On this weekend’s broadcast of “Fox News Sunday,” Washington Post columnist George Will took a position on the illegal unaccompanied minors flooding the southern U.S. border that conflicts with the views of most conservatives on how to handle the situation.
Will told host Chris Wallace that he believes these minors should be welcomed to this country and assimilated.
“[M]y view is we ought to say to these children, ‘Welcome to America, you’re going to go to school and get a job and become Americans,’” Will said. “We have 3,141 counties in this country. That would be 20 per county. The idea that we can’t assimilate these eight-year-old criminals with their teddy bears is preposterous.”
Wallace pointed out that Will is likely to receive some pushback for his position, but Will didn’t back down and took it a step further by suggestion a NAFTA-like measure that applied to Central America.
“We can handle the problem is what I’m saying,” he added. “We have what Emma Lazarus famously called ‘the wretched refuse of your teeming shores’ a long time ago and lot more people than this. Long-term, the most effective legislation, Chris, passed concerning immigration wasn’t an immigration bill at all. It was Bill Clinton’s greatest act, passage of the act – the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which put the Mexican economy on the path to prosperity. We need to do something similar for the countries from which these children are fleeing, including the fact of trying to get Americans to quit consuming so much of the drugs that are imported from these countries.
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