The jon kiper show

What's happening folks? This is the Jon Kiper Show. Welcome. I'm Jon Kiper and I'm running for governor of New Hampshire. So today's episode we're gonna talk about immigration. I think it's an issue that's been on a lot of people's minds for obvious reasons, and it's something that I think it's important that we talk about.

I have not talked about immigration very much on the campaign trail because I want to be abundantly clear: the governor does not really have a role in forming immigration law or establishing immigration quotas or anything like that. And frankly, when people ask me on the campaign trail, they say, "What are you gonna do about masked ICE agents coming into our cities and, killing people or hurting people or break, violating the Constitution?"

I'm gonna be honest with you. As if I'm the governor, there are not a lot of good options. Okay. Having the state police arrest ICE officers is something people have talked about. That gets very dangerous when you have one group of state sanctioned people with guns and another group of state sanctioned people, federally, with guns.

The outcome could be very bad, and I think we can all agree some type of civil war in the United States would be a terrible thing. And that's really why we need to bring the attention down right now because. That's where this is headed. This, that is the logical conclusion of where we're at. But there's still, I think, plenty of time for cooler heads to prevail and for us to not let Donald Trump destroy this country as he seems hell bent on doing.

I would just wanna take one second and read through the names of people who have been killed by ICE because as I'm sure you all saw the gruesome video. From just a couple days ago when a very young, young man named Alex Prety, who's a 37-year-old ICU nurse was shot and killed by a federal border agent, now border guard, I think.

If you've seen the video, it's horrific. He's at a protest, he's filming. He does not have a firearm visible. He is not brandishing it as the administration has claimed. He is seen filming the officers. He's helping a woman. He gets pepper sprayed, he gets thrown on the ground. He has six people on top of him, from what I could see.

It did appear that he one of the agents removed a firearm from Mr. Freddy's pocket, or, holster somewhere concealed, and then it appears that officer accidentally discharged that weapon, causing all of the officers around to then shoot Preti, thinking that he was the one who had just discharged his firearm when that was not the case.

Regardless. It's a heinous crime. It's these people should be prosecuted because what they did was illegal. It was unlawful, and it violates all social norms in these United States. Now, I, Alex Pretty was not the first person to get killed by immigration or ICE authorities. Renee, Nicole Goode was a woman who was shot on January 7th.

Before that, Sylvia. Sergio Vega Gonzalez was a 38-year-old man who was shot and killed by an ICE agent near Chicago in September of 2025.

Let's see, Gerardo Luna Compost has been killed. Victor Manuel Diaz. Ko F Saed, Abdul Ka, Jean Wilson, Brutus Marie Andjay, Blaze Macu Cher, who's a Ukrainian immigrant who died in custody Miami in February and many others have died in ICE detention since 2025. This is just the people whose names that I could find.

There's. Undoubtedly many people that have died in ICE custody that we don't know about. And I think what we need to ask ourselves is a pretty simple question. Is the threat of an undocumented immigrant who is here working without the proper paperwork, is that worth seeing people? Is the removal of that person worth seeing?

Innocent people shot in the street. Is it worth seeing? The Constitution just stomped on. While they don't these people are not given due process. They are doing these warrantless searches of houses and just having this armed, masked, paramilitary organization on our street. Is that worth the cost of having this undocumented person here or having them removed?

I would say it's not. And it's important to understand that the Biden administration and the Obama administration, they deported millions of people. Millions. And you didn't hear a lot about it because they did it quietly in the background, and so there wasn't a lot of protests. There was none. They didn't have masked men going around doing this.

And I think that's a mistake that the Trump administration is making if it really has any intention of actually doing immigration enforcement, because. All that they've accomplished is to radicalize a bunch of people who were on the sidelines before that. And I have a very specific example. My friend who lives a couple towns away, he has three sons in school, and one of them who was.

I think 10 or 11. One of his classmates was Brazilian and his family got picked up by ICE and got deported. And this kid came home one day and said, "Hey, my buddy wasn't in school. What's going on?" And my friend and his wife had to explain like, "Hey, there's this guy Donald Trump. He didn't like, doesn't like immigrants, and he's sent your friend back home."

And now my friend's wife, who I never saw her post anything political really at all before. Maybe occasionally around an election, but very limited. She's been posting about ICE a lot, and when you start to radicalize a suburban mom, you're in trouble politically because these people vote and there's gonna be consequences for the Trump administration's actions.

And, i've, listened to some interviews with journalists who have talked to former Border Patrol agents or former ICE agents who said, "This is not how we do things. This, it's not how we used to do things. And it's making the entire job very ugly, very disgusting." And they said, "This is not good for."

Our profession. And I'll say, back in 2021, people started saying, we need to disband ICE. They're dangerous. I didn't really see the issue at the time. I thought, we need an organization that's working on getting, particularly criminals that are here illegally drug smugglers, whatever.

We need some organization getting these people out. But now no way. I think we should disband ICE. I totally agree. But the bigger question we gotta ask ourselves and this is hard because in this one moment it feels like we're in chaos and we are. And it feels like all these tragic things are happening, and they are.

But we need to demand from our elected officials, both Republicans, but also Democrats, that there is a plan for immigration. Okay, we need a comprehensive immigration reform plan, and I'm not seeing that from the Democrats. What good is it for us to disband ICE if Border Patrol just does the same job?

This guy, Alex, was shot by a Border Patrol agent, not by an ICE agent. And what good does it do us to get rid of ICE? And then in 2030, whatever, 36 or some future date, a Republican gets in there and then says, okay, we're just gonna make, recreate ICE and we're going to continue as we were before. What good is that?

We need a solution to this problem because here's the reality, okay? There are millions of people in the United States who have become economically integral to our economy. They grow food, they process food, they landscape, and they work on houses. They're building houses. These people are essential for our economy.

And to remove 10 million hardworking people makes no sense. I agree. If you are here and you've committed a crime, you should be deported, a hundred percent. But there's got to be an avenue for these people who have been here for years, decades even, to become naturalized citizens after all this time. And frankly, the Republicans and the Democrats have both kicked the can down the road on this issue.

And now, I think when Obama was president, i'm sure he did the calculus and he was like, we can focus on immigration, or we can focus on healthcare, but we don't have the political will to do both. We're gonna do healthcare. But the very idea of Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals, DACA, is that he was pushing the can down the road.

I think we need to really look at the relationship between the United States and Mexico, particularly because I think a lot of people don't really think about this. Number one, the reason that there's a lot of Mexicans in the United States is because a whole swath of the United States used to be part of Mexico, and that for literally hundreds of years people that worked in agriculture from Mexico would follow the, the agriculture calendar, and they'd be picking fruits and vegetables, as the seasons change. And then they would return to their village in the winter, and then they would do it all over again. And this was. For years and years. And what happened was there was a general named Chapman who was coming off of Vietnam.

He had been a Marine, and he was assigned to be in charge of the border. And this guy's a Marine. He had just been in Vietnam, fighting what was a border dispute between North and South Vietnam. And he looked at the border and he saw Mexican people just walking across and, I heard a story the other day about a guy who said when he was a kid, he would just walk across the border, sell some watermelons, walk back with his money, and this is how it worked.

People would just walk over and they would work, and then the winter would come and they'd walk back. And this guy Chapman said, "Wow, this is chaos. We can't have this. We've gotta militarize the border." And he did. And what happened? It turned out that it was actually a pretty good system. It wasn't flawless, but what happened after that?

It was a pretty good system before the militarized border. And what happened after that is there was millions of people that were in the United States, they were trapped. They were from Mexico and Guatemala and these other areas, and they said. It would be too dangerous for us to go back to Mexico and then not be able to get back to the United States.

And we have houses, we have jobs, maybe even kids here, so we're just gonna stay in the United States and not go back in the winter like we would have normally as migrant workers. They were trapped here. And obviously they're sending money home, so it's not the worst, it's not terrible.

But a lot of the people in Mexico had intended to go back to their village someday, at least temporarily, but maybe permanently, take the money from working and open a restaurant or something. I worked with a guy from Brazil. He was a doc, he had his documents, and he basically was working 90 hours.

He was working at a restaurant in Portsmouth. And a Burger King in Portsmouth, and he was working all this money, and he said, "I've just gotta do this for five or 10 years and then I'm gonna go home and I'm gonna open my own restaurant and I'm gonna be able to pay cash for it because I'm just stacking money."

And this is why I think that immigration is really the United States. It's what made us a superpower, because when you're bringing all these people from around the world in, and that was the intention in the United States from the get go. If you're not a Native American, you're an immigrant, you're a descendant of an immigrant.

And so it was this idea: we'll get all these people from all over the world, people fleeing war and famine. We'll get 'em all here and we'll create this melting pot of ideas. And that's really what United States was built on. And so to. Act like that's not the origin of this country's madness. We're all immigrants.

Okay. Stephen Miller is a descendant of immigrants. Donald Trump is married to an immigrant. JD Vance is married to an immigrant. It's just madness to, for them to now ignore these facts. So immigration is. It's just part of the United States culture. And like I said, these people got, these Mexicans got trapped in the United States.

They had kids, and their children were the DACA recipients, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. And the problem is, Obama. Left those people, the DACA recipients, open for a future administration to do what they're doing right now, which is deporting them. It's also really important to understand that ICE is not really going after a lot of criminals.

They're going after people that are even in the process of getting their paperwork. To become citizens and they're literally grabbing them at the courthouse. What sense does that make? I also learned that I didn't know this, but there was a way for undocumented immigrants to get a tax file number.

So many of these people were paying taxes, yet not receiving any benefits. That's just a win-win for the United States. 'Cause immigrants come here, they just wanna work. That's good for our economy and this is a fact. Immigration in the United States, illegal and legal, goes up when we need more workers.

When the unemployment rate goes down, we get more people coming in. When the unemployment rate goes up, people go home. During COVID, a lot of migrants just went home because there was no work here. They just left. And that's exactly what we want. We want people, when we need workers, we want to come, and when we don't, we want 'em to go back home.

That's how it should work. And I think people just have lost sight of this bigger picture. And that's really what I want to talk about: that we need some sort of system to understand that we cannot deport all the undocumented immigrants in this country without causing massive economic trauma to this country.

And unnecessarily, we are a country of migrants. Okay? And for many years. The founding of this country, there was no paperwork to become a resident. You just came here and got a job. You just started working, and then someday you could apply for citizenship after you've been here for a while. There was no rules about who could come.

Now, I'm not advocating for an open border at all, but here's the reality. And I know this because I've traveled, and I've talked to a lot of people, and I've interacted with other immigration systems. Most countries with a shared border, like the United States of Mexico, have got reciprocal visa agreements where people from one country can go and work in the other country and vice versa.

Without too much paperwork, Australians go and work in New Zealand, New Zealanders go and work in Australia. The Irish go and work in England. And this is just how it works in the world, because it makes sense, right? It makes sense. You might as well, you've got these people right there.

And I know a lot of people that, that have, that wanna go to Mexico and work and start businesses. I was an illegal dishwasher in Mexico for one winter. And I also did some illegal dishwashing in Australia when I was strapping young Vlad. And I did it and I knew what the risks were. I knew that I could get in trouble, but ultimately the it was worth it to me.

And it's worth it for these people. And I think you gotta really think about this, someone willing to. Walk, hundreds, thousands of miles, swim across the river, go through the barbed wire. What's more American than that? We won, guys. We're the country that everyone wants to be at.

We won. And it's a reality that we need to grow the economy, to keep the economy growing. And the only way to do that is with more people, and people aren't having enough babies. So we need. Immigration. Look at what's happening to Japan right now. Japan is entering into an economic doom loop because they continue to borrow more money to fund the retirements of the elderly, because people did not have enough kids.

So they do not have enough workers to fund their retirement system. So they're borrowing to do that, to fund the retirement system, and it's not sustainable. You have to have a growing population. Okay, now I think what the Republicans have realized. Is that by the numbers? I think the number, the year is 2040.

People of color will outnumber white people, and I think they've realized that. And they've said, oh, whoa, we gotta stop all this immigration before us white people are a minority, can't have that. But their major misreading on this and I find this. Frankly, hilarious, but just also ironic, is there's this assumption from the Republican side that every person that comes up to the United States from Mexico or Guatemala or wherever is going to be a Democrat because the Democrats are more pro-migration, and the reality just could not be further from the truth.

Many of the people coming from Central and South America are very religious. They're Catholic. They don't believe in abortion. They're big family people. They believe in big families. They, in fact, have a lot more in common with conservative Americans than they do with liberal Americans, which is the funny part.

And a lot of them have said, we're gonna vote for the Republicans. I heard this was very telling during the last election where. I saw this interview on NPR where there was a gentleman who had come over in the eighties, and he'd actually gotten amnesty from Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan gave 2.7 million people amnesty, and this, so this guy was in his eighties.

He was very old. And the interviewer said, "Oh, you got amnesty. That's great. So how do you feel about the election?" He said, "I'm voting for Donald Trump. I don't want any more illegal immigrants coming into this country." And this is a guy who came over as an illegal immigrant. It just it's not as cut and dried as people think it is.

And there was another story I remember where there was three people who had just claimed asylum, and they were all from I think they were all from Central and South America, but the. Interviewer said, if you could vote today, no they couldn't. If you could vote, who would you vote for? Harris or Trump?

And they, all three of 'em said Trump. And they, and the interviewer said, he's pretty hostile to like migrants like you. And they're like, yeah he's a strong guy and machismo and all this stuff. And ah, I really love Trump. It's mind blowing, right? People will vote against their better interests sometimes.

Because of other factors. So that argument that the Republicans have just doesn't make any sense to me. This argument that the Democrats are allowing all these people in that are then voting for them, it's just wrong. You look at the numbers, many young Latino men voted for Donald Trump.

They did not really care about the immigration issue. I think it's important just to understand too, that a lot of people who came here legally. And went through the process. Do not exactly appreciate people that come here without documentation and they're upset. They're not upset, but they, they did it the right way at much expense and a lot of paperwork and they look at people that come here illegally and they say, oh you're making us look bad.

But the reality is the United States fundamentally is going to need these people for our economy to continue to grow. Social Security is itself a pyramid scheme. There's got to be more people working on the bottom, and that only works if our population is growing. And currently it's not. It's not growing fast enough to sustain our Social Security benefits.

I once made this joke, I'm like, an immigrant's just a taxpayer you haven't met yet. These people just want to come here and pay taxes. And that sort of thing. That's why I think it's really important that we push this conversation about immigration reform, because I need to hear it. I need to hear Democrats, elected officials, talking about it. I hope someone running for Senator, Congress, will watch this video and say, "Yeah, I'm gonna come up with an immigration plan," 'cause it's just essential.

But I wanna talk about another issue which is way more pressing, but it's very. Connected to this issue, and that is the surveillance state. So since 9/11 since the War on Terror, both Republicans and Democrats have voted for the Patriot Act and for these other laws that allow the government to conduct surveillance of all of us.

Now, they did it under the guise of terrorism, and that's always how it's done. But really they've been surveilling everyone. This was something Snowden brought up, that the NSA was spying on Americans and he's been hiding in I think Russia or wherever ever since, because the government is.

Is getting information in a way that I think a lot of people would not be comfortable with, and it's really important for people to understand this. There's a gentleman by the name of Peter Thiel, and calling him a gentleman is frankly probably too kind. But Peter Thiel owns a company called Palantir, and Palantir is basically this massive database of information.

At least one of the things that they do is they build these databases of information using AI and whatever technology, and they have perfected this software. Israel and the IDF, Israeli Defense Force, has used it to spy and keep track of people in Gaza, and they perfected it there. And then Palantir sold the same software to ICE.

And ICE is now using this software to show up at an undocumented person's door, find their car, find their school, whatever it is, and track 'em down. And the thing is that. It's not going to stop with undocumented immigrants. It's not gonna stop with terrorists. It's going to, they're going to, they want to have everyone under surveillance.

They want everyone to be in this. System, and they wanna be able to track you and know everything that you're doing. And they wanna be able to shut you down if they, if there's any dissent against the ruling class. They wanna be able to just shut off your credit cards, shut off your electricity, shut off your car, whatever they want to do.

That is really their ultimate goal. And you've gotta listen to what these people are saying because it's absolutely crazy. It really is. And that's the bigger fear I have. We have this sort of short-term, next three-year battle with Donald Trump over ICE funding and DHHS and border patrol.

But we gotta look at the bigger picture, guys. This is just an experiment they're running on the undocumented folks that they can perfect the software, and they're gonna use it on us all. And this is really, it sounds maybe like conspiracy theory, but this is really. What their end game is just this control.

They call it the panopticon. And the idea is that they can see you at all times, that you are never outside of the view of a camera or a tracking device or whatever it is. So we all need to be aware of that bigger issue. And we need to fight back against it. We need to demand that our elected officials first understand what's going on, this bigger picture, but then also are work in a fight to prevent that.

So that's my big takeaway is this is one part of this massive fight that we are having between us and the oligarchs. Okay. And I'm just gonna rephrase what my whole campaign is about. The problem is inequality, okay? Immigrants did not cause inequality. It was the rich hoarding money. The solution is to tax the rich and use it to fund public education and housing, okay?

That's it. We have got to deal with the inequality. They are using immigration and immigrants as scapegoats. Saying, oh, it's their fault. It's their fault that you don't have a job. It's their fault that your quality of life is deteriorating. That is just not true. The reason that the middle class is eroding is not because of immigrants.

This country has always had immigrants. We are all immigrants. If you're not Native American, the reason that your life is getting worse is because the rich are hoarding more and more wealth, and this was a natural. Consequence of the way that we've been doing capitalism and the fact that the corporations are getting more and more money.

I've got a book coming out very shortly. It's called Community First Economics, and it attempts to identify this problem and to offer some real solutions and philosophically how we think about the economy, how we think about the country, how we think about the role of the government. And it should be out in a couple weeks.

I'm sure I'm gonna do probably a whole podcast about that. But, thank you for coming. Thank you for watching this show or listening. Again, my name is Jon Kier. I'm running for Governor of New Hampshire. This is my chat on immigration. And if you can share this with someone if there was anything in it that was insightful, I'd appreciate it and be good.

Do good work. Thank you.