Media
Event Summary
U.S. Rep. Brandon Gill (TX) joined Mark Krikorian, the Center’s executive director, for an Immigration Newsmaker conversation discussing U.S. immigration policy, border security, and potential reforms to both legal and illegal immigration systems.
“We’ve had open borders for four years, with an estimated 15 to 20 million illegal immigrants entering the United States,” Gill said. “It’s the biggest political crisis we’ve faced in decades. More fundamentally, immigration touches everything else — it is the one issue that determines who we are as a country and as a people.”
Gill addressed enforcement policy, immigration levels, assimilation, and current political debates on immigration law.
Date and Location
March 5, 2026
Washington, DC
MARK KRIKORIAN: Good morning. My name is Mark Krikorian. I’m executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank here in D.C. that examines and critiques the impact of immigration in the United States.
Brandon Gill represents the 26th Congressional District of Texas, north of Dallas, in the House of Representatives. Although he’s only in his first term, and unless there’s new information, he’s the youngest member of the Republican caucus in the House. Congressman Gill has become something of a social media star with his sober, just-the-facts-ma’am interrogations at congressional hearings, which often go viral and leave witnesses kind of sputtering.
More substantively, specifically, Congressman Gill in little more than a year in office has staked out a position as one of the leading voices on immigration in Congress. He’s a member of the Judiciary Committee’s Immigration Subcommittee. And the very first bill he introduced, shortly after taking office, was about border control and Remain in Mexico program.
So who knows what the future will hold, but Gill’s knowledge of and commitment to the immigration issue suggests he’s likely to play an outsized role in the inevitable reshaping of our immigration policy in coming years. There’s only so much that an executive through executive orders and memos and what have you can do; at some point, Congress is going to have to step in and make some pretty fundamental changes in our anachronistic immigration system. And Congressman Gill is almost certain to be one of those helping shape whatever new system comes out of that discussion.
So thank you, Congressman, for agreeing to sit down with us. And what I wanted to start with is just basically, you know, why are you in Congress? And also, maybe more specifically, why is immigration one of your marquee issues?
REPRESENTATIVE BRANDON GILL (R-TX): Yeah. Sure. And first of all, thanks for having me here. It’s good to be with, you know, fellow conservatives in the immigration space. We, obviously, use y’all’s research pretty often. And more recently with the Minnesota fraud case we used a lot of your research that you did there on welfare usage rates and everything else, and we found it really helpful.
But you know, I, as you mentioned, am the youngest Republican in the conference right now, and never expected to be in political office, certainly not right now at this point. I’ve got a wife and two young kids in Texas, was running a business. Things were going great. But my representative, my previous representative for Texas 26, announced that he was retiring, and what we wanted to do is make sure that we had true conservative representation in my district. It’s a red district. You know, it’s always going to vote Republican, pretty conservative. And I think too often you have districts like that that are represented by Republicans who are much farther to the left on the political spectrum than their constituents are, and that creates problems long term. Eventually, you’ve got half the country who don’t feel like they’re adequately represented in Washington. So we wanted to do that.
So, been in office for about a year now. It’s been an incredible time. I think we’ve had – it’s one of the most productive conservative Congresses we’ve had in a long time.
But I’ve been focusing on immigration for a few reasons. One is just that it’s timely, right? We had open borders for four years. We talk about it all the time. You know, 15, 20 million illegals came into the country. That is the biggest, I think, political crisis of the past couple decades at least.
But more fundamentally, immigration is the one issue that touches everything else. You know, if you think about the price of housing, health-care cost and quality, the availability of social services, medical care, I mean, everything – education – all impacted by immigration, because –
MR. KRIKORIAN: Security, jobs. Right.
REP. GILL: Security, jobs. Everything. You know, it’s the one issue that determines who we are as a country – I mean, who we are as a people, who’s voting in our political system. So in many ways it’s – especially right now it is the most important issue that we have, and that’s why I wanted to focus on it. And candidly, I think that the American people agree, certainly on the Republican side.
MR. KRIKORIAN: And that kind of raises a(n) interesting question, because I want to talk substantively about one of the aspects of the issue, specifically worksite enforcement. But the reason this was a good segue is that there’s actually, you know, some disagreement among Republicans, even some very conservative Republicans, on this issue of whether we should do serious worksite enforcement, because the point of worksite enforcement or just employment-based enforcement overall is to make it – to make illegal immigrants unemployable, because that’s the magnet that’s pulling people here. And there’s a lot of ambivalence. There’s business interests that, you know, don’t want that to happen. So, first of all, what do you think about the importance of worksite enforcement? And how do you finesse the political problems, at least among – on the right, with regard to that sort of thing?
REP. GILL: Yeah. I mean, I’ve always been of the view that two things are true. One, you can still focus primarily on criminal illegal aliens, which should be the top priority. I think most conservatives agree with that. But you cannot neglect worksite enforcement in any way. To your point, that is the pull factor.
You know, we hear from the left all the time, what are the root causes of illegal immigration? It’s what Kamala Harris would always talk about. I mean, one of them, apart from living in the greatest country in the world, is that there’s an ample amount of job opportunity for illegal aliens. And I think the idea that the illegal aliens who are on any given worksite or wherever are entirely law-abiding people and are just here to feed – that’s just empirically not true. I mean, many of these people are engaged in all kinds of other activity outside of, you know, whatever they’re doing on the jobsite. So to neglect that, I think, would be to fundamentally neglect, you know, a border security – broader border security agenda.
MR. KRIKORIAN: And you’ve introduced some initiatives on employment-related stuff, and one of them that got my attention was – and this comes up all the time – is mandatory E-Verify.
REP. GILL: Yeah.
MR. KRIKORIAN: First of all, what is that? And then, why is that important?
REP. GILL: Yeah. You know, E-Verify, as we know, is simply a system that – where employers can determine whether the people that they’re hiring are American citizens or have a legal right to be in and work in the United States.
But going back to that pull factor, is that is why many people are coming into the country, is that you see that there’s basically a lawless employment system where you have employers who are as a matter of employment policy deciding to hire illegal aliens because it undercuts the wages of working-class Americans. And that’s why you have so much pushback against E-Verify, is because there is a large commercial interest who has a very big interest in making sure that they can hire cheap labor. You know, the idea that our immigration system would allow that – would allow something that so clearly undermines and harms our own people – is insane, and I think E-Verify sort of strikes to the core of that problem.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Right. And in a sense, I mean, what you’re talking about is there are whole businesses that have based their – industries, even, that base their business model on employing illegal aliens.
REP. GILL: Of course. Yeah.
MR. KRIKORIAN: And so what that would mean, of course, is there, you know, would be transition dislocations.
REP. GILL: Yeah.
MR. KRIKORIAN: That’s the – kind of the issue, is how do you get over that hump.
REP. GILL: Right. And you know, I think being realistic about it, if you have a business model that relies on illegal alien labor you’re kind of admitting that your business model is dependent upon having – operating as a massive criminal enterprise. And we need to be straightforward about that.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Right. Exactly.
And there’s one more question on the employment issue. I wanted to get to some other ones. But this is an issue that’s really important and that almost nobody knows about, and that is work permits for people who have no authorization to work in the United States. Because if – let’s say you get some kind of work visa. Well, then you get a work permit because that’s the whole point of your being let into the country. If you have a green card, that itself is the work authorization. But administration after administration has, on the flimsiest statutory basis, just given out work permits to pretty much anybody they want to. There’s millions of them out there. And so this is a problem I think people don’t get, and it’s something I think that you’ve tried to address as well.
REP. GILL: Yeah. You know, you hear all the time, you know: We need the workers. We need the workers. We don’t have the available talent in the U.S. And that’s just simply not true. We have the talent here. We have them in our colleges, in our high schools. We have the people who can work these jobs. But again, it goes back to if a business can hire somebody for 30 percent lower wages, of course they’re going to. And that’s the commercial interest that we’ve got to – got to stand up to.
MR. KRIKORIAN: So, moving to another issue – and this is timely now because of what’s going on in the Middle East – you have publicly called a number of times for limits on Islamic immigration to the United States or immigration of people from Muslim-majority countries. Sort of what’s the issue there, as you see it?
REP. GILL: Yeah. The issue – I mean, for a long time immigration policy was based on – was predicated on kind of two key ideas. One of them was that you couldn’t be what’s called a public burden, right? You can’t come into the U.S. and hop on welfare. We’re not – we’re not importing welfare queens as a matter of immigration policy.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Well, we are, but we – we’re not supposed to be.
REP. GILL: Well, we are; we shouldn’t be.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Yeah. (Laughs.) Right.
REP. GILL: But second was one of cultural assimilation, which is that if you immigrate into the United States you are expected to become fully American. You’re expected to adopt our culture and our customs and our beliefs and speak our language. You know, you can’t have a coherent country unless you have, you know, the vast majority of the people speaking the same language, have the ability to communicate with each other.
So the issue with immigration from Muslim-majority countries – and this is – this is one that comes up all the time in the DFW area; I hear from constituents all the time about the Islamization of Dallas – the Dallas-Ft. Worth metroplex – is one of lack of cultural compatibility, that you have people coming from parts of the globe where we just view the world in a radically different way and it’s on a fundamental, core ideological level. So, you know, if you think of the difference between the American constitutional system and the Islamic world, you know, we have very different ideas of freedom of speech. We have very different ideas of freedom of religion, of separation of church and state or mosque and state. We have very different ideas about the dignity of women and their role in society. You know, and these are core, core beliefs, and the reality is that not all cultures are equal. Not all cultures are compatible with any given, especially our, governing framework. And I don’t think that we should be importing cultures or cultural practices that undermine our own constitutional system.
MR. KRIKORIAN: To play a little bit of devil’s advocate, is there a way to do a kind of cultural vetting without sort of a broad-brush, you know, ban? And the reason I ask this is that there’s a lot of Christians in Lebanon and Syria, which are Muslim-majority countries; and, frankly, there’s a lot of Muslims – in fact, some of them having been terrorists – from non-Muslim-majority countries: Russia, India, that sort of thing. So –
REP. GILL: Right. Pretty soon the U.K.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Right. Well, exactly. Well, that’s going to be a Muslim country, maybe, at some point. But is there a – is there a role, or have you thought about the possibility of a kind of cultural vetting – in other words, not just trying to look for people who are terrorists, but trying to actually examine, you know, do you think it’s OK to kill apostates, in which case, sorry, go find some other country?
REP. GILL: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, the purpose of talking about it on a country level is to use that more as a proxy for cultural compatibility. So the core issue is culture, not necessarily what country you’re in.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Right, right.
REP. GILL: So I’d totally be open to that. And I think that we’re sort of exploring ways that you could do that properly.
But I do think that the goal – the fundamental goal of our immigration system should be to benefit the American people. It doesn’t exist for any other reason. We have no obligation to have an open immigration system in any way. So I – you know, I would –
MR. KRIKORIAN: Doesn’t the Statue of Liberty make us take anybody in the world? (Laughs.)
REP. GILL: You know, there’s this view that, you know, America is a nation of immigrants, and it’s one of those things – I think Samuel Huntington calls is, you know, a half-truth. You know, of course immigration has been a big part of the American story and of our history, but we are fundamentally an American people with a distinct culture, a distinct heritage that’s rooted in real historical experience, and we do want to preserve that. And immigration can be – it certainly has been a part of that, but we want to preserve that core American identity.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Among your fellow Republicans in the – in Congress specifically, do you get a sense of do people agree with you on that? Is that something they are afraid of talking about, that sort of thing?
REP. GILL: Yeah. I mean, there’s certainly two different camps. One of them is one that, you know, agrees with that wholeheartedly and is sort of on the same page that we are. I think there’s another that agrees with that more in theory than in practice –
MR. KRIKORIAN: How so?
REP. GILL: – and would say, you know, we do have a distinct, you know, cultural American heritage, but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t import, you know, 2 to 3 or 4 or 5 million immigrants every single year to work our jobs and to reduce wages for businesses and because, you know, whatever other reason that they can think of. You know, there’s always an excuse for mass migration.
MR. KRIKORIAN: That’s actually what I wanted to ask about, because, you know, if we’re talking about worksite enforcement, we’re talking about the security or cultural aspect of Islamic immigration, for instance, those are, you know, specific – I won’t say they’re niche issues, but they’re pieces of the issue. Overall, what should our legal immigration system look like? If you were emperor, you’re elected president at some point – I didn’t check; I don’t even know if you’re old enough.
REP. GILL: (Laughs.)
MR. KRIKORIAN: But, so, you know, what would our immigration system look like if Emperor Brandon Gill just was able to write it?
REP. GILL: Yeah. I mean, I think that we would bring back those two principles that I mentioned earlier: You can’t be a public burden. And cultural compatibility has to be core – a core component of our legal immigration system. And return to the overall, you know, philosophical framework that immigration has to benefit our people.
On a practical level, I think that would mean drastically, drastically reducing legal immigration. Illegal immigration, we can even put that aside; that, obviously, needs to be turned to zero, as the president has done already. But that needs to be maintained. But on the legal side, I think it needs to be pretty close to zero.
You know, you have multiple – what’s happened is you have right now multiple programs that were initially created with good – I think in some ways good intent, at least theoretically. H-1B is a good example; you know, we’re going to bring in somebody who has – needs to fill some very niche, specific job that we can’t – we literally cannot find in the United States. That has metastasized and been completely twisted and contorted into being a program rife with fraud everywhere that, again, its purpose is to lower wages. I would either drastically reform or just outright get rid of programs like that.
I think that we’ve had so many people come into the country, both legally and illegally, that we need several – probably several decades for American culture and civilization to cohere, for all of them to assimilate, and for us to become one people. And I think that should be sort of the underlying goal. So, again, that means on a practical level little to no legal immigration.
MR. KRIKORIAN: And that is an issue that I expect there’s even less consensus about, even among Republicans maybe, than the issue of, say, worksite – you know, more vigorous worksite enforcement. What sense do you get – I mean, my sense is – and, obviously, you’re there, so I’d like to hear it – my sense is the – that calling for dramatic reductions in legal immigration is something that’s become more acceptable among Republican lawmakers but isn’t necessarily a consensus view yet. Is that accurate, or what do you think about that?
REP. GILL: I think that’s probably right. I think it’s once – you know, the problem is it becomes easier to make those – make those calls once you’ve seen the negative impacts of mass migration in your specific area. So the DFW area, it’s much more clear that we have problems with cultural incompatibility from Islamic immigration. And that’s something, again, I hear from my constituents all the time. It’s one of the biggest questions I get whenever I do townhalls or grassroots meetings, is about Islamic immigration.
But you know, I think that, unfortunately, it’s one of those things that many people without as strong a sort of a philosophical or ideological framework on the issue have to feel it firsthand before they sort of realize it. It’s something that still in many circles is seen as a bit uncouth. You know, it’s harder to go to, you know, your, you know, Republican country club cocktail parties and talk about reducing legal immigration, even though, by the way, our voters agree with that. The vast majority of Republican voters want less legal immigration; it’s just getting Washington to hear them.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Right. And all parts of Washington, not even just only the legislative branch but the executive branch to some degree, in my experience.
So, specifically, another – just the last question on legal immigration. One of the big pieces of that, obviously, in fact, the majority of legal immigration now is family migration. In other words, 60 percent – something like that, more – of people who get green cards in any given year get them because of who they’re related to. And some of that, it seems to me, is not so much unavoidable in a bad way, but is irreducible; in other words, I don’t see us telling the – you know, an American who marries, you know, somebody that he met during his junior year abroad in Colombia that he can’t bring his wife to the United States. But does chain migration have to be reduced as part of what you’re suggesting should be a reduction in immigration?
REP. GILL: Yeah. I mean, my view is chain migration should be eliminated outright. And I think even in the marriage instance that you just – that you just described, there’s a – there’s a lot of fraud in marriage immigration and –
MR. KRIKORIAN: Sure. There’s whole movies about that, in fact.
REP. GILL: Right. I mean, you know, you go to Latin America, you marry somebody, divorce him – you know, bring him into the U.S., divorce him a month later, and they’re still here. So that’s a problem that we need to – that we need to tackle as well.
But I think the idea that you can come into the U.S. and bring, you know, your wife’s kids, and then their uncles, and then their cousins, and then their grandmas, and just on and on and on indefinitely is completely idiotic. It makes no sense at all. And again, that’s where you start to see our immigration system become just culturally and politically suicidal to the United States. I mean, you’re bringing in infinity immigrants legally who may not adhere to any of our cultural institutions or ideologies in any way; who are coming in here, hopping on welfare. I mean, it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
MR. KRIKORIAN: One of your senators, Senator Cruz, recently tweeted out that his immigration policy was legal good, illegal bad. This actually has always been kind of a punchline to a joke when I’ve said it, and I mean no disrespect to Senator Cruz because I like the guy. I voted for him in the primary 10 years ago. But do you – do you still hear a lot of that legal good, illegal bad kind of cliché, even among Republicans?
REP. GILL: You know, it has certainly died down a lot relative to what I would have expected it to be five or 10 years ago. I don’t – candidly, I don’t really hear that very often because I think it’s something that you’re – that the people are not with. And I have tons of respect for Senator Cruz. He’s a good friend. I don’t agree with him on this issue. I think that immigration is not good simply because it’s legal. That doesn’t mean that it’s good for the American people.
You know, a perfect example of that just recently is the Senegalese immigrant who came in and shot up a nightclub in Austin, you know, wearing a sweatshirt that says “Property of Allah” with an Iranian flag on his shirt below that – Muslim, highly radicalized, coming from a country that’s 97 percent Islamic. I mean, why in the world we would have allowed him to come into our country under any –
MR. KRIKORIAN: And he was a legal immigrant. Right, right.
REP. GILL: And he was a legal immigrant. Why in the world he would have been allowed to come in here legally, illegally, under any circumstances is absolutely insane. And this is what I mean about an immigration system that’s suicidal. We’re bringing people into our country who hate us – who hate our way of life, who have allegiances to foreign leaders and foreign ideologies, whose ideologies do not comport with our own or our own governing framework, and that is completely unsustainable. And you know, as uncouth as it is to say, I would rather preserve the America that we know and love so that my daughter and my son can grow up in that country as opposed to growing up in a world where they go to the mall in Dallas, Texas, and you see 90 percent of the people wearing burqas and speaking foreign languages.
MR. KRIKORIAN: And something you’ve been talking about which has been in the news a lot, obviously, is this whole Somali fraud issue and all that.
REP. GILL: Yeah.
MR. KRIKORIAN: And almost all Somali immigrants are – were admitted legally. I mean, there’s probably a few illegal aliens among them, but it’s not a major phenomenon. They’re almost all legal immigrants.
REP. GILL: Yeah. And I mean, you guys have done phenomenal research on this which we’ve used extensively. But I mean, the statistics on this are just mind-blowing.
So if you look at just Somali immigrants in Minnesota alone, only – even only if you count the people who have been here for 10 years or longer, so have had time to assimilate, have had time to get up on their feet, 78 percent of them are on welfare. That’s nuts. You know, 50 percent of them, roughly, don’t speak English very well. I mean, that is insane. You cannot have a country that is sustainable whenever you’re importing people who – where you have to pay for their food, their housing, their medical care, their education, who you can’t even communicate with because they’re speaking, you know, an African language. I mean, that’s crazy. And I think most Americans realize that’s crazy.
MR. KRIKORIAN: There’s another timely issue, that the Supreme Court next month is going to be hearing oral arguments in the birthright citizenship case. So, first of all, I want to talk about the broad issue of birthright citizenship, the substance of it, and then maybe your thoughts on how the case itself might turn out. So what – you know, what are your thoughts on the issue of birthright citizenship?
REP. GILL: Yeah. I mean, of course, this is one of those that’s been so, so totally perverted, the meaning of birthright citizenship. I mean, the idea that you could have an illegal alien cross the border, have a baby, and then that baby be an American citizen, that’s just ludicrous. The idea that you could have, you know, Chinese coming into the country and –
MR. KRIKORIAN: As tourists, right.
REP. GILL: As tourists solely for the purpose of having a baby, that baby growing up in China being an American citizen with voting rights in the U.S., is – I mean, it’s just – it’s so idiotic. And I know I keep saying suicidal and idiotic, but those are the best ways to describe an immigration system that allows this kind of stuff.
So, you know, there was an idea for a long time in the U.S., again, on this issue that not only did you have to be born in the U.S., but you had to have full allegiance to America and to our Constitution and our legal system; that you were – essentially, you were American, not just that you were born on a patch of dirt that identifies as American. And I think that that has – that has a long constitutional history, you know, if you look at Native American tribes and some other issues that – where the courts have upheld that reasoning. So I won’t get in front of the Supreme Court. We’ll see what they do. But I think that this is – this is an issue that is ripe for reform.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Now, the issue that’s going to be coming before the Supreme Court is whether the president can change our current practice – which has been the practice for quite a while and so, you know, it’s going to have to – the government’s going to have to make some kind of decision to change it, whether he can do it on his own. And the debate has always been, really, whether Congress can just pass a law or you need a constitutional amendment. Is there any appetite in Congress to address this issue? Because, I mean, even the – I don’t know if I’d put it this way, but it seems to me even excluding the kind of kookiest people at the fringes it seems to me even among Democrats the idea of birth tourism, at the very least, is just preposterous. And so is there any – have you got a sense there’s any appetite to address this issue?
REP. GILL: From Democrats there will be no appetite whatsoever. I mean, they may theoretically agree with us on birth tourism and issues like that, but the reality is that mass migration is a core part of their political strategy and has been for decades, and they’re not going to do anything at all to undermine that. I mean, their political plan has been import as many people as possible – illegals, legal, whatever it is; and illegal has been kind of the core part of that – provide a path to citizenship, hopefully they’ll vote, and in exchange for getting amnesty they’ll vote Democrat perpetually. In the meantime, they’ll impact congressional apportionment, they’ll vote in American elections illegally, and they’ll vote Democrat. I mean, Democrats are not going to rock the boat at all on that issue. On the Republican – I mean, and of course, without Democrats we don’t have the votes to do any kind of constitutional change.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Right.
REP. GILL: I think there is appetite on the Republican side, though. I think we have a much more level-headed idea of what immigration is and what it does. But again you know, whenever you have a two-seat or whatever majority even in the House, not to mention what you need in the Senate, it’s difficult to get anything done.
MR. KRIKORIAN: So this is more a procedure issue and it’s not your chamber, but do you think that the Senate needs to get rid of the filibuster if we’re going to have any change on immigration policy, not to mention other aspects of it?
REP. GILL: Yeah.
MR. KRIKORIAN: And are there risks to doing that for Republicans?
REP. GILL: I mean, my view on the filibuster there is the Senate should move to a standing filibuster. I mean, if you want to actually – if you want to filibuster, then you actually have to speak; you can’t just threaten to filibuster. And that would be not a change in Senate rules.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Like in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” where you have Jimmy Stewart standing up there and talking, right?
REP. GILL: Right. And that would be not a change in Senate rules, but a limited change in Senate precedent. And I think, you know, the Senate prides themselves they’re the deliberative body. They’re, like, the American version of the House of Lords and – you know, compared to us barbarians in the House.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Right. (Laughter.)
REP. GILL: But if you want to be the deliberative body, then you ought to actually deliberate. So I think that that’s what we should do. That’s, I think, realistically going to be the only way you get bills like the SAVE America Act passed or any kind of substantial immigration reform that’s not – you know, that doesn’t make our system worse – you know, be full of amnesty and other issues. But I think that’s what they should move to, and I think that that’s what the American people want as well.
MR. KRIKORIAN: You kind of alluded to an amnesty legislation. There’s always a push for what they call comprehensive immigration reform, which I think at this point most voters who pay attention just – that’s become a synonym for amnesty and increasing immigration. But they keep using it. You’d think the other side would focus group some new – I don’t know what they would come up with, but some new term. Even one of your colleagues has introduced legislation, Congresswoman Salazar from South Florida, to amnesty all the illegal aliens and increase immigration. That push has failed repeatedly under George W. Bush, under Obama. Do you think there’s any – it has any prospects? Because the supporters seem to think so.
REP. GILL: Not while we control the House. And that’s an issue that I think I certainly and I think many of my colleagues will absolutely go to the mat on to kill. We’re not doing amnesty. I mean, I want 20 to 30 million illegal aliens deported. We’re not – we’re not doing amnesty. And I think that – you know, I think House leadership right now realizes that. I mean, they’re – they get that that would be politically suicidal for Republicans. You can’t run on a platform, as we did last cycle, of securing the border and deporting illegal aliens – and remember, that is what we ran on; I mean, we were holding up mass deportation signs at the RNC last – two years ago – and then turn around and pass an amnesty bill. I mean, that would make, you know, “Read my lips: No new taxes” look like, you know, child’s play. I mean, that would – that would be the biggest political betrayal in modern American history.
MR. KRIKORIAN: So what are your feelings about how the administration is pursuing this, you know, mass deportation proposal that the president promised?
REP. GILL: Yeah. I mean, I think that they’ve – they’ve done a phenomenal job not only of closing the border, of course, you know, basically immediately –
MR. KRIKORIAN: And it’s interesting that we almost do that as a – kind of an aside; in other words, well, that’s taken –
REP. GILL: Right, which is –
MR. KRIKORIAN: Which is a pretty big deal, I got to say.
REP. GILL: Which is a pretty big deal. I mean – I mean, if you just think about that, we’ve had a border crisis – and it’s easy to forget this – for decades. It wasn’t just Joe Biden. I mean, it was every Republican and Democrat administration for – since Reagan where we’ve had a problem on our southern border. I mean, the early 2000s under George W. Bush we had a – we had a real, true crisis.
But going back to the Trump administration, you know, what he did not only in securing the border but he sent the message globally that illegal aliens are not welcome in the United States. We don’t want you here. Don’t come here. It was the polar opposite of what the Biden administration was signaling. And that alone did a lot to stem the tide of illegal aliens even coming to the border, but that also sends the messages to aliens who are in the U.S. that, you know, you don’t have a long-term future here. And that’s why you’ve seen over 2 million self-deport, which is the easiest, the cheapest way for – to get rid of illegal aliens.
So I think it’s been phenomenal. I think the messaging there has worked. I mean, you have 2 million who have self-deported. You’ve got, you know, what is it, 7(00,000) or 800,000 who have been deported on top of that, who have been actually deported. I mean, that is a success. We’ve got a long ways to go, but that’s a great start in one year; I mean, incredibly impressive.
MR. KRIKORIAN: I have one more question that may generate some social media clips depending on what your answer is.
REP. GILL: (Laughs.)
MR. KRIKORIAN: But I just want to tell people who are tuning in live that if you have questions email them to [email protected] – that’s [email protected] – and we will look through the questions, people in the audience here submit questions in writing, and I’ll examine them.
But my potentially controversial question that if I were a politician I would answer in a very elliptical and political fashion is: Do you think your colleague Congresswoman Ilhan Omar should be denaturalized?
REP. GILL: (Laughs.)
MR. KRIKORIAN: I don’t mean to put you on the spot. Feel free to –
REP. GILL: Yeah. I mean, I guess there’s a lot of questions about her immigration status, how that went about with, you know, marriage potentially to her brother, with other forms of immigration fraud. And if, after an investigation, we find out that that is, in fact, true that she did commit immigration fraud, then, yes, she should be denaturalized and deported just like anybody else would.
MR. KRIKORIAN: So we have a bunch of questions here. Let’s see. Yeah, this is – puts into context some of the things we talked about. There’s been a lot of discussion about AI wiping out huge sections of the workforce, especially white-collar jobs. Is there a – you know, is there an imperative to reduce some of these visa programs especially in the light of – in other words, regardless of what they’re doing to American workers now, especially in the light of the fact that lots of jobs are just not going to exist because of AI?
REP. GILL: Yeah. Yeah, that – I mean, that is one of the best examples of kind of the illogic of mass migration, especially recently. You know, you hear from the business world, from the political world, everywhere: AI is going to transform American life. It’s going to transform business life. We’re not going to need, you know, sort of the drudgery-type jobs in every single industry, from manufacturing to software. We’re just not going to need it. And people are going to work, you know, four-hour days going forward, and we’re going to be so wealthy because of it. They’ll say that, and then turn around right after that and say we need to import 2, 3, 4 million workers every single year because we simply can’t fill these low-wage jobs. I mean, it makes no sense at all. And the – you got to pick one. So I do think that that’s increasingly a more compelling argument for lawmakers and for the public about the idea that mass migration is just simply not necessary in any respect from a – from a commercial standpoint.
MR. KRIKORIAN: We have a question here which is a good question and timely now, is: Do you think Biden’s policies, and maybe even those before that, exposed the country to greater threats that now are relevant from potential terrorist sleeper cells, Iranian operatives or their – or others?
REP. GILL: Yeah, of course. And you know, I don’t have the numbers off the top of my head, but how many hundreds of known terrorists have been brought into the country because of Joe Biden’s open borders? I mean, we’re still dealing – we’re still finding them. And that’s not to mention the unknown terrorists, kind of like this Senegalese guy who went and shot up a nightclub. Of course, he was a legal immigrant, which is in many ways worse. But the number of people who are – who create, you know, real domestic terror threats, because they – the millions of people who came in were totally unvetted. We didn’t know where they were coming from. They weren’t exclusively coming from Latin America.
You know, I was at – a few months ago I was touring DFW. It was just something totally unrelated.
MR. KRIKORIAN: The airport? Yeah.
REP. GILL: The airport, yeah. Totally unrelated to immigration; it was work we were doing in the district and in the area. And they happened to be doing a self-deportation flight whenever I was there, so they took me into the terminal just to kind of show me what was going on. None of this was planned. And you know where the flight was going to? It was going to China.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Wow.
REP. GILL: This is a flight full of – I mean, there was, I think, a hundred fifty people or something self-deporting to China.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Illegal immigrants.
REP. GILL: Illegal immigrants, yeah.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Going home, yeah.
REP. GILL: So, I mean, the idea that, you know, there’s not a serious national security threat within the United States right now because of Joe Biden and Mayorkas is insane.
MR. KRIKORIAN: And I’ll just do a plug for our podcast, Parsing Immigration Policy. Today’s episode, the one we just posted today, was an interview with Mark Morgan, former head of CBP and ICE, specifically on this issue of security vulnerabilities.
We have another question here which I kind of alluded to but I think it matters: What does Congress need to do to make sure that the next president doesn’t just open the border again? Because all – a lot of the things the president is doing, I mean, there’s a lot of positive stuff, but there’s no reason that President AOC or President Gavin Newsom wouldn’t just undo everything on the first day.
REP. GILL: Right, right. Well, a couple things that we have done, and then get into what we should do.
We did provide funding to build a border wall and river barriers and all of that, which is a big deal. You know, I’m not saying a future Democrat president wouldn’t tear down a border wall once it’s constructed or get rid of river barriers, but it –
MR. KRIKORIAN: It’s harder to do, right.
REP. GILL: – at least creates a political barrier, a higher political hurdle for them to do that.
MR. KRIKORIAN: And the Laken Riley Act Congress passed as well, that’s a real thing.
REP. GILL: Right, right. And those are – those are huge – I mean, that’s – the Laken Riley Act, the border wall, that’s a big deal.
But on top of that, I mean the issue really should be codifying every single executive order the president has issued on any – on just about any subject, but especially on border security. So that’s why I introduced the Remain in Mexico Act, which was my first piece of legislation I introduced here, which would make that a permanent law, so make it substantially harder for a future Democrat to get rid of it. I mean, that just says that asylum seekers or somebody coming over the border who’s going to claim refugee status needs to wait as their asylum application is being processed not in America; in a third-party country.
Things like that, like H.R. 2, which is a big – you know, it’s an enormous amount of border security, the package, those are the things –
MR. KRIKORIAN: Which Congress – the previous Congress passed that bill, H.R. 2.
REP. GILL: Yeah. Yeah.
MR. KRIKORIAN: It has – as I – I mean, maybe I’m mistaken here or something’s happened in the past couple days, but Republican leadership I don’t think has reintroduced that legislation.
REP. GILL: You know, that’s something we’ve been pushing for, obviously, very hard. It’s going to be a harder hurdle to get it done in the Senate just because you don’t have – we don’t have 60 votes there.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Yeah, but you got to start with – somewhere, yeah.
REP. GILL: But you got to start here, and then let’s begin the process. But we need to be doing that right now, not, you know, in September or October of this year.
MR. KRIKORIAN: So this wasn’t a question we got, it just occurred to me: What are your thoughts on the change in tactics in enforcement because of what was happening in Minneapolis, and the president sent Tom Homan to kind of calm things down, and seems to have really succeeded without actually retreating from their goals of getting enforcement done? Any thoughts on how that worked out or whether that was a problem to begin with, or?
REP. GILL: Yeah. I mean, it’s been fantastic. I mean, Tom Homan is the best of the best on immigration enforcement. I mean, he is the guy who needs to be – who needs to be in charge of this kind of stuff. And you know, the – we had a lot of sort of political issues in Minneapolis for several weeks. He comes in, gets in charge, cleans up everything, and you really haven’t heard about – I mean, it’s been quiet for a month now. I mean, that’s what we want.
And to your point, I mean, he’s gone in; he’s built relationships with local law enforcement, with local elected leaders in a way that I think we haven’t seen in many of these very blue areas very often; and he’s focusing – I think his top priority, again, is getting criminal illegal aliens off the streets but with the recognition that anybody is deportable. If you are here illegally you are deportable, and we’re not going to back down from deporting anybody who shouldn’t be in our country.
MR. KRIKORIAN: The bigger question, it seems to me – and this relates to, you know, this Senate filibuster issue and sort of everything – is, how – you know, it is even realistic that we could have consensus on some significant changes to immigration policy? Because 30 years ago there were a lot of Democrats, including President Clinton, who were – you know, they were not the same as Republicans – they were probably more, you know, permissive on immigration issues – but they were pretty serious about it, whether it’s, you know, Barbara Jordan, obviously. That doesn’t seem to exist anymore, at least in Congress. Do you think there’s a realistic prospect of developing some kind of new consensus around changes to immigration policy?
REP. GILL: Not on a bipartisan basis. I think Republicans just simply have to beat Democrats electorally. That’s the only way we’re going to actually get –
MR. KRIKORIAN: Do you think beating them, though, might get them to change their thinking? I mean, this was – President Clinton was actually quite nimble in that respect, and he saw that people – for instance, on welfare reform as well as on immigration matters he shifted with the electorate, which is kind of what’s supposed to happen in a democracy.
REP. GILL: Right, right, it is, but this is a very different Democrat Party than it – than under Bill Clinton. I mean, the Blue Dog Democrat Party is totally dead. It doesn’t exist anymore. And again, this is a party whose political program – this is not, like, a crazy right-wing conspiracy theory – whose entire political agenda is based on mass migration. It’s: We’ll import as many people as we possibly can. We’ll create sanctuary jurisdictions that illegal aliens flock to that tend to be in blue states. That gives blue states greater congressional representation via state-level apportionment because the number of people – the Census counts the number of people, not the number of American citizens, meaning blue states would get more congressmen than red states will tend to get. So we’ll benefit electorally now. A lot of those – we’re going to oppose adamantly the SAVE America Act and similar pieces of legislation that would clean up our election system, so many of those illegal aliens will vote in our election system. And in the meantime, we will push for amnesty. And once we get that, illegal aliens will vote for Democrats because we – you know, this is the, you know, Boss Tweed Democrat Party.
That is their political strategy. And we’ve heard this for a long time. Democrats have talked openly – elected leaders have talked openly about amnesty. You’ve heard Democrats for decades talk about demographics are destiny. I mean, the bible of Democrat political social theory, it was a book called “The Emerging Democratic Majority.” It was written in the early 2000s. And the whole thesis is that demographic changes benefit Democrats at the expense of Republicans.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Oh, a co-author of that book is chastened and has actually very much changed his tune on that.
REP. GILL: Right. So that’s a – that’s a long way of saying I don’t think Democrats are going to be onboard. (Laughs.)
MR. KRIKORIAN: Right. So this is an interesting question from somebody in the audience, and this is kind of downstream of immigration policy. The fact is, the large majority of the foreign-born in the – in the United States, which is the highest percentage ever recorded, are legally here, are legal immigrants. And you know, some of them maybe committed fraud, but the vast majority of them aren’t going anywhere. What can we do to address – to accelerate assimilation with the people we already have? Because even if we, you know, magically stopped immigration tomorrow, there’s still tens of millions of legal immigrants. You know, some have assimilated some, some less, that sort of thing. What can we do to promote that and accelerate it, if anything?
REP. GILL: Well, the first and most important thing is to turn off legal immigration so that you’re not bringing more people in. But putting that side, I think language is a good proxy – a good proxy for very basic cultural assimilation – not true assimilation, but just at a basic level. Things like making English the national language of the U.S.; the idea that we should have road signs or ballots, honestly, in a foreign language to me is ludicrous. I think we should entirely –
MR. KRIKORIAN: Or truck driver tests. (Laughs.)
REP. GILL: Or truck driver tests. I mean, this is – again, that’s suicidal. It’s so stupid. No sane person believes that you should have somebody driving a, you know, massive 18-wheeler who can’t speak our language. I mean, you have to be so beyond idiotic to believe that. (Laughs.)
But I think language is a good proxy for that. So enforcing, you know, in our schools you’ve got to speak – you got to speak English. You know, whenever I was in high school you’d have somebody come in and they speak Spanish, and we were – we were all very clearly told, you know, because we were learning Spanish as a second language – couldn’t speak it well, but – were very clearly told do not speak to them in Spanish; only speak in English so that she can learn – he or she can learn English. And that should be the attitude, I think, is that, again, if you come into the country, speak our language, adopt our customs, revere our heritage in the same way that we do, and if you don’t then you should leave.
MR. KRIKORIAN: We have a question here that also has been in the news. And just to kind of rephrase it, what can Congress do about sanctuary policies? And this is relevant in Virginia. I live in Virginia, and the new governor there has completely undone – has prohibited cooperation with ICE, all of that sort of thing. What can Congress do to discipline or rein in sanctuary jurisdictions?
REP. GILL: Yeah. I mean, there’s a couple things we can do.
One, I think, is we ought to look at just entirely defunding them. And I know that there’s been some talk about that and maybe for perhaps some legal challenges. But if you’re not going to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement, then why in the world should you get any tax dollars? I don’t care what it’s for. You know, you are a burden on the rest of the country. Why should Texas 26, my district, be paying for health care for illegal aliens or for anything in Minneapolis if they’re not going to cooperate? That’s one thing that would, I think, move the needle pretty substantially.
The other is I think whenever you have – local officials should actually be on the hook for, in many ways, the crimes that illegal aliens are committing if they are – if they refuse to cooperate with federal immigration authorities. I mean, if you have an illegal alien who gets arrested for a petty crime, and instead of turning them over to federal officials you throw them out on the streets and then they go beat up an old lady or murder somebody or rape somebody, I mean, you ought to be liable for that.
MR. KRIKORIAN: So it’s kind of like extending the cause of action in the Laken Riley Act, allowing state attorneys general to sue.
REP. GILL: Yeah. Right.
MR. KRIKORIAN: So that idea. But again, you’re not likely to get that through the Senate.
Another thing that may or may not be able to get through the Senate but is a pretty fundamental issue not just here but in Europe, in Israel, Australia, everywhere where there’s immigration, is asylum – asylum reform – because asylum is – I’ve written on this a number – it’s an anachronism. It’s something that, you know, was formed, really, at the end of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War. And what can be done short of sort of more fundamental changes? Is it realistic to have, like, a first-country requirement for asylum, that if you pass through anywhere else you don’t get to apply here?
REP. GILL: Yeah, I think there’s a lot. I mean, the asylum program has been so wildly abused. I mean, the number of people who have come in and have claimed asylum, it basically means I need asylum from a bad economy in my home country too often.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Right. (Laughs.)
REP. GILL: I mean, that’s, like, 80 to 90 percent of asylum claimants. So that needs to be drastically reformed and just rationalized.
I mean, I think that, again, that’s another area where we should pretty much turn off asylum claims, you know, unless you’re – unless there’s a true case of a refugee who’s got a real life-threatening issue. I mean, why in the world we’re bringing people in because they’re – because they want higher wages here than they get in their home country is nuts. But, yeah, I think there’s a lot – a lot of reforms similar to that that we ought to be looking at.
MR. KRIKORIAN: I have one last question for you. One of the issues – one of the reasons Republicans – Republicans in the House especially, but anywhere – have been ambivalent on immigration issues is because of ag interests. In other words. Republicans are disproportionately representing agriculturally, you know, relevant districts or states, and attempts to either enforce the law or reforms to the H-2A visa system often run into real opposition from Republicans on this. How do you – is there a way Republicans can kind of, I don’t know, square the circle – I’m not sure what the right metaphor is, but deal with this issue where ag interests end up exercising a disproportionate influence and undermine attempts at kind of any form of immigration reform?
REP. GILL: Yeah. I mean, I think that there’s a couple things.
One, we talked about AI, and that is going to impact the agricultural sector. That’s going to be a little bit more long term than I think you’re getting at.
You know, I grew up on a cattle ranch in West Texas, and I grew up, you know, pounding T-posts into the ground, driving tractors and backhoes from the time I was young. And that – for a long time in America that’s been a core part of sort of the American story and American identity, is agricultural work. The idea that we should be – and I think we can make this case to the agricultural lobby; whether they buy it or not, that’s their problem. But the answer, ultimately, should be, no, we’re not going to import infinity laborers because you want cheap – you know, to grow stuff for cheap.
But I think the case – listen, this is an American industry that ought to be run and worked by the American people. There are plenty of people in the United States – high school graduates, even college graduates – who want to work on farms or work on ranches who don’t have the opportunity because you can’t make a living doing it because of massive agribusiness, who has not only bought up smaller family farms but is completely undermining them in a – it’s impossible to compete whenever they’re bringing in cheap, cheap labor legally, illegally, however. So I think making the case that we ought to – I mean, this is an American industry and we want to keep it that way is the way to go.
MR. KRIKORIAN: Thank you, Congressman Gill, unless you had some last thing you wanted to get yourself in trouble with.
REP. GILL: (Laughs.)
MR. KRIKORIAN: I really appreciate your coming in and sitting down and talking to us. I expect that you are going to be central to the immigration debate over the next however long you decide to stay in Congress or your constituents decide to let you stay in Congress, so keep up the good work. And you know, keep us – keep us in mind. Don’t be a stranger.
And for those of you who are – who aren’t watching this live, it’s on our website at CIS.org. And we will be doing more of these kind of newsmaker interviews with people like Congressman Gill who are central to the immigration debate here in Washington in the future. So thank you. Thank you again.
REP. GILL: Perfect. Thank you very much. Appreciate it.
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