Political Quotes

“Madam President, the chairman of the Homeland Security Committee is exactly right to say we can't just look at the border in dealing with this crisis. My friend Henry Cuellar from Laredo, TX, a Member of the House of Representatives, likened this to a football game. He said: You can't only do goal line defense. We need to find ways of deterring people from leaving their homes in the first place and coming to the United States. I know Vice President Biden was in Guatemala this last week and Secretary Johnson was in the Rio Grande Valley, and I know they are looking at all of this. There is no simple, single-shot answer to it. But the fact is there are a lot of people who want to come to the United States, for obvious reasons. But I look at it as even though we are a nation of immigrants, we are a nation of legal immigration, one of the most generous in the world. I think we naturalize roughly 800,000 people a year now because they want to become American citizens through the legal system. But to have this mass of humanity come at such a great flood and in such a short period of time, particularly as unaccompanied minors, threatens to capsize the boat. It creates a lot of hardship in local communities, States, and places around the country we wouldn't expect to be dealing with this, because they are going to have to be taken care of.…”