Watch Tucker Carlson and Jorge Ramos butt heads over immigration, Latinos

Tucker Carlson had Univision anchor Jorge Ramos on his Fox News show Wednesday night, introducing him as one of President Trump's "loudest critics on immigration." He began by asking Ramos to explain a recent comment about the U.S. being "our country, not theirs." Ramos said he meant the U.S. belongs to all its residents and not just those "who want to go back to 1965, when there was a white majority," and "believe that Latinos and immigrants and refugees shouldn't be here," adding that it's still their country, too.

"Let me just point out that you are white, obviously — you're whiter than I am, you have blue eyes," Carlson told Ramos, curiously, "so I don't know exactly what you mean by 'white' or 'Latino.'" He returned to the point later, noting that "Latino" seems to include Afro-Cubans, German Guatemalans, and "blue-eyed rich Mexicans like you." Ramos defined Latino as people from Latin America, though Carlson still seemed confused.

Carlson returned to what he called Ramos' suggestion that white Americans don't have the right to be concerned about Latino immigration. "I'm for getting along, I'm for color-blindness, I'm for tolerance, 100 percent," he began. "But I also think that if things radically change in your country, it's okay for you to say, 'What is this?' and 'Maybe I don't want to live in a country that looks nothing like the country I grew up in.' Is that bigoted?" Ramos simply stated that "there's a demographic wave, or revolution if you want to call it, happening right here in the United States."

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Ramos and Carlson each marshaled their own statistics to measure the value of immigration, Ramos pointing to a National Academy of Sciences study from September which found (among other things) that immigrants have "an overall positive impact on long-run economic growth in the U.S." and their impact "on the wages of native-born workers overall is very small." Carlson pointed to Federal Bureau of Prisons data that show 14 percent of the federal prison population is Mexican citizens.

Ramos bristled at that last statistic, telling Carlson that "you, like Donald Trump, are criminalizing the immigrant population," and citing other statistics: "More than 97 percent of undocumented immigrants — 97 percent — are good people; less than 3 percent are bad hombres, or they committed a felony." Carlson didn't contest that, instead asking Ramos to "acknowledge the truth" that rich people like Ramos (and Carlson) benefit more from low wage, low skill immigrant labor than "the middle of the country," where "they don't hire a lot of household help." Ramos declined. Watch below. Peter Weber