Dave Rubin recently amplified a short Direct Message clip featuring the late Thomas Sowell, and the reaction on the host’s face says more than a thousand media sound bites ever could. In the clip Sowell lays out the blunt economic and cultural realities of mass, uncontrolled immigration — and Rubin is right to put that cold clarity back on the public stage where it belongs.
Sowell’s core point is simple and unromantic: a country without secure borders has no functioning immigration policy, and sentimental slogans don’t change that fact. He reminds Americans that the first great immigration worked because newcomers largely fit into the existing labor market and because there was a social and economic reality of remigration; today’s circumstances are different, and policy must reckon with those differences rather than pretend they don’t exist.
This isn’t abstract theory — we’re living the consequences of a porous southern border, a crisis lawmakers keep shrugging at while cities and taxpayers shoulder the impact. Congressional hearings and recent floor debates highlight the strain on local services and the real security and economic problems that follow when millions can cross with impunity.
Americans who love their country and respect the rule of law should be grateful for thinkers like Sowell who refused the fashionable pieties of the moment. He warned decades ago that promising citizenship before getting control of the border is putting the cart before the horse — an idea Democrats and cheap-sentiment journalists still refuse to address honestly.
Watch how quickly the establishment rushes to weaponize compassion as a cudgel against common sense: call border enforcement racist, call enforcement cruel, and move on. But these rhetorical smears won’t feed working-class Americans, won’t stop the cartels, and won’t pay for the schools and hospitals stretched thin by open-border policies.
Conservatives should seize this moment and insist on Sowell’s reasonable sequence — secure the border, restore the rule of law, and only then talk about long-term status for those who legitimately belong here. The American people are not opposed to immigrants; they are opposed to chaos, and they deserve leaders who will defend the nation first.
Finally, remember that platform power often favors political fashion over uncomfortable truth, which is why independent voices like Rubin’s matter for keeping Sowell’s lessons alive. Hardworking patriots must keep pushing elected officials and media elites to stop the moral posturing and start doing the hard work of protecting our country and its future.
