And you mentioned the Oklahoma story, which I found just particularly fascinating from your piece, basically for those who haven't read your piece yet. There are these cartels of illegal immigrants that are basically undercutting the state's legal marijuana program, selling higher THC content marijuana, and just kind of putting to bed all of the pro-legalization arguments, actually. It was fascinating to read, but kind of pivoting to the issue of immigrant crime, which was the thrust of your City Journal feature, you take to task kind of this idea that we hear all the time in the media, right, that immigrants are no more likely than native-born Americans to commit crimes. You know, this emerged from a study in Texas that you cite, this canard. Could you kind of unpack for us what the data actually says on immigrant crime? Well,

there have been a couple of studies based on Texas incarceration date. And one of the reasons it was based on Texas was because many states don't track the number of illegals or just the number of immigrants in general in their systems, their prison systems. And sanctuary cities do this, some people say, purposely. There is another program that actually reimburses states for the cost of incarcerating illegals. And the reason it does this is because the federal government is supposed to be in charge of securing the borders. And so when illegals come here and they create crime at a cost to the states, the states can get reimbursed by Congress. In order to be reimbursed, the states have to file detailed records on the people that are incarcerated. And so a lot of these states don't make this information public. It does exist within the federal government because states do want to be reimbursed. They do want their money. And studies which have looked at this data find that there's a far higher degree of immigrant crime than is reflected in the study on Texas. Ironically, or interestingly, even the data from this other data set does show that immigrant crime levels in Texas as a percentage of the number of immigrants there is not as high as other states. People theorize that this is because Texas has an active policy of tracking down immigrants, of incarcerating them. And as a result, immigrants are essentially, even though they're coming over the border, they are getting out of Texas. You can see the result of what I would call the perverse incentives of sanctuary cities and states, that a lot of these folks who are coming over the border are making their way to New York. They're making their way to California. They're making their way to Illinois. In Illinois, several legislators have said that Chicago's sanctuary city policy is the reason that they are attracting and have created such a problem in that city where they're spending hundreds of millions of dollars on immigrants. So these other studies suggest that the rate of crime is far higher, regardless of how we debate this issue of whether it's higher than the American rate or not. The fact of the matter is that we probably have, and no one knows for sure, 5 million to 7 million additional immigrants, either asylum seekers or illegals who have snuck over the border during the Biden administration. As one whistleblower who was a border agent said to Congress, even if only a small percentage of these people are breaking the law, it still means tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of criminals in this country who shouldn't be here. And when you look at that, and you look at the cartels, you look at the gangs, when you recognize, and we've seen this in testimony in Congress, that many of these international gangs essentially responded to what Biden was doing in the same way that just ordinary people who were trying to get into the country responded. They came here, you realize that this is a significant problem. Whether we acknowledge that they're committing crimes at higher rates, at the same rate, that there are simply millions of people here who are here illegally and who were allowed to enter the country unvetted, you know, without being properly vetted. And so, you know, this is a problem that the Trump administration says is a very high priority for obvious reasons. The polls show that Americans think it's a very high priority. You certainly want to take voters at their work because they do say that they are concerned about

immigrant crime.