What To Do About Child Immigration & Taxpayer Sugar Syrup Failure – Wingin’ It Wednesday

This week on "Wingin' It Wednesday", panelist Carol Ross, Warren Caudle, and Mike Stagg joined "Nathan and Bernie in the Morning" to discuss child immigration into America as well as a new audit says the state lost $71 million in taxpayer money on a failed sugar syrup mill in southwest Louisiana.

Here's what the panel had to say:

1. A wave of undocumented migrant children being transferred to a small Arizona town is expected to be met by protesters today.  Dozens of children are being taken to a group home in Oracle, Arizona for processing.  Demonstrators plan to block the buses carrying detainees.  Your thoughts?

Mike Stagg started us off:

What does the Statue of Liberty say? Give us your poor, your huddled masses, unless they are brown kids from Central America?
Conservatives are trying to make the most out of this, but the roots of this crisis go back to December 23, 2008 when President George W. Bush signed the trafficking victims act. The legislation gave substantial protect to children entering the country alone and prevented them from being deported back to their country of origin.  There’s the source of the problem.
This is the ugly America that’s showing it’s face to these kids. We’re better than this. We should take a better approach to this.

Carol Ross posited:

It is a humanitarian tragedy, but it’s of the President’s own making. He’s the one who signed the deferred action for childhood arrivals. It was like sending an engraved invitation.

 

Warren Caudle posited:

I think this goes back to unintended consequences. When you go back to the 1970s to when Castro had the Mariel boat lift. We have this law passed that any Cuban who made it to America could stay here forever. So Castro opened up the prisons and the mental institutions and sent them all here.
I think the Republicans are really shooting themselves in the foot on this deal. You’ve got these immigrants coming in, why won’t they vote Republican? The biggest reason is you’ve got this group saying they don’t want them.

2. A new audit says the state lost $71 million in taxpayer money on a failed sugar syrup mill in southwest Louisiana.  Built for a group of cane farmers, the mill overshot its budget, never yielded the profit Odom projected and was idle for several years before it was sold for scrap. Your thoughts?

Carol started us off:

This is the prefect example of why government shouldn’t get involved in these types of ventures. I think the Hayride has this entire story archived.
The government is so often stupid, greedy, and wrong. It’s just unbelievable the machinations they went through to get this done. It was doomed from the beginning. The bond commission refused to approve the bonds on this thing and they went ahead and did it anyway. What does that tell you? If a venture is really worthwhile the private sector will get in there and invest in it.

Warren added:

I remember when this thing came up and all the controversy.
Should the government get involved in all this? It all depends.
If you go back after WWII when they came in throughout the south and we had cheap electrical industry, we had huge economic development. The south ended up totally industrialized and the rust belt was created up north. Later on everything started going south to Mexico.
I do believe when you sit there on a deal like this to target one thing to benefit one group of people… that’s not right.

Mike concluded:

That was in 2008 and when the credit markets collapsed those deals fell through. This was the legacy of Bob Odom. He came close to making it work, but they couldn’t get the financing done. There’s a mighty fine rum company down there now so it’s not a total bust.

To listen to the full audio from our Wingin' It panelists, click the play button below:

Now it’s your turn to tell us what you think about today’s Wingin’ It Wednesday topics. Who got it right, who got it wrong, and who was way off? Let us know in the comment section.