McKinney: Before I let you go, you have a new article out in The Federalist talking about the Biden Effect versus the Trump Effect at the border and some of your interactions with people who want to cross over the border but held off when Trump was in power. I was wondering if you could outline your article for our audience tonight.
Bensman: The piece in The Federalist is an excerpt from my new book, Overrun: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in US History. And what I’m trying to explain there is my reporting on the ground interviewing hundreds and hundreds, thousands even, of immigrants who are on their way here. And Democrats like to – sometimes Republicans too – give all these different alternative, complex, explanations for why they’re coming. This piece just explains that it’s really not that complicated. It’s very simple. If you’re going to spend $10,000 on smuggling fees, you want to know before you lay that fortune down, before you borrow it from friends, family or the cartel, that you have a really high chance of actually entering and staying and paying it back multiple times over. It’s the calculus. And what we saw with Trump is that his rhetoric, followed by policies that lowered the odds that they could get in and stay made them stay home! And when Biden came into office, his rhetoric and policies increased the odds that they would get in and stay in earning many multiples of the investment. That’s all this piece is about. When you interview them, it’s a really simple calculus: If we know we’re going to get in, we’re paying. If we know we’re not going to get in, we’re not paying and we’re staying home. I know it sounds too simple to even be worth putting in a book, almost, but you’d be surprised that this lesson is never absorbed. And as we go forward as a nation, my argument is that every single policy should be judged against this filter: Will it increase the odds of people getting in and staying? Or decrease the odds of people getting in and staying? That’s how you turn the spigot on and off.
McKinney: And as you say, it should be self-evident but Kamala Harris gets up there all the time saying ‘root causes! Root causes! Maybe you should send her a copy of your book!