Hour 1: The enforcement on the nation's immigration laws shouldn't sway based on who's sitting in the White House

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2:09At 1030 Dr. Brian Fitzpatrick from Fordham's National Research Manager and author of this report are high school grades becoming meaningless in the age of AI and endless screen time. There's a new nationally representative studying and it reveals a lot of very troubling information about electronic devices and the amount of time that your kids, our kids, grandkids and so forth spend on these devices and not doing other things. There's also a recent study that has been released as well and we'll get Dr. Fitzpatrick reaction to this. It was reported in the Washington Post as it relates to an international student assessment called PISA, PISA. And we'll talk about how the US did against other emerging nations around the world.

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4:22I had talked about this in a while, but everyone kind of knows how I feel about this particular issue when talking about immigration. Well, the Washington Post had an article the other day. And I've been meaning to talk about this and it's just too many things happening. A lot of things coming from a lot of directions. Well, the article was weird because they were express frustration and being upset that 40% of the illegal aliens detained by US immigration and customs enforcement since President Trump has taken office that they have no criminal records. Really, it would seem to me that one would be more upset that 60% of those that have been detained or have been running around this country, unvetted. Nobody knows what they're doing committing crime on the streets of our country.

5:26And maybe we should be applauding ICE for removing the 60% of people that have been wreaking havoc in our communities across our country. Now, I mean, we all know that this comes on the heels of one of the worst times in history as it relates to migration into this country under the Biden administration where they basically ignored the entire federal register as it relates to immigration and immigration enforcement for four years. And, you know, it's really interesting because there was a lot of discussion about reforming the immigration and nationality act. And a lot of what we do is no different than almost all of our allies, no different than most of the democracies that exist across the world as it relates to how

6:31how they deal with immigration and immigration policy. I mean, simply put, when you cross the border illegally, it's a federal crime. Eight USC 1325. You overstay a visa. It's not a criminal offense. It's a civil offense, but it's still wrong. And you can still be detained for doing so. That's what they do in other countries. In fact, they move you to detention facilities to assess that you are in fact, have overstayed your visa and then you're out. So being unlawfully present in the United States, not unlike most other countries around the world, is an offense against the country. And there's a wide plethora of options at each of these countries exercise to include the United States detention and deportation.

7:35It was funny in the Washington Post article, they wanted to make a big thing between a criminal offense and a civil offense. But never really mentioning the fact that these immigration laws have been on the books for decades. And it were not an outlier as it relates to how we handle immigration in this country. There's never been a requirement that you have to have a criminal record before you detained by ICE and otherwise deported ever. This has been going on for decades, like I said, in under multiple administrations. The Obama administration in the first four years he was referred to as the deporter in chief. Bill Clinton campaigned on this issue in a huge way. George Bush, one and two, both, same thing.

8:40There's also this misnomer and it's really interesting when you read the article talking about judicial warrants. ICE does not need a judicial war to make an arrest unless they're entering private property like a home. Otherwise, they do not need a judicial warrant. They do not need an arrest warrant. They do not need to go before detached magistrate. In articulate facts and circumstances in order to gain a warrant, it's not required. We've been providing all of this misinformation as though there's been an abuse of the laws and the privileges afforded people in the United States of America. There hasn't been. It's all BS. And all they ever needed was a reasonable suspicion that an alien is unlawfully present in the country. That's it. A reasonable suspicion.

9:49So in the end, we have all these laws. And if an alien violates any of them, guess what happens? The same thing that happens to you as a citizen. You walk into the local convenience store and you steal a candy bar, you have committed a theft. Now it is a misdemeanor theft. What do you think happens? You get arrested. You get booked. Yes, you will probably be released on bail because in most jurisdictions we have jail overcrouting because unfortunately, and historically in this country, we offend at a higher rate than a lot of other emerging nations. Industrialized nations. It's just a simple fact. But nonetheless, you are documented. You are then, from that point forward, tattooed with having been arrested for making a choice to walk into a store and steal something.

11:06In some states, you drive without insurance. You drive without a driver's license. You exploit that privilege by not doing the right thing by documenting oneself as having passed the test and is out on the road. It's about the safety for others. In some states, you are, in fact, arrested. In fact, in some states, if you exceed the speed limit by a certain amount, you are compelled to go to a local county courthouse and immediately pay a fine as opposed to being arrested. And then they figure out whether or not you are, in fact, guilty or not. And if you are, you get your money back. These are all things that we do to citizens. We create these inconveniences to serve as a deterrent factor so that you don't repeat this behavior.

12:13But what's amazing by the mainstream media is that that doesn't apply when you come to this country because we should be a compassionate nation, one that embraces everyone, whether you are going to follow the rules or not. And if your first act in this country is that you're violating the norms, the customs, the protocols, and more importantly, the federal laws, how far should that compassion extend? Well, there are those in the Democrat Party that have gone to incredible lengths to protect these folks and believe that you and I and others should pay to provide them with all the necessities of life. Knowing that the first thing that they've done is violate the rules and customs, conditions, protocols, laws of this country.

13:19You know, typically as a citizen in this country, if you are hired by someone, you're a probationary employee. And if your first act is to violate the company's rules, standard of conduct or whatever, you're what? It's okay, go ahead, you can say it. You're terminated. You're no longer welcome to work there, right? Why does that not hold true in this country as it relates to immigration? Why is it that there has to be this continuing feeling that we need to create a reception, so to speak, and even maybe a party for individuals who in the first act have chosen and made a choice to violate the immigration laws of this country?

14:27It is really mind numbing and mystifying to me. That's how that's how that we propose that this country should act. Recently, there's been some new data, a report from the Center for Immigration Studies that suggested foreign-born population is down 2.9 million people over the first 18 months of the Trump administration. Interestingly, they said that this could not be managed. It could not be done that we needed to have immigration reform. Most importantly, what we needed to do is reward people that kind of snubbed our way of life and creating a pathway to citizenship for them. In other words, you don't have to earn anything. You can do what you want when you want, how you want, which citizens are not afforded, that accommodation.

15:35And still, it is incumbent upon us because we are a compassionate nation to create a pathway to citizenship. It doesn't matter how offensive you are, how much of a disciplinary problem you are if we want to use the school or university analogy. You can be completely disruptive in this country and still because of this compassion thing that we ought to be giving people multiple chances to reach the pot of goal. The benefit of living in a democracy, a constitutional republic that has an organized set of rules, laws, acceptable patterns of behavior, and that we actually adopted outcomes. What happens when you violate that? What happens when you run counter to it? And now all of a sudden we throw caution to the wind because allegedly we need to be more compassionate.

16:47That compassion and removal of accountability in this country, we see what's happening right now. We see what's happening right now. We see the outcome of this in so many different ways. In fact, just the other day in New Jersey, we know where Governor Mikey Cheryl has been and the anti-ice policies that she's been involved in, where she's actually passed all kinds of laws there. The trust directive, which creates public safety risks by limiting the ability of ICE to work with police offices, they have handcuffed local law enforcement of cooperating with ICE at all in New Jersey.

17:51I mean, it's actually a joke what's going on there, the length to which they have created this sanctuary environment there, which all of it just limits the cooperation amongst law enforcement officials, which is absolutely a joke. And the executive order that she passed not too long ago, you can only arrest in a public area. If authorized by judicial warranted judicial order, it violates all the federal laws. They're in court, they're fighting this. I mean, this is the kind of stuff that's going on. This is the outcome of where we're at. But it's interesting. What happens when there's horror that comes to Democrat families? It'll be interesting to see how this flips. Dr. Penelope Cohen, the wife of the East Brunswick mayor, Brad Cohen, was in a Tesla the other day.

18:57And an illegal alien fled a scene of a targeted ICE operation. You know, you know what happened. Ranner Red Light and crashed right into Dr. Cohen's car. Now thankfully, she was treated at the hospital and she doesn't have significant physical injuries. But we read these stories every day. Each and every day. And we wonder why the conversation never moves to the safety and well-being of the citizens of this country. That's all we want. We've adopted rules based on customs and the way that we've decided that we want to live our lives here and the way that we've decided that we want to have an ordered and structured society. It doesn't matter if there's individuals out there because I get a lot of text all the time like this one.

20:00No, you're missing the point. Citizens want law and order. Unfortunately, the Trump administration is lawless and orderless and is degrading the Constitution. I don't know that he's degrading the Constitution when it comes to immigration laws. Both can be true. He can be lawless and he can engage in unconstitutional behavior in other areas of government. But it doesn't necessarily mean that he is in this area government. It doesn't necessarily mean that we should be willing to accept less. We set the bar. We elected people that passed the immigration and nationality act. We've understood for generations how this works. We also understood the necessity of migration legally. But for some reason we want to make this political football out of it because we really believe that one side of the equation or one side of the aisle is going to benefit more than others.

21:07So what we do is we will engage in bastardizing this entire process. We'll choose when it's comfortable for us and works to our benefit to ignore the law. Like the Biden administration did. They ignored it each and every day. They lied to us about the border each and every day. They lied to us about what was happening to immigrant children that were coming across the border. They continued to lie to us today about this and we just sit back and take it and think that this is all good because Trump's bad. Well, Trump being bad should not be our focus, I don't believe, as it relates to certain issues. We should understand that we have to continue doing what we're doing for the greater good of society at large in this country. And that's simply enforce the laws.

22:10Enforce the laws. We celebrate in communities when you see our part one crime offenses are the lowest they've been since 1972. But we are not going to celebrate the fact that the number of illegal immigrants coming to this country has fallen by 2.3 million people over the last 18 months. And the question is why we'll be right back folks. There's a new nationally representative survey of high school students and recent graduates about what they are seeing in schools around AI, great inflation, elicit ed tech use and more. And one of the authors of this report, Dr. Brian Fitzpatrick with Fordham's National Research. He's the manager there. He joins us to talk about these findings. Doc, welcome to the show. Good morning, sir. Thanks for having me. So the theme is our high school grades becoming meaningless in the age of AI and endless screen time. So if you would share with us what this study reveals and why this study is different from other studies that I found very interesting in some of the particulars that you outlined.

23:27Well, happy to summarize things. So we have a couple different things we asked students. So these are students across the United States and students who are currently in high school and just or just graduated in the past couple of years. So the first thing we found is that kids are using tech. We call it elicitly or secretly. However you want to say it. They're using tech at rates that are pretty shocking about half of kids say they're using Instagram, TikTok, other social media in class on a daily basis. A third of kids play video games in class. A third of kids put watch YouTube videos. There's a little bit of online gambling and online shopping, but they're also using AI. So I'm sure all of your listeners know AI is everywhere. It's free. You can access it if you can access the internet. And it's of course really good at cheating. And one in five of students who took our survey admitted to using AI in the middle of tests.

24:34So we're not exactly sure if they're doing that because they're taking a test on a laptop or they are sneaking out their phone while their teachers aren't looking. But that's a pretty disturbing number. And it all kind of leads into this issue of what you mentioned grade inflation. Now what that means is essentially the average grade has gone up your decade after decade for the past 50 years to the point where D's and F's barely exist anymore and C's are an endangered species. To the point where we can't even tell which students are doing well and which aren't which we think is undermining really the value of high school, but also our ability to tell which kids are doing well and which kids aren't. I guess most recently and I'm sure you are aware of it. I think it was one of the heads of the University of California higher university systems said that some of the kids coming in and extraordinary number of kids are eight years behind the curve as freshmen.

25:42I guess we shouldn't be surprised by that then. Unfortunately no, I'm familiar with that particular instance and I think it's particularly bad in California because they dropped the use of standardized tests like it be a CT and the SAT for the past I think it's about eight years. Thankfully they're bringing it back, but that definitely compounds the problem if you're not even going to look at the one objective measure we got for these kids. So when we look at technology this technology, you know everybody thought that this was going to be the new way of the new way to educate kids utilization of this there is a role for that in school, but not it seems to be not necessarily nest, you know, it has to be provided in order to accomplish what they should be trying to accomplish in both high school and grammar school. I think that's exactly right. Kids do need to know how to use a computer, they need to know how to type and they need to be, you know, tech savvy, but first of all they're pretty good at figuring out technology without our help.

26:56Second, I don't think there was anything wrong with the computer lab model, right? That's what they had when I was in school. It had computer labs that were kind of cordoned off areas where we used tech as a kind of specific tool for learning about the technology itself, not as a general educational aid where it's, you know, you're in front of a computer in a history class in English class because I think we're seeing here is that that mostly doesn't enable better learning and it enables distraction. I think we're Dr. Brian Fitzpatrick, Fordham's National Research Manager and author of this report that we're talking about. So obviously this, this, this, the distractive nature of this technology seems to lead to a lot of things and utilization of AI even to more. What most studies are showing and I know that Fordham has done some extensive research on this as well as a critical thinking school that skills are like kind of out the window now.

28:02Yeah, I mean our report can't speak to that, but it's certainly the case that there's in these perennial concerns that, you know, I mean some people will bring this back to the calculator, but I'll just stick to computers for our discussion. Giving students tools that help them think faster or better is a very fine line between that and having giving them tools that do the thinking for them, which of course is likely to undermine their ability to think critically. So a lot of what they're seeing and a lot of what they're absorbing on computers and obviously smartphones and everything else, a very short in nature, right. They look little tidbits. I was reading and I'm sure you saw the most recent report that was provided in the reporting on the piece, the program for international student assessment.

29:06And the one thing that was an observation made about that is that American schools, and this was Washington Post article, American schools having increasingly assigned short passages instead of full books due to pressure to prepare students for standardized testing budget cuts and time constraints. But it also went on to say that students are having real difficult times with longer questions, with reading a book, because that's kind of what they're not their mind is trained for by utilizing all of these technologies, your thoughts. I think all of those things kind of work together. It's hard to pin the blame on one particular thing, right. You have on the one hand, you have tic-toc showing kids 30 second videos, and that's the kind of extent to which they're engaging with any topic, whether it's serious or frivolous.

30:09I do have standardized tests, which the SAT and I know the SAT has changed over the past couple decades where they've shortened passages. And some people point to that as, you know, a response to modern technology, or maybe as a driving educators to then themselves assign shorter pieces. I think all of these things are pushing in the same direction of lower attention spans and a worse ability to read, sit down and read a whole book or a whole novel. And it's hard to control for things for which schools have no control. One thing we want to push on is the thing that schools can control. They can't control smartphones or they have a hard time doing it. They can't control the SAT. They can switch to books and start giving students books and testing them on the content and essentially forcing them to read the whole book because you only learn how to do that if you have to.

31:15Yeah, I mean, and the more you do it, the better you get at it, right? For the first part. I mean, to this day, I don't know about you and your generation, but my generation, I'm still working off a hard copy. I print everything out. I highlight it. I'm in the margins with my synopsis and everything. It's just the way I learned and it's still the way that I do it because I seem to be able to do it better when I do it that way. I wasn't raised on the technology. And I find, you know, just like with dealing with my kids and grandkids, their attention span is so much shorter than not able to really stay focused and stay on task. Like we were taught to do and how we learned, which I think is incredibly important. It seems to be, and I don't know, you know, you look at this data from all over the, not only the country, but the world.

32:19But we seem to be falling behind other industrialized nations. Yeah, you're right. Well, so that I'll push back there because the PISA results, this international testing that you're pointing to, saw it. We've seen, they're showing a decline in the past decade across the world. And it's pretty consistent. It's showing up in Europe. It is showing up in Asia. So that makes me think that on the one hand, you know, I want the US to kind of beat the trends here and we certainly aren't doing that. But whatever is going on here is really an international story. Sure. Absolutely. I mean, it's, well, we know the technologies everywhere, right? And I guess the, the lore and the temptation and how to best utilize that technology hasn't been, I don't know, fully vetted maybe, maybe, you know, when you look at studies like yours, where you are not only looking at the illicit use, but the approved use, you know, the issued Chromebooks by schools, how that works, whether or not there's a discipline or the structure there.

33:34To keep them on task and keep the illicit use down. Obviously that requires resources and a lot of these schools are resource starved. So that's an interesting point. I would say one of the things that come out comes out of this is that technology costs quite a bit of money. And so I worry that technology is being spent or all this money is being spent on tech to the detriment about other things we might be spending money on. That's another key worry that came out of this research. Doc, you would agree, I guess, that tech has become really like kind of a marketing tool, you know, when you look at universities and what they're doing with pools that repress that, you know, a swimming pool that looks like an insignia, the letters of the university and this and that and comfort centers and massage part, you know, places on campus and this and that and everything else.

34:37It's like, what are we doing? We're spending a lot of money on other things, you know, other things other than reading, writing, arithmetic, critical thinking, you know, the classics, you know, all of the cornerstones of educational success in the in the 30s, 40s and 50s. I think that's exactly right. I think tying it to say, you know, those famous lazy rivers they have down the essay in the SEC is exactly right. Oftentimes it's a shiny new toy that kind of shows off what might look like a fun part of education, whereas the important piece of education or can you read, can you do math in the basics kind of are far more important than any fancy new toys you learn. About in school. And will you graduate. I'm not a job.

35:37I mean, it's this the traditional hallmarks hallmarks of success, I guess, Dr. Brian Fitzpatrick really enjoyed reading the the the study, excuse me, and thank you so much for joining us, Fordham's National Research Manager and author of this report. Have a great week. Thank you, you too. Thanks for having me. Thank you, sir. We'll be right back 504 2601870 on the Oak, Oak, and Hard, Jewelers, talk and text line stay with us. When we come back after the top of the hour, newsbreak folks, we will visit with Michael Heck, president CEO of GNO Inc. As well as Hansel Gill, director at NASA's Mishu Assembly Facility. Stay tuned. We have much more coming your way. This is NULL on WWL.