FM Talk 1065 Podcasts
State Rep. Ben Robbins - Jeff Poor Show - Wednesday 9-12-24
[Music] Welcome back to the JetPort show, and if you're talking about 065, thanks for staying with us on this Thursday morning, text line. It would be touched with the program, 2513430106. Still to come on the program about an hour from now from Alabama today, our Thursday regular April, Marie Fogel. And then in the 11 o'clock hour, Attorney General Steve Marshall will be with us, so please make sure you stay tuned for that. Joining us now on the line, I want to get him on, just kind of get updated. He represents the people up in Talladega County, near Solacaga, around Solacaga. Ben Robins, State Representative Ben Robins, Representative Good morning, how are you? I'm great, how are you? Doing well, doing well. Thank you for coming on. We do appreciate it. Oh, well, you've been very, very proactive here. There's a resettlement underway, and we've seen it throughout the state. Is this kind of, you know, unlike Albert Mill, where they've had to deal with immigrants coming in and, you know, the assimilation and everything. This is something relatively new, but kind of give us a lay of the land, the way you understand things. And we've seen the news reports, but there's a lot of confusion out there. There is a lot of confusion, and I appreciate you saying I've been proactive. I think, by constituents, really just want to know some answers on this, and that's what's the struggle. Our federal government is completely, their immigration policy is just so completely inept that what we believe would be basic questions that should be easily answered or unanswerable. You know, it seems like where did, how did they end up here? The federal government has no idea. And talking to some of the Haitian immigrants, I think that they are being promised jobs and opportunities and maybe some false promises to get on vans is what it seems like instead of buses from the description, the way they describe how they got here to me. It sounds more like a van than a bus, but they don't know the term van. Apparently they'll say the bus, they'll describe a van and are showing up in our communities without these jobs and opportunities that they were promised. And so it's creating a bad environment, not just for our community, but also for the immigrants themselves. And they don't need to be in Sowakaga. They don't need to be in Alberville. They need to be in other places or in Haiti with their families, because these are not good conditions that they're living in here. The concern it seems, I mean, as you look at it, just as a community, is the community really prepared for something like this? Like, you know, there's the language barrier. There's also the infrastructure dealing with that. The available housing, for example. We do not have the resources period. South Valley County has not had a residential development housing development in 40 years, basically. There were some in the early 2000s, but we're having the very first housing development built since the recession in South Valley County. We have a housing shortage. We have no one that speaks French Creole, Haitian Creole in this community. And so there's just an impossibility to provide or to assist, even if you wanted to. Even if you were the, you know, a few of them go to the Baptist Church, First Baptist Church in Sowakaga. Even if you said, "Oh, we want to help you and provide you with food and help you." You know, you couldn't even communicate with them on learning what they need or how you want to help them. It just said, "We can't provide these services. We can't help." And we don't have the resources to even help them. It makes no sense to bring them here. And it is, again, it's just a complete failure of our federal government in knowing how many immigrants are here in America, where they are and where they are going. It's creating a, like, Sowakaga is, Alberville, Athens, is every small town in America is going to be dealing with this issue and having to face it because our federal government is allowing hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people in with no monitoring and ripe for human trafficking and other issues that come along with that. Well, it seems to be this that, let's say, at some point that the federal government does step in and help, but then it just becomes sort of a dependency. Like, you still don't really have a good answer for, "Well, where are these people going to work? What does their health care look like? What is their education that they have kids?" You have a lot of still unanswered things. The federal government comes in with, you know, money or resources or whatever. It's just creating this federal government dependency for the local community. Oh, in no way am I arguing with that. I think that you are completely correct. The government is so big, it has created a problem that is now causing local communities to have to look to them to solve because of our federal government. And so, yes, I think you're right. I mean, what happens to the person that comes to the country with no language skills, I mean, only Creole speaking abilities is in America with no job and no ability to find a job, what happens? They end up on government assistance. Maybe right now some of them are not on government assistance because they don't know English to know who to talk to on how to get those programs, but eventually they will be on government assistance because we simply don't have, when I use the term resources, I'm talking about houses, jobs, everything. I mean, we don't have a large poultry plant here. So, there is a finite number of jobs and there are more Haitians coming than there are jobs available. So what happens to someone that is unemployed with no skills and no ability to provide, they end up on the government role. And then our community will also end up on the government role, and our state will further rely on federal assistance. So it is a bad environment. It's chaos created by the federal government at the top down. That's the problem, though. We don't know, like, it's a dis shroud of mystery here. Why silica? Why Talladega County? What is going on here? How is this? Why did they just look at a map of Alabama to start throwing darts? Or is there something there? And that's used to be the unresolved issue. Well, I know for a fact, I'm talking, you know, I'm doing everything I can to try to figure out these questions. Like, I mean, I'm going to the Haitians where they live and saying, talk to me, tell me why you're here. I'm talking to people that anybody can. And I know for a fact that, you know, they are, our community cannot handle this. We have, it's unfair to Talladega County and it's unfair to the immigrants. So what's happened? You know, it's unfair to say, get on, get in this van. Again, this bus. Here's a sheet of paper with four people that might employ you and go ask them for a job. That is what the federal government is doing. They're allowing that type of system to happen. And that is just completely. I mean, we can't, and then you get here in those four places aren't hiring. So now what happens? It is just a terrible situation. And I think that talking to several of the legislators that are dealing with this, we're going to have to do everything we can in the state legislature to create some laws to try to prevent this flow in the state of Alabama, because we don't want our communities to pin it on the federal government. And we don't want large numbers of unemployed people with low skill and an ability to communicate coming into our communities. It's not good for anybody. Showed by State Representative Ben Robbins here on the program from Silicon County. Representative, we hearing this. And I don't know if you can speak on this that the federal government's kind of using these dog governmental organizations, these NGOs as a pass through. Sometimes they are faith based. You have any sense of that going on? Yeah, I mean, I think that what you've seen is massive fraud and issues from these NGOs. I mean, what is happening is it is there's just greed. These NGOs are getting money to grants and other ways to help using air quotes help Haitians, and all they're doing is giving them a sheet of paper that says here, take go to go go apply these four places. And they're ending up basically in the arms of people that have no concern for them. And are in essence, trafficking them from point A to point D and squeezing money out of the immigrant at every turn every corner. And it's, it's just, I cannot understand how toxic it is how terrible it is to the to our community and the immigrant and these NGOs and our federal government are just watching it happen and completely okay with it. And we're pumped. Our federal government is pumping money as pumped a lot of money into a system that is over overriding our local communities and just really being a unjust unfair system to everybody. Some of these immigrants should not be here. They most of them should not be here. And they're led here really by our federal government on false promises. What are you here? And I guess we're at the state level here. The governor. Last time we talked, you said they've been very, very helpful. So still we made the case. Yeah, I mean, everybody, everybody is concerned about this issue. And everybody wants to know more answers. But because of the ineptitude and that ineptitude causing such chaos that Homeland Security and our federal government, it's, it's hard to get answers. But everybody is working on this issue because of all because of what the strain is putting on our local communities, the human trafficking that's happening, the drugs that could be coming here. It's all a toxic environment that we want to try to prevent from happening in Alabama. And we've got to get to the bottom of it. So we can create legislation that would curb this tide. Well, let me ask you about that. I mean, obviously immigration and Alabama said to learn the hard way over the years as a federal issue. What can the state do? If anything to try to try to curb this. Representative. Looks like we may have lost her. Yeah, we may have lost representative Roberts there. Two, five, one, three, four, three, zero, one, zero, six. That's the text line. If you want to be in touch with the program. I'll see. Do we have you now? There we go. We drop. Yeah, I'm back. My question was before we dropped, it was what why why why can't the state do I guess at the legislative level like what laws could they pass because as we know, I mean, Alabama's tried this before and they've kind of run a file of the federal government with passing immigration laws or code or whatever. What do you think you could do there at that level? I think there are several things we can do. Yes, immigration itself is a federal issue. And the supremacy clause of the Constitution means that federal law supersede state law. So anything time directly to immigration is a federal issue. However, when you come in under the CHN V program, and this is something that we're looking into. When you come under the CHN V program, you have a sponsor. That sponsor is supposed to provide you with transitions with job placement, language skills, all of those services. If those sponsors are failing and dumping them on us, I think those sponsors owe our community and our state money for the failure that they did as a sponsor. And that's not a federal issue. That's just saying, hey, we spent X number of dollars. Here's your invoice that you pay us for your failure to do what you were supposed to do. I also think there's some things we can do in terms of how basically what what the if you are hiring a C 11 employee, which would be a CHN V employee. You must notify that you've hired one. And that way, at least the state could monitor. But I think then today, we've got to tighten up some of our we've done a lot in the last few years, but we really need to probably exercise and use the laws that we have in the books concerning human trafficking. And I think that if we do that, because I believe that is happening here, talking to some of the Haitians, that if we were able to do that and the threat of the human trafficking prosecutions, I think that these people would say, we're not going to bring them to Alabama anymore because we're concerned about that. We'll go to another state, not that I want them in America, but I don't want them in Alabama. So I think that we have laws in our books and we can strengthen some of our laws, but we could also use them that we have currently on the books. You could use them as a deterrent. The hassle, make it much more of a hassle, right, where, okay, maybe out of the place we want to do this. Yeah, if I'm concerned, I might get prosecuted for human trafficking, or I'm going to have to register with the state that I'm a sponsor, and then I might have to pay some bill to the state. No, just go to, you know, go to Indiana, go here, don't go, don't send me out about, I don't want that hassle is possible. Or, you know, and so I think that we do have some laws in the books that could be deterrence and we do have laws in the books that. And I think laws currently in the books, the laws we need to strengthen that could really go at some of the people that are doing bad things that are mixed in with the immigrant population. Representative, we'll leave it there, but thanks for hopping on. I think you had it a lot. We do appreciate you coming all of us. Oh, no problem. Thank you so much for the time. Hey, thanks for coming on. We got to get a break in here, guys. We'll be right back. This is the Jeff Moore show on FM Talk 10065. Alabama