Mark Krikorian - Executive Director, Center for Immigration Studies Joins Houston's Morning News

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
As mentioned, Brittany Marino opening a lot of eyes and
they're dropping a lot of jaws by saying no more
dual citizenship in the United States if his bill were
to become law. Mark Riccory and Executive director of CIS
Center for Immigration Studies, with reaction to that, Good morning, Mark,
Good morning. Okay, So what are your thoughts? What was
your first reaction to what the senator offered.

Speaker 2 (00:22):
Well, it's kind of an obvious thing. In other words,
dual citizenship isn't even technically allowed under US law. It's
just that nobody does anything about it. Because when a citizen,
when an immigrant liked Senator Marino or Congressman Omar, when
they became a citizen, they had to take an oath.

(00:43):
You can just look it up Google Oath of Citizenship
and it says, I hereby renounce and abjure all allegiances
to any state or sovereignty or prince or potentates. It's
sort of old timey language, but it's already there. The
question is what do you do about it? And it
used to be before the nineteen sixties that if you

(01:05):
did a series of certain things, like if you ran
for office in a foreign country or voted in a
foreign election, you automatically lost your citizenship. Supreme Court in
the sixties says no, you couldn't do that. And what
Congress needs to do, and this bill doesn't really do
that is make those kind of acts crimes. In other words,

(01:30):
if you vote in a foreign election, you get you know,
a ticket on the first offense, and you know, six
months in jail on the second or something like that.
This legislation may not actually, even if it passes, which
it won't, the Democrats will never vote for it might
not pass judicial a muster because it says you automatically

(01:51):
lose your citizenship if you don't renounce your other dual citizenship.
So important thing to get discussion launched. I'm just not
sure it's going to go anywhere.

Speaker 3 (02:02):
Yeah, And I think that's a very good point.

Speaker 1 (02:04):
It probably will not, especially with the divide of Congress
and not by by by by chamber, but just the
slim majorities. Obviously you're not going to have that anybody
on the Democrats side going for this. But what what
should be what should be more passable? Uh, if you could,
if you could draw it up yourself, mark something that
would at least take somebody like illin Omar, who has

(02:25):
said in public speeches that she is supportive of Somalia first,
not the United States first. That's not even dual citizenship.
In my regard and my way of viewing it, that's
one A and one B, and one A for her
is Somalia, one B is the United States. At least
when somebody is is as brazen as that, there has
to be something that can be done or or or

(02:46):
could there ever be.

Speaker 2 (02:48):
Yeah, I'm not sure there is a legal solution to that.
That's a political question. In other words, if she were
to run for office in Somalia, that's the kind of
thing you could prohibit. LEA. There was actually a guy
from Columbia in New Jersey a number of years ago.
He ran for office in Colombia and in New Jersey
at the same time. Now he lost one election and

(03:11):
one the other. But that kind of thing you can criminalize.
What Ilhan Omar is talking about is the kind of
thing that unfortunately is mainly going to be susceptible to
political solutions. The problem is her district. A lot of
the people who live there, a lot of our American
fellow citizens, are okay with that. Sort of thing. So

(03:32):
I think we have a kind of a teaching job
to do before we can, you know, curb this kind
of thing. And that's where I point to this bill
by Senator Moreno as you know, a useful participation, a
useful start of that discussion.

Speaker 3 (03:51):
Yeah, that's that's what I said.

Speaker 1 (03:52):
We're talking to Marco Corey and CIS Center for Immigration Studies.
Mark just briefly impacts that you guys and your team
at CIS have noticed over the core of the last
well we'll just say the first ten eleven months of
the Trump presidency, but specifically over the last three months,
if I understand it correctly, zero point zero illegal border
crossings at our southern border.

Speaker 3 (04:12):
What impact is that having. Well, it's huge.

Speaker 2 (04:15):
I mean, there's still some people trying to get across.
It's a small number, but none of them are let go.
That's the thing. Nobody's let go, and that was what
was driving the crisis last time. But yeah, the crossings
are the lowest probably they've ever been. They say it's
the lowest since the sixties. But back then, we didn't
know when people were sneaking by at night. You know

(04:38):
that there were a lot of people who got by
without being noticed. That doesn't happen much anymore with cameras
all over the border, So it's a huge difference. It's
the problem is what do you do about all the
illegal immigrants that Biden led in over the past four years,
in other words, the immigrants who were the illegals who
were already here. And that's a harder nut to crack.

(04:58):
But the first thing you have to do, if your
tub is overflown, you turn the faucet off. And the
Trump administration has pretty effectively done that.

Speaker 3 (05:07):
Spot on, spot on, And you're right though.

Speaker 1 (05:10):
Now it is about cleaning up the mess that overflowed
that tub, and that's exactly what ICE's job is. Mark
Accory and Executive Director, Center for Immigration Studies.

Speaker 3 (05:19):
Mark, thank you, always appreciate the chat.

Speaker 2 (05:22):
Happy to do it. Thanks