Beto O'Rourke: “I want to thank Representative Gallego for his very eloquent support of moving forward with comprehensive immigration…”

“I want to thank Representative Gallego for his very eloquent support of moving forward with comprehensive immigration reform and doing so in a rational, fact-based manner. And I think he would agree with me that we are very pleased to see progress being made in the Senate. Whether it was originally with the Group of 8 or the 60 or more Senators who have since joined them in key supportive votes to move this forward, I'm happy that we're making progress. What concerns me are some of the provisions that specifically relate to the U.S.-Mexico border: You're talking about 600 miles of border fencing and walls that currently exist being expanded to more than 1,400 miles of the 2,000- mile border. You're talking about a Border Patrol force that today is more than 20,000, which is more than double what it was in 2001, being doubled yet again to more than 40,000, and all this for the cost of upwards of $50 billion a year. And as Representative Gallego pointed out, this is at a time of tight budgets, of sequester, of record deficits and debt. We simply can't afford to move forward like this. But I will grant the proponents of these measures this: there's a certain crude logic to that. If you have a problem with immigration, if you have a problem with flows northward from Mexico and Latin America, then putting a wall in place, doubling the Border Patrol that's patrolling that line, there's a crude logic to it.…”