Fox News host Tucker Carlson told viewers on Tuesday night that immigrants have been “plundering” America’s wealth for decades and more “are coming” to bleed the country dry.
Claiming that “functioning societies don’t operate like this,” the conservative primetime star declared that American leaders don’t want to enforce the laws and “defend our nation” because they are “decadent and narcissistic.”
“That's obvious and the rest of the world knows it,” Carlson said. “The American piñata has been getting pummeled for decades and now it has finally come apart. Our national wealth is up for grabs by whomever gets here first, and they are coming.”
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Asserting that 1 percent of Guatemala’s population has moved to the United States in the past year, the Tucker Carlson Tonight host insisted that Guatemalan villages are “literally depopulating” in order to take advantage of “America’s generous welfare state.” The reality of the situation, however, is that a climate change crisis has caused farmers in that region to abandon their land and make their way to the United States.
Citing a study by anti-immigrant group Federation for American Immigration Reform—an organization designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center—Carlson claimed remittances sent out of the U.S. by foreign-born workers showed “the scale on which the United States is being plundered.”
Carlson said FAIR’s study revealed “illegal aliens” are remitting $28 billion a year.
“That’s $28 billion leaving this country, going abroad every year from people who don’t even have a legal right to work here in the first place but are,” he fumed. “And are benefiting, of course, from all the extras—free healthcare, free education, subsidized housing, food stamps, who knows what else?”
Undocumented immigrants, of course, are not eligible for most government benefits by law. They are not legally able to receive food stamps or enroll in Medicaid or live in public subsidized housing. While they can receive emergency health services and enroll in public schools, there are no federal government programs in which undocumented immigrants can receive direct cash or monetary assistance.
Carlson’s anti-immigration stance is nothing new. In fact, he is currently in the middle of a sustained advertiser boycott over his harsh rhetoric towards immigrants. Following a December 2018 segment in which he said immigration has made the United States “poorer and dirtier,” dozens of companies announced they would no longer air their ads during his program.
