Tucker Carlson found rare common ground with New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio on the issue of the loss of jobs through automation, but the Democratic 2020 presidential candidate seemed disinclined to elaborate on the Fox News host’s follow-up question about the impact of immigration on working class Americans.
The New York City mayor’s Thursday night appearance on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” saw Carlson offer de Blasio, along with fellow presidential candidate Andrew Yang, “sincere” praise for taking the issue of automation seriously.
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Though Tucker acknowledged that they likely disagree on “a lot of details,” both men agreed about a potential governmental role in mitigating and not incentivizing the kind of automation that leads to massive job losses for middle and lower class Americans.
“I think we need a future that’s based on work, so if a company is going to put thousands of people out of work, they show a responsibly for making sure those folks get a new job at the same company or elsewhere or that tax is both an incentive to keep people on the job in a good way and a productive way and also provides money to help foster from the federal level the kinds of things we need a lot more of,” said de Blasio.
At which point the Fox News host shifted gears.
“So we were together up until this point, but if you really believe that automation is a threat to low skill jobs, why are you for mass immigration?” he asked. (RELATED: Tucker Asked Jorge Ramos How Many Caravan Migrants He Planned To Take In — Things Got Awkward Fast)
De Blasio seemed to ignore the question, shifting back to automation and a call for the federal government to “step up.”
“Immigration is a close second as a force that’s transforming the country, and the two are at cross purposes, so immigrants come here overwhelmingly to work in low skill jobs” which are “going away,” Tucker said. “This is crazy. Why are we doing this?”
De Blasio referred to what he believes are a “huge number of jobs right now,” particularly in agriculture where there aren’t “enough workers to do the work among the people already in this country.”
“Okay, and that’s a separate debate,” said Carlson. “I disagree, but the much bigger picture is jobs in the service sector are going away that immigrants fill. We’re continuing to import immigrants at over a million a year. Why are we doing that?”
De Blasio again brought the issue back to automation with a criticism of the recent GOP tax cut which he said “made it worse and encourages companies to lay off more workers and to put the money into new machines.”