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Pete Buttigieg: “The last time we had actual comprehensive immigration reform…”

Featuring: Pete Buttigieg, Democratic | Former Secretary of Transportation, Former Mayor of South Bend | National

Pete Buttigieg Interview

Published October 1, 2025 | Video Starts at 51:43

There was a big one in 2005 or 2006. There was a bill, you know, a year or two ago that wasn't a complete reform, but it would have helped. The last time we had actual comprehensive immigration reform in this country was 1986. Yeah. Under Reagan, of all people. Yeah, yeah. And I knew the congressman, who. He was from Louisville, who was one of the people who did it. (51:43–51:48)

CLAIM

Asserts that the last comprehensive immigration reform in the U.S. occurred in 1986.

This is an excerpt from a raw transcript. The assertions have not been audited or verified. Tap the video to view the source footage and understand the context.

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Pete Buttigieg

“Human beings driving kill roughly 40,000 people a year in this country.”
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“I think the statistic is something like 50% of the graduating class of Princeton in the 40s went directly into the military.”
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“We had about 4 billion people get on an airplane on my watch. And zero crash fatalities in commercial airline crashes.”
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“We got 20,000 projects done and about 70,000 projects started.”
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“Some of the oldest freestanding structures in the world are these megalithic temples [in Malta], like, older than Stonehenge.”
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“Today, some companies are hiring less at the entry level because of AI.”
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“AI is getting good at writing code.”
Pete Buttigieg Interview | Uploaded October 1, 2025 | 03:49-03:52
“White collar as well as blue collar jobs that are on the line.”
Pete Buttigieg Interview | Uploaded October 1, 2025 | 04:00-04:03
“I don't think it'll be like 50% unemployment, but I do think that you'll see certain categories of jobs where suddenly like a huge chunk of…”
Pete Buttigieg Interview | Uploaded October 1, 2025 | 04:20-04:31
“I was already mayor in South Bend.”
Pete Buttigieg Interview | Uploaded October 1, 2025 | 08:11-08:14
“I got reelected...with more votes than I did the first time around.”
Pete Buttigieg Interview | Uploaded October 1, 2025 | 10:13-10:18
“This is in, like, Indiana's a conservative place, right? This is while Mike Pence is the governor of Indiana.”
Pete Buttigieg Interview | Uploaded October 1, 2025 | 10:18-10:24
“If you look into the history of what made it possible for people like me to have rights...a lot of that was advocates and activists who were…”
Pete Buttigieg Interview | Uploaded October 1, 2025 | 12:50-13:04
“The Trump administration apparently trying to put a thumb on the scale of election by getting Eric Adams a new job so he'll get out and…”
Pete Buttigieg Interview | Uploaded October 1, 2025 | 15:03-15:11
“The experience of young people is policy failure.”
Pete Buttigieg Interview | Uploaded October 1, 2025 | 17:01-17:05
“You're supposed to be able to at least hope to purchase your home and that's not happening.”
Pete Buttigieg Interview | Uploaded October 1, 2025 | 17:05-17:12
“Trump, like ripping out Medicaid and making your premiums go up by getting rid of the Obamacare subsidies makes health care more expensive…”
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“Republicans have stopped paid family leave in this country.”
Pete Buttigieg Interview | Uploaded October 1, 2025 | 19:01-19:05
“People like me went from not able to get married to able to get married in the short span of my adult lifetime.”
Pete Buttigieg Interview | Uploaded October 1, 2025 | 20:00-20:07
“If you're going to change jobs 13 times in your career, which the younger you are, the more likely that's going to happen, then you should…”
Pete Buttigieg Interview | Uploaded October 1, 2025 | 20:35-20:46
“One side is taking the money out of healthcare and putting it into tax cuts for the rich.”
Pete Buttigieg Interview | Uploaded October 1, 2025 | 21:25-21:30
“Trump is actively getting rid of [SNAP]. His budget is cutting Snap.”
Pete Buttigieg Interview | Uploaded October 1, 2025 | 24:17-24:19
“People's access to the benefits that they've already [earned]...happens with food stamps. That happens with Medicaid.”
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“The people who are cutting Medicaid right now say that they're not cutting Medicaid.”
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“This happened in Arkansas. They did this exact move...a bunch of people who are supposed to [receive Medicaid] aren't getting their care.”
Pete Buttigieg Interview | Uploaded October 1, 2025 | 24:57-25:05
“There are unspeakable horrors taking place in Gaza.”
Pete Buttigieg Interview | Uploaded October 1, 2025 | 27:48-27:53
“A war that started with unspeakable horrors being perpetrated by Hamas on October 7th.”
Pete Buttigieg Interview | Uploaded October 1, 2025 | 27:56-28:03
“There is in fact an explosion of antisemitism going on in this country.”
Pete Buttigieg Interview | Uploaded October 1, 2025 | 29:04-29:09
“Here at Harvard, it's easily one of America's most anti Semitic, hateful universities.”
Pete Buttigieg Interview | Uploaded October 1, 2025 | 29:08-29:14
“It's not like every dollar that comes out of foreign aid...is going to somehow automatically wind up in your pocket.”
Pete Buttigieg Interview | Uploaded October 1, 2025 | 30:57-31:12
“Most of the time it's not. It's winding up in the pocket of the wealthiest Americans who are getting tax cuts under this administration.”
Pete Buttigieg Interview | Uploaded October 1, 2025 | 31:11-31:17
“The reason it's unaffordable here at home is not because we're helping certain causes abroad.”
Pete Buttigieg Interview | Uploaded October 1, 2025 | 31:56-32:00
“Some of these expressions of antisemitism happen on the morning of October 8th, like before Israel even responded to October 7th.”
Pete Buttigieg Interview | Uploaded October 1, 2025 | 32:41-32:53
“Everything that Netanyahu government does right now...is incinerating a really important part of the moral fiber of what connects America to…”
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“The settler expansion into the west bank...designed to make it impossible for there to be a functional Palestinian state.”
Pete Buttigieg Interview | Uploaded October 1, 2025 | 34:57-35:04
“Netanyahu's government is doing everything that it can to make it impossible [for a two-state solution].”
Pete Buttigieg Interview | Uploaded October 1, 2025 | 35:03-35:08
“It's about spiking the two state solution, which also means defying what has generally been America's position.”
Pete Buttigieg Interview | Uploaded October 1, 2025 | 35:11-35:17
“American leadership can make a difference. But I think the leadership there [in Israel] is what will make the most difference.”
Pete Buttigieg Interview | Uploaded October 1, 2025 | 36:25-36:30
“This gridlock is being kept in place largely by Netanyahu because it's his ticket to stay in power.”
Pete Buttigieg Interview | Uploaded October 1, 2025 | 36:30-36:36
“There needs to be American leaders that can do two things at once that can be committed to the security of people in Israel and unwilling to…”
Pete Buttigieg Interview | Uploaded October 1, 2025 | 37:00-37:13
“If it becomes just a partisan thing, then I think the relationship [between the U.S. and Israel] is destroyed.”
Pete Buttigieg Interview | Uploaded October 1, 2025 | 37:27-37:27
“More and more people, I think, on both sides are pessimistic about a two state solution.”
Pete Buttigieg Interview | Uploaded October 1, 2025 | 37:43-37:48
“You were farming out our wars to lower income people.”
Pete Buttigieg Interview | Uploaded October 1, 2025 | 39:42-39:46
“This largely started in the post Vietnam era because in Vietnam, everybody... got drafted.”
Pete Buttigieg Interview | Uploaded October 1, 2025 | 39:47-39:54
“The goodwill gets squandered in the Bush years by invading Iraq, which has nothing to do with 911.”
Pete Buttigieg Interview | Uploaded October 1, 2025 | 42:02-42:10
“US policy played a role, no question [in making people mad enough to commit acts like 9/11].”
Pete Buttigieg Interview | Uploaded October 1, 2025 | 43:53-43:56
“Trump speaks to that actually, by the way, that's all bullshit. Like he was for the Iraq war and then later on pretended to be against it.”
Pete Buttigieg Interview | Uploaded October 1, 2025 | 44:18-44:25
“I think Another lesson of 911 is whatever's going on in the world will come find us one way or the other.”
Pete Buttigieg Interview | Uploaded October 1, 2025 | 45:19-45:26
“There was an enormous amount of corruption [in Afghanistan].”
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“Like police commanders would just be paid in cash. But also they personally would be expected out of their personal pockets to pay the…”
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“In Afghanistan now, like they don't think women should go to school. They're not gonna let women have jobs.”
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“By the time I was there, it was getting a little harder to figure out what the strategic objective actually was [in Afghanistan].”
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“I was there in 2014, started in 2001. And by the way, we thought we were the ones turning out the lights. Like, I thought I was one of the…”
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“The decision by the Trump administration to just scrap all of these programs, there's a lot of people who are just high and dry.”
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“It's not okay to militarize an American city.”
Pete Buttigieg Interview | Uploaded October 1, 2025 | 50:38-50:43
“The whole American economy almost designed to need more labor than we're able to supply.”
Pete Buttigieg Interview | Uploaded October 1, 2025 | 52:50-53:01
“They've driven violent crime down in Baltimore.”
Pete Buttigieg Interview | Uploaded October 1, 2025 | 55:53-55:56
“Tens of thousands of people die every year in the country in crashes. We reduced that.”
Pete Buttigieg Interview | Uploaded October 1, 2025 | 59:12-59:18
“Trump tried and he couldn't get it done. We got it done.”
Pete Buttigieg Interview | Uploaded October 1, 2025 | 59:40-59:44
“We enforced the rules that were already there. We had record enforcement actions against airlines.”
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“We made sure there was accountability for [the Southwest meltdown], like more than $100 million.”
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“We put in rules and tools, things like flightrights.gov.”
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“Trump just killed [the process to get compensation for your time if it's the airline's fault].”
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“They're letting credit cards charge these junk fees that there was a rule that you could do that.”
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“This administration killed the direct file that would allow you to just do it yourself and not have to go through one of these companies.”
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“My replacement at the Department of Transportation was literally an airline lobbyist.”
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“There was a derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, where we had folks on the ground very quickly.”
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“There were no fatalities, it was just an incredibly serious incident.”
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“It was hard enough for the government to get them good information, and then you had this flood of bad information coming in online.”
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“People weren't applying for money that they should and could get because they had been told that it wasn't going to happen.”
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“Projects are incredibly expensive. Like in New York, we're trying to do the second Avenue subway. Billions of dollars, and the tunnel's…”
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“The federal government is not set up to make sure projects go quickly. It's set up to make sure they don't go wrong.”
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“It's affecting how we build housing. It's affecting how we build clean energy infrastructure.”
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“We did improve the number of people who are dying in car crashes in this country. Like thousands less per year.”
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“A big one now is distracted driving where people.”
Pete Buttigieg Interview | Uploaded October 1, 2025 | 1:06:33-1:06:37
“Same thing with the so-called self-driving cars that weren't really self-driving.”
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“We did things like bike lanes and just more sidewalks and people were like, no one's ever going to use the bike lane. But like it mattered…”
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“There is transit, which is like, that was a lift, like culturally to get people in the Phoenix region to get into transit.”
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“We should establish, like, good bus options.”
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“Northwest Indiana is one of the most underrated or undervalued coasts in America.”
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“My dad immigrated from [Gozo, the island next to Malta].”
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“Malta...is independent English speaking, but also Maltese speaking, which is a Semitic language.”
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“I believe in peace in Northern Ireland.”
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“Now it's happening.”
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“You should be stifled.”
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