize Congress for not creating enough immigration courts to process all these asylum claims.
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There are only 73 in the entire country.
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73 courts to handle 3 million cases.
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No wonder there's a backlog.
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There's this great set of articles from our libertarian friends at the Cato Institute
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that explains how the crisis largely wasn't Biden's fault
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and was the result of a ton of other factors that just so happened to culminate in the early 2020s.
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So, what's the solution?
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Well, when it comes to immigration, I stand with Ronald Reagan.
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That's right, I'm a Reagan progressive.
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I'm calling on Congress to give amnesty to the 13 million undocumented immigrants in this country.
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So long as they haven't committed a crime, they should be granted legal status.
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Next, let's get Congress to quadruple the number of immigration courts.
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We need more immigration judges and more legal infrastructure to support all these asylum claims.
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Can't fit immigrants in your city?
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Let's upzone and build tons of new affordable housing.
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Not only will there be enough housing for immigrants, there'll also be enough housing for American citizens.
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The bottom line is that immigration is a good thing.
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It's good for the economy, and it honors our history.
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Instead of mass deportations, we need mass amnesty.
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After all, it's what Reagan would have wanted.
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for setting that whole thing up.
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Members also get their name in the credits, which you can see right here.
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I'd like to shout out my Hamiltonian supporters Tim Spot, Aseemate, and Poison Geordie.
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I'm not a perfect person, and I wouldn't be surprised if there were mistakes in this video.
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If you see any, please let me know in the comments, and I'll have corrections in the description.
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If you just can't get enough of my political takes for some reason, follow me on Twitter, at TheHadiRahim.
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While I was making this video, Trump decided to go to war with Iran.
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Why?
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Because Israel told him to.
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That's not me saying it.
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That's Secretary of State Marco Rubio saying it.
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So the president made the very wise decision.
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We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action.
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We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces.
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And we knew that if we didn't preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties and perhaps even higher those killed.
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And then we would all be here answering questions about why we knew that and didn't act.
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No, no, no, you don't understand.
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It's to take out their ballistic missile capabilities.
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The United States is conducting an operation to eliminate the threat of Iran's short-range ballistic missiles
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and the threat posed by their navy, particularly to naval assets.
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That is what it is focused on doing right now and it's doing quite successfully.
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Like you do realize they're just gonna build back their ballistic missile capabilities in a few years, right?
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Like I don't, like this is just a weird, that's a weird justification.
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You want regime change.
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We know your true underlying goal for all of this.
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The whole war is crazy and Americans are dead and we bombed a school and so many innocent civilians are dead.
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And I want to see if I can make a video about it
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while I work on Iraq Part 3 because the videos are actually very related
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and it looks like we might even send troops.
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It's very crazy, gas prices are up because of it, so it's a big deal and if you want to hear more of my thoughts on it, go follow me on Twitter.
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Thank you all for watching, have a great day, let's try not to start World War 3, see you in the next video.
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Real-Life Scenario: Debating a Controversial Topic
The video presents a lively discussion about illegal immigration, using relatable examples like jaywalking, underage drinking, and littering to argue a point. This type of dialogue is common in casual debates, social media discussions, or classroom conversations, where speakers use vivid comparisons and rhetorical questions to persuade. Learning English with videos like this helps you practice understanding and participating in real-world debates, a key skill for English speaking practice.
Useful Chunks & Collocations
- "No-brainer": A decision or idea that is obviously correct (e.g., "Abolishing ICE seemed like a no-brainer to her").
- "Victimless crime": An illegal act that doesn't harm others (e.g., "Jaywalking is often called a victimless crime").
- "Virtue signaling": Publicly showing moral superiority (e.g., "Critics accused him of virtue signaling about the law").
- "National outrage": Widespread public anger (e.g., "The scandal caused national outrage").
- "Leading cause of preventable death": A main avoidable reason for deaths (e.g., "Smoking is the leading cause of preventable death").
Your Shadowing Challenge
Shadowing—repeating speech immediately after a speaker—is a proven way to improve English pronunciation and fluency. Here's your task: Use a shadowing app or play the video, pause after each 10-second segment, and repeat it aloud. Focus on matching the speaker's tone, speed, and stress (e.g., "Where is the national outrage? Where is the Republican propaganda machine?"). This shadowspeak practice trains your mouth to form English sounds naturally. Do this for 5 minutes daily, and you'll notice faster progress in your English speaking practice. For extra help, use a shadowing app to record yourself and compare it to the original—this feedback is key for improving pronunciation.
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| “Used to” used to + verb — a past habit or state that is no longer true | used to be · used to talk |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | has been · have put · have read |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | was formed · be obsessed · be deployed |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | IDs, which is · those who came · those who have |
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.