00:00I did not agree with many of the things that you said right ahead of this,
00:05but I don't think that's my point to discuss here.
00:08What I want to ask is, you are married to a woman who is not Christian.
00:14In her Wikipedia, I mean, I just looked that up.
00:17I wanted to know what her faith was.
00:19I didn't know this before, but she still calls herself Hindu.
00:23You are raising two kids, three kids in interracial, cultural, racial, religious household.
00:33How are you maintaining or how are you teaching your kids not to keep your religion ahead of their mother's religion?
00:43Or how are you teaching them that your kind, their dad kind who got here just a few years or a few decades ago is different
00:53or is better than your mom's kind who got here just a generation before?
01:00How are you balancing that?
01:02And when you talk about too many immigrants here, when did you guys decide that number?
01:09Why did you sell us a dream?
01:12You made us spend our youth, our wealth in this country and gave us a dream.
01:19You don't owe us anything.
01:20We have worked hard for it.
01:22Then how can you as a vice president stand there and say that we have too many of them now
01:29and we are going to take them out to people who are here rightfully so
01:35by paying the money that you guys asked us.
01:39You gave us the path and now how can you stop it and tell us we don't belong here anymore?
01:45And one more thing.
01:46I'm sorry.
01:47One more thing.
01:47Do you have to be...
01:49There's a lot there.
01:49I don't know if I'm going to remember all this, but I will try.
01:51I'm sorry.
01:52I'm sorry.
01:52I had to say all of this and please take it with due...
01:56I mean, I'm saying all of it with due respect.
01:57Of course.
01:57No, no.
01:57Go ahead.
01:58Please.
01:58I have no intention of causing a scene here or anything, but...
02:02We're not close to causing a scene.
02:04Don't worry.
02:04But we talked about Christianity, all of this.
02:08I'm not even Christian and I'm here standing to sow support.
02:13Why are we making Christianity one of the major thing that you have to have in common
02:19to be one of you guys, to sow that I love America just as you do.
02:24Why is that still a question?
02:27Why do I have to be a Christian?
02:29Okay.
02:29So there was a lot there and I'm going to try to respond to as much of it as I can.
02:35So on the question of immigration, so first of all, I can believe that we should have
02:42lower immigration levels, but if the United States passed a law and made a promise to
02:48somebody, the United States, of course, has to honor that promise.
02:51Nobody's talking about that.
02:52I'm talking about people who came in in violation of the laws of the United States of America.
02:57And I'm talking about in the future, reducing the number, reducing the number of people.
03:04Sorry, what?
03:05May I continue on that?
03:07Because when you just said you are not stopping with the people who came here legally, right?
03:14But you are pushing out policies that hurt us, and these policies are not even solving the
03:20problems.
03:21These policies are just creating chaos.
03:24No, no, ma'am.
03:24Okay.
03:25So again, I'm going to finish answering the question, and then if I've answered all nine
03:32of your questions in less than 15 minutes, then we can keep on going.
03:39We got to have a little fun, right?
03:41So here's the thing.
03:42I can believe that the United States should lower its levels of immigration in the future
03:49while also respecting that there are people who have come here through immigration, lawful
03:55immigration pathways that have contributed to the country.
03:57But just because one person or 10 people or 100 people came in legally and contributed
04:03to the United States of America, does that mean that we're thereby committed to let in
04:08a million or 10 million or 100 million people a year in the future?
04:12No, that's not right.
04:13We cannot have – I'll go and finish.
04:16We cannot have an immigration policy where what was good for the country 50 or 60 years
04:21ago binds the country inevitably for the future.
04:25There's too many people who want to come to the United States of America, and my job as
04:28Vice President is not to look out for the interests of the whole world.
04:31It's to look out for the people of the United States.
04:35Now, you asked a personal question about our interfaith household.
04:48And yes, my wife did not grow up Christian.
04:50I think it's fair to say that she grew up in a Hindu family, but not in a particularly
04:54religious family in either direction.
04:56In fact, when I met my wife, we were both – I would consider myself an agnostic or
05:00an atheist, and that's what I think she would have considered herself as well.
05:04You know, everybody has to come to their own arrangement here.
05:07The way that we've come to our arrangement is she's my best friend.
05:10We talk to each other about this stuff.
05:11So we decided to raise our kids Christian.
05:14Our two oldest kids who go to school, they go to a Christian school.
05:18Our eight-year-old did his first communion about a year ago.
05:21So that's the way that we have come to our arrangement.
05:24But – thank you.
05:29My eight-year-old was also very proud of his first communion.
05:32Thank you, guys.
05:32I'll tell him that Ole Miss wishes him the best.
05:35But I think everybody has to have this own conversation when you're in a marriage.
05:40I mean, it's true for friends of mine who are in Protestant and Catholic marriages,
05:44friends of mine who are in, you know, atheist and Christian marriages.
05:47You just got to talk to – the only advice I can give is you just got to talk to the person
05:52that God has put you with, and you've got to make those decisions as a family unit.
05:57For us, it works out.
05:58Now, most Sundays, Usha will come with me to church.
06:00As I've told her and I've said publicly, and I'll say now in front of 10,000 of my closest friends,
06:06do I hope eventually that she is somehow moved by the same thing that I was moved in by church?
06:12Yeah.
06:12I honestly do wish that because I believe in the Christian gospel,
06:16and I hope eventually my wife comes to see it the same way.
06:20But if she doesn't, then God says everybody has free will, and so that doesn't cause a problem for me.
06:26That's something you work out with your friends, with your family, with the person that you love.
06:31Again, one of the most important Christian principles is that you respect free will.
06:35Usha's closer to the priests who baptize me than maybe I am.
06:39They talk about this stuff.
06:40My attitude is you figure this stuff out as a family, and you trust in God to have a plan,
06:47and you try to follow it as best as you can, and that's what I try to do.
06:50I want to make a final point.
06:54So I don't want to cut you off.
06:56I want to be respectful to all the people behind you in line, but I want to make this point about immigration, okay?
07:00If you ask the question, what is the exact right number of immigrants for the United States to let in?
07:07It is just very specific on the context.
07:10If you go back to the 1920s, the United States passed an Immigration Reform Act that effectively cut down immigration to close to zero for 40 years in this country.
07:20And what happened over those 40 years?
07:23The many, many people who had come from many different foreign countries and different foreign cultures, they assimilated into American culture.
07:30And there was an expectation that they would assimilate into American culture.
07:34I think we have two problems in our immigration system today.
07:37And my guess is you're probably a slightly more leftist political persuasion, liberal political persuasion.
07:42Maybe not.
07:43But here's the thing.
07:44And I remember, back in my establishment GOP days, when I was still very early getting involved in Republican politics, I remember a conservative think tank person who told me that one of the reasons why immigration was really good is that if you had enough diversity in a country, people would mistrust each other and they wouldn't join labor unions.
08:08Okay, so when I see a lot of left-wing people who theoretically support organized labor saying we need to flood the country with a limitless number of immigrants, they're unwilling to set any limitations on it.
08:21My response to that is you were destroying the very social trust on which American freedom and prosperity was built.
08:29And that is really important to me.
08:31So the honest answer to your question, what is the exact number of immigrants America should accept in the future?
08:39Right now, the answer is far less than we've been accepting.
08:43We've got to become a common community again.
08:45And you can't do that when you have such high numbers of immigration, which is one of the reasons why we have the immigration policy we do.
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