California Republican gubernatorial candidate Neel Kashkari believes that illegal immigrant juveniles, nearly 90% of whom are teenagers, need to be sent back to their home countries, because having open borders is just not rational.
While guest-hosting CNBC’s Squawk Box on Tuesday, Kashkari said he was the “son of immigrants” and “pro-immigration,” but declared that, “we need to send these kids back home to their home countries” to discourage them from making harrowing trips in which they may be raped, kidnapped, or murdered.
“We need to change the law so we can send them home quickly,” he said. “The only way we are going to stop the next wave of kids from this dangerous journey is if they see the kids that left last month are back.”
Noting that there are “human tragedies all around the world,” he said America should use its foreign policy to improve the lives of people in other countries and emphasized that his “heart goes out” to those fleeing violence. But he said that America “can’t just have an open border and say we’re going to welcome everybody from around the world.” Kashkari said the country needed to “update our laws” and be “pro-immigration,” but emphasized that America can’t let “everybody come here in an uncontrolled manner.”
“That’s not rational policy,” he said.
A massive influx of illegal immigrants would also hurt American workers who are already struggling in an economy that has not recovered for them, which Kashkari himself discovered when he spent a week homeless in Fresno, California.
There have been nearly 60,000 illegal immigrant juveniles who have entered the country since October of last year, and federal officials expect at least 150,000 more will be apprehended in the next fiscal year. A majority of Americans want illegal immigrants to be sent back more quickly in nearly every poll.
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