Bill O'Reilly is not happy after his counterpart George Will shocked the panel on Fox News Sunday and said that the United States should not deport child refugees who were fleeing violence in Central America. To no one's surprise, Bill-O responded with more fearmongering about how we're going to be overrun with immigrants from all over the world if we just open our borders -- which no one is suggesting of course, but that doesn't matter to O'Reilly -- and by basically calling all of them a bunch of lazy moochers and pretending they have nothing to add to our society or our economy.
Here's more on O'Reilly's rant above from Fox's blog: O’Reilly Takes on Williams: ‘You Are Dodging the Unintended Consequences of an Open Border’:
Mary Katherine Ham and Juan Williams were on “The Factor,” where they debated Will’s stance with Bill O’Reilly.
Ham said that policy doesn’t deal with the many immigrants who will continue to come in.
O’Reilly noted that 50 percent of immigrant families are receiving entitlements from the American taxpayers.
“We support the elderly, we support our veterans, and I think these children, as George Will said […] he said on the Statue of Liberty, it says, ‘We can handle your teeming masses, yearning to be free,’” Williams said.
“All of the world, we’ll handle everybody’s teeming masses, that’s just insane,” O’Reilly fired back.
While people want compassion for the children who are here, O’Reilly said Williams is “dodging the unintended consequences of an open border.”
“You are an open border guy,” O’Reilly said to Williams.
I don't know where O'Reilly's getting his "statistics" on the number of people receiving "entitlements," but I'm guessing it's straight from his posterior. Media Matters took this narrative from the right wing apart last year: Conservative Media's Misplaced Hysteria Over Immigrants And Welfare .
And as Jamelle Bouie explained last year as well, allowing more immigrants into the United States will have the opposite effect on our social safety nets: How to Fix Entitlements? More Immigrants:
Given Washington’s obsession with spending, this won’t enter the picture, but this figure—from a recent Gallup poll on immigration—is more important to the future of entitlement reform than any policy discussed by President Obama or Congress: [...]
As Kevin Drum noted yesterday, the “primary reason that Medicare (and Social Security) expenditures are rising over the next 30 years is simply because we’re going to have more old people.” We can solve this by cutting spending on services for old people, raising taxes on everyone else to support these services, or we can take the (relatively) easier option and let more people into the country.
In general, more people means more workers and greater productive capacity. Yes, these people will consume services, but they’ll also be paying taxes. In other words, if the problem with government spending is that the United States is getting older, the obvious solution is to find ways to make the country younger. At the moment, the best way to do that is to allow more immigrants—it’s as simple as admitting a large group of working twentysomethings for every new cohort of Social Security and Medicare recipients. It’s not a direct subsidy, but over the medium-term, adding more people (who work) will make it easier to support retirees. And given the wide demand for residence in the United States—138 million people want to live here!—it wouldn’t be hard to find large groups of young people to live and work in the country.
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