 To Free Media, I'm Robbie Suave. And I'm Amber Duke. Let's get right into it. HBO's Bill Maher has a message for liberals who dream about moving to Canada or Western Europe. Those places are not all they're cracked up to be. Let's watch. Canada has the highest debt-to-GDP ratio of any G7 nation. I don't know what that means, but it sounds bad. So does their vaunted healthcare system, which ranks dead last among high-income countries in access to primary healthcare. And the ability to see a doctor in a day or two. And it's not for lack of spending. Of the 30 countries with universal coverage, Canada spends over 13% of its economy on it, which is a lot of money for free healthcare. Look, I'm not saying Canada still isn't a great country. It is, but those aren't paradise numbers. Let's hear what Maher also had to say about immigration. Let's take a look. Sweden opened its borders to over a million and a half immigrants since 2010. And now 20% of its citizens are foreign-born and its education system is tanking. And it has Europe's highest rate of gangland killings. And one result is that the far-right parties are in the government now there for the first time. To which liberals say, blaming immigrants for the rising crime rate is racist. Yeah, but is it true? Of course it's true. It's not a coincidence. The quality of life went down after the Somali gangs started a drug turf war using hand grenades. So every now and then, Robbie, I think Bill Maher kind of stumbles across a kind of conservative take and conservatives run to praise him and celebrate him as this is sort of based ex-liberal, but I'm sure next Friday on his show he'll say something else that will anger them. But let's start with Canada, right? Because he talks about the healthcare system, single-payer healthcare, not as great as all the left-wingers would have you believe. But the other thing he didn't get into there was Canada's crackdown on free speech. There was, of course, the desire of Trudeau and his government to prevent the freedom convoy of the truckers protesting vaccine mandates to be able to engage in their protest. And then he ended up seizing the bank accounts of some of them and preventing their ability to either get donations or, in general, use their own money freely as they saw fit. So yeah, it's kind of a hellscape. Yes, it's always interesting to see and hear some American liberals pying for Canada, our neighbor to the north, especially their health system being so good, then you find out, well, what is the wait time to see a doctor there? In a lot of cases, it's astronomically longer to get critical care you need. Then you have people in Canada come to the US. So I think it's not all it's cracked up to be. And you're so right to point out the infringements on civil liberties and free speech that this supposedly progressive government has pursued. I actually think a lot of people's assumptions about Canada and even a lot of European states how they're run end up being wrong in both directions because I've seen like on some measures, Canada has a less intrusive gut. Like they've been ranked on like economic freedom indexes as more free sometimes than the US because while they might spend more proportionally on welfare and on healthcare and on things, but I think in some ways they tinker with the economy less so there's less wholesale regulation of industry. I wanna have that less regulation and then also maybe the American approach to the welfare state, because it's clearly getting a muck there. But here's where we're gonna disagree, I bet. Yes, I'm sure. Is it immigrants who are responsible for rising problems in some of these countries, including in Europe, rising crime? So as far as I know from looking at the statistics in the US context, maybe it could be different in Europe, I don't know, doesn't seem to me that immigrants are especially likely or are more likely than the native population to commit crime to the extent we have rising increase in crime in various cities, including in DC where we are right now, doesn't appear to be caused by a spike in immigration to my mind. It's not to say there aren't problems, but I think there's something wrong about blaming it on immigrants. Okay, let's start with Sweden, which he brought up in the statistics about the rise in gang criminality and the decline in the economy there. There's also been a huge rise in rape and sexual assault in Sweden that is directly attributed to the number of refugees that they've taken in since 2018 from mostly African Muslim countries and Muslims from the Middle East as well. And so it's not a race issue, it's a cultural issue, and some of those cultures believe that it's justified to treat women in degrading and violent manners. So that's, I mean, that's number one, but number two to your point about whether those statistics bear out in the United States. It's kind of difficult for us to even say one way or the other because most US states do not track crime that's committed by illegal aliens, the only state that does is Texas. And their prison data has been used by various think tanks whether it's Cato or the Center for Immigration Studies and they disagree wildly on what the data actually says. Basically, Cato says if you just look at the raw numbers, then it looks like illegal aliens commit less crime than Native Americans. And I'm talking about obviously people who are citizens of the United States, not like, not like, not like other Native Americans. But the Center for Immigration Studies claims that they actually have higher rates of violent crime because they say that Cato fails to account for the fact that people are not automatically identified as legal aliens when they're first entered into the criminal justice system. Sometimes their immigration status isn't known until later. And so if you account for that, you end up having much higher crime rates among the illegal alien population. Now, you're correct to say that immigrants generally, if we're talking about legal immigrants in the US, they do tend to have either equal or lower crime rates than the Native American population, but we should expect that because our immigration system obviously has really strict processing. It takes years for people to get legal status and we generally have a merit-based immigration system for the most part. So we should want the legal immigrants we have coming here to have a better crime rate. But again, we don't really have good data on whether that's the case for illegal aliens. And so if you look at crime that's committed by illegal aliens, the question is could we have prevented this by simply enforcing borders, for example? Well, maybe. I mean, I think, look, I don't want violent criminals streaming across our borders, assaulting our women, et cetera. Obviously that's very bad. I wanna prevent gang-style criminal activity from taking hold in the US. The question is, and I think the answer is yes, could we prevent that, have whatever border security we need to prevent very dangerous people from coming to the country while still accepting, maybe by making the legal process easier for people to come here, people who will subsequently go on to have low crime rates who want to contribute to our economy, who want to start businesses, who want to work jobs, who want to grow our economy, who want to contribute meaningfully and productively to American society. The process to go through that is such a nightmare, and so we get more of the kind of reality of people going through frankly unsafe circumstances for them to come to the US and then massing on the creating some level of kind of just chaos and disorganization, I think in border towns that is sometimes frustrating to the people who live there. I get that, but we've made the process so confusing and so difficult, and it seems like we're, I think we should be able to have both. I think we should be able to make sure we are not bringing in, we're not importing violence into the country while still being welcoming and affirming of people who will make our country better off because we need to build houses and we need to grow our labor force. We need to take advantage of the resource that human ingenuity is. Yeah, and then you get into like economic questions about immigration, which are probably a whole separate conversation that I'm sure we'll talk about on a future episode of this program, but I think just on the security aspect of it, we traditionally have not done a very good job even through the legal immigration process of preventing people coming from cultures that frankly don't respect rule of law or American tradition, which I think are important things when we're talking culturally about what we want our country to look like. We just saw last week, for example, a bunch of people in Dearborn, Michigan, legal immigrants chanting death to America in a protest. I mean, there's no reason why people like that should be able to come here and basically threaten the country who's done a favor to them by giving them a better opportunity. I mean, but I got news for you, right? Like a hostile, from a, you know, you're from a conservative standpoint that the most hostile to like America and the founding values and all that, like that is a popular view among, right? Like very left-wing people on college campuses who are well-being. Right, but I can't stop them from being born here. No, right, who had been here and came over on the main car. But I can't stop a legal immigrant who feels the same way from coming. My point being, like my argument to conservatives who make this is that you can't, these threats to the way of life, to free markets and free speech and some values that we have in common, although we disagree on a lot else, is that like it's, the threat is homegrown. It's not, you can't, it's not being polluted by people coming in. It's that there's fundamental disagreement even, you know, again, I'm with people who've been here for generations and are wealthy and privileged that hold dissenting or different values and I want a system where people can exercise, I guess, the least amount of control over someone else's life as possible and you can decide how to run your own life and have decision rights over your property and your space and someone else can do that for their property and their space. I just think, I think it's a little bit of a misdirection to say everything would be fine if we could keep out these people who chant death to America. I'm like, it's still gonna Berkeley. They'd be chanting it every day even if their grandparents and great-grandparents were born here. But that's a straw man, right? Because I'm not saying that everything would be solved if we just prevented those people from coming to the United States. That's part of obviously a larger strategy to try to raise good citizens and have people here who want to contribute productively to society and don't hate the country that they either grow up in or immigrated to. And Sweden should be a warning of what happens when you don't exercise that right to control who comes across your borders and you bring in a bunch of people, import a bunch of people who end up raping your women. I mean, that's like the worst-case scenario. A lot of people coming from Mexico, coming over our southern border, are fleeing socialist dystopias that they despise. Then they can apply for asylum. Are terrified of inflation, have seen what inflation does. Some of them are religious conservatives. They come from nations that are more Catholic than ours. They don't like communism. They have a lot, like frankly, I'm not afraid of their cultural values ruining our country. I welcome these cultural values as a warning they could send to the rest of the country about having high inflationary policies, empowering socialism, how it can go wrong and lead to massive political repression. Yeah, I mean, I think those people from different countries in Central and South America are not monolithic. So if you're talking about Cubans or Venezuelans, you might be on the right track, but at the same time, Venezuelan now has homegrown or is importing gangs here now where we have Trendela Ragua and New York City terrorizing American citizens and then sending the money back to Venezuela. So I mean, it's not just like, oh, they're all Catholics and they all wear crosses around their necks. So they're all good people. I mean, there still has to be a modicum of screening for people. No, disagree. We can screen it, but the way the right talks about the immigrants coming in is it's entirely an invasion. They're entirely a process of the American project. It's millions of people a year and that's on top of two million Godaways. We have no idea who they are. All right, well, we, I no problem to do some screening. You'd let us know what you think about it more of free media after this.