Coons: Blue States Have Shared Border Burden, ‘Not New’ for Us to Have Migrants in ‘Places Like the Beach Resorts’

On Tuesday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports,” Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) argued that blue states have shared the burden of people coming into the U.S. through the border because it’s “nothing new that there is migration into states like Delaware, blue states. This has been going on for a very long time.” Particularly in the southern part of Delaware, and it’s “not new for there to be new Americans or new immigrants into places like the beach resorts in southern Delaware.”

Host Peter Alexander asked, “Right now, we’re hearing from the Senate Minority Leader, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), the top Republican in the Senate, who has been applauding these Republican governors’ efforts to send these migrants to some of these more blue, more Democratic-leaning states. He said the following today, ‘These well-to-do blue enclaves are finally witnessing the smallest fraction of the challenges that open borders have forced on working-class communities all across our country.’ Your response to that effort that some of these blue states, as he describes them, should share some of this burden.”

Coons responded, “It is nothing new that there is migration into states like Delaware, blue states. This has been going on for a very long time. We have a strong agricultural sector and we have a strong immigrant community, particularly in southern Delaware. The difference is in how we respond. We respond by being, I think, welcoming and supportive and by recognizing that America is strengthened by immigration. We can and should do more to strengthen our immigration system and to ensure that immigration into the United States is legal immigration. But this strikes me as a political stunt that’s just designed to get on TV by luring people onto a charter jet and then dropping them in places like Martha’s Vineyard. It is not new for there to be new Americans or new immigrants into places like the beach resorts in southern Delaware. So, I disagree with the [Minority Leader] here in the Senate.”

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