Excerpts from the July 14, 2021 radio interview:
Host: Todd, you have spent time down in Central America studying what is going on. And I’d like to hear it from you. What is happening?
Bensman: Sure, well most Americans are probably familiar with the border crisis having to do with Central Americans and Mexicans mostly, Spanish-speakers. But there is this whole other aspect of the border crisis that Americans known nothing about, and it’s that there’s an international trail that is connecting the entire world to the southern border. And that people are coming in from 120 different countries from around the world right now in escalating, record numbers. So I decided to go down to the trail, which is the Nicaragua-Costa Rica border, which is a spot on that trail where they surface, to see what is going on. And what I found there was just absolute congestion of migrants coming from places like the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, Senegal, Eritrea, lots and lots of Haitians, Cubans, Somalis, people from the Middle East, from terrorism countries of concern in South Asia like Pakistan and Afghanistan. And you could see that there was actually no law enforcement pressure whatsoever, that the smugglers and immigrants worked in the wide open all day long every day to just keep this conveyor belt of migrants from around the world going to our southern border.
And the other aspect that I think Americans need to know about and don’t really know about is that there is a national security concern about this particular kind of immigrant because of the kind of countries they’re coming from, where there are lots of terrorist organizations or tribal militias that are committing atrocities in Africa. That’s what I write about in four pieces published at the Center for Immigration Studies.
Host: So it’s more than issues about Central America like we have been told, drug lords and gangs.
Bensman: Yeah, that’s right. This is not going to be an area you’ll ever see Vice President Kamala Harris visit, or anybody in the American journalism establishment. They’re not interested in reporting this migration and it’s really escalating. There were 50,000 immigrants from around the world who were not from Central America who hit our border in May. That’s the most recent known numbers. And that’s a 700 percent increase from the May a year earlier. And it’s a four-fold increase from just January. What the migrants tell me when I interview them. I interviewed many dozens of immigrants about why they’re coming, is because they perceive that Joe Biden opened the border up and stopped deportations, which is true on both of those counts. So they’re surging to get in while the getting’s good.
Host: Why do we even accept the fact or believe that anyone on the planet can come walking in here and it be ok? You can’t do that hardly anywhere else in the world. And we just say okay?
Bensman: I really don’t have a good answer for that. People speculate. I mean, it’s the strangest thing I’ve ever seen. I mean, we’ve had mass migration crises like this in the past, right? Even under Trump, we had them. But those have happened despite best efforts to stop them. We don’t want them to happen. And this is the first time I’ve ever seen a presidential administration actually foment it on purpose by just making sure that Border Patrol welcomes them in and processes them in like they’re Walmart greeters. I’ve been down to the border a lot in the last three or four months, and I watch it happen: boat load after boat load after boat load crossing right in front of law enforcement. They empty out and then law enforcement takes them out and then hustles them over to a processing center and gives them legal documents. Within a day, they’re in buses all over America. It’s the strangest thing I’ve ever seen. I don’t have a reason for it other than that maybe there’s some sort of virtue signaling going on for the Democratic left, the left side of the party that believes in open borders and we’re all one world and that we should all help our fellow man… if we have something to give, we should give it, and that’s what they’re doing.