#2049- Coleman Hughes

Joe Rogan (0:13)

What's up? Good to see you, man.

Coleman Hughes (0:15)

What's cracking?

I'm good. I can't complain.

Joe Rogan (0:17)

We were just talking about you live in New York City.

Coleman Hughes (0:20)

Yes.

Joe Rogan (0:20)

And whether or not the migrant crisis is a real thing.

Coleman Hughes (0:23)

It's a real thing. It's a real thing. You notice it in Port Authority.

And I think when Eric Adams gets in front of the country and says, I can't handle this, I think he's telling the truth.

And some people have accused him of racism bizarrely, but I don't think it comes from that. I looked into this and the part people don't know about this story is really the full unfolding of it goes back to the 1930s. New York State made a constitutional amendment to the state constitution, which required the state to provide housing for the homeless, essentially. And it was sort of vaguely worded. So in the 80s and 90s, the courts in New York began interpreting that more and more strictly.

Almost no other state, I'm not sure if any other state actually has something in its state constitution, requiring that kind of a thing. So basically, what happened is the judges ended up interpreting this more strictly. Obviously, the original purpose of this is for New Yorkers that are homeless to be housed. But they ended up interpreting it so strictly that when the Republican governors in Texas and Florida began sending a few thousand migrants up to New York City as kind of an FU to the liberal cities that have declared themselves sanctuary cities without actually having to deal with the kind of border crisis that Texas does. The first few thousand found that legally, New York had to house them.

And then word got down to Mexico that if you make it to New York City, you will not be turned away. Legally, you don't even have to be a citizen for the state amendment to apply to you. So what began as a few, let's say the first 10 or 15,000 were sent by the Republican governors as a kind of political tactic has now become tens and tens and tens and tens of thousand coming of their own volition to New York City. And it's the only state in the country where Mayor Adams has no legal recourse to send people elsewhere. He actually cannot do it. He's tried to do executive orders, but he legally can't because it's in the state constitution. It's above his power. And now it's taken on a life of its own way over and above what the Republican governors started. And so this is why he's going to the national media and literally saying, I can't do anything about this. I'm trying to do something about this, but I can't. And we're putting people up in Airbnbs for $100 a night. And the city will be bankrupt in X number of years if we don't find a solution to this. Yeah.

Joe Rogan (3:22)

I was looking at a video of the Roosevelt Hotel, which is no longer a hotel. They've essentially said, this is now a center for housing migrants.

Coleman Hughes (3:33)

Right.

Joe Rogan (3:34)

And they said the restaurant is no longer a restaurant, and sorry, that's just how it is now.

Coleman Hughes (3:40)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (3:40)

I mean, what do you do if you own the Roosevelt Hotel and you just wanted it to be a hotel and now the state just says, nope? Yeah.

Coleman Hughes (3:49)

I mean, look, I don't blame any of these people. I was born in Mexico.

Joe Rogan (3:53)

100%.

Coleman Hughes (3:54)

We'd all be doing the same thing. It's just a smart thing to do from their perspective.

But that doesn't mean from our perspective that we should just put out the bat signal to the whole world and say, you can come to New York City and we have no legal recourse to move you anywhere else.

Joe Rogan (4:12)

It's not just New York City. It's other parts of the world. It's strange that recently it's become this crisis where migrants are coming en masse to these places and just flooding them.

Is this orchestrated? Is this just a fact that they found out that they can do it and it's better than where they are? And if they go there, these places that are essentially, they're charitably minded and they would like to house people that are down on their luck, but now people are sort of taking advantage of that loophole and just swarming.

Coleman Hughes (4:48)

I think that's what it is. I think the whole Western world has become much more open to immigration recently. Obviously, America was open to immigration in the 19th century, but we were the outlier. All the other countries of the world, the default was closed borders, essentially. So I think the whole world has, out of empathy for the poor and struggling, has wanted to have more permissive immigration, but that sends an incentive to people of the world that they can now come, they can abuse asylum laws. And again, I don't even blame people for doing this, because it's exactly what I would do. If I were born in Guatemala or Syria, I would say, hey, I'm a refugee, this is my story. And I would probably lie about it in order to get a better life in the one life that I had. But this is just a true side effect of those compassionate laws, is that people abuse them. You get, you know, immigration pools that are vastly proportionally male, which is how you know that they're not refugees, because where are the women? Right.