Kentucky Senator and Republican presidential candidate Rand Paul stated that “once the border is secure,” “we can find work visas” for “honest” non-criminal illegal immigrants that are “here for the American Dream” on Thursday’s broadcast of CNN’s “Wolf.”
Rand was asked, in light of his statement that illegal immigrants in the US “are never going home, don’t need to be sent home, and I would incorporate them into our society by giving them work visas and making them taxpayers,” whether he would allow illegal immigrants who pay their taxes and don’t break any other laws to have a path to US citizenship. He stated, “I think what I’d start with, first of all, is securing the border, so we don’t have illegal immigration. That’s been needed for 20 or 30 years. And I think we’ve had Republican presidents and Democrat presidents refuse to secure the borders. You do have to secure the border. Once the border is secure, if you are honest, and not a criminal, and here for the American Dream, which I think the vast majority of people are, yes, we can find work visas for you. But it still does mean some scrutiny. So, for example, there’s a grain of truth in what you’re hearing from other folks, in the sense that we have do actually have to do criminal background checks on everybody who came here illegally. And then we have to decide who are legitimate people seeking the American Dream, legitimately want to work, and then what we have to do is have a work visa program that works. The farmers in my state use the work visa program, but they tell me it is broken, it’s cumbersome, and it takes months to try to get the paperwork done. Certainly, in this Internet age, we can figure out how to do it online, and we can figure out how to get people background checks and find out who is in this country with good intentions. But, I don’t really foresee a time where there’s going to be some sort of mass roundup of 11 million people. I think what we need to do is figure out how to secure the border, and figure out how we can get a good, legal, immigration system working again in our country.”
Rand was asked again about a pathway to citizenship for these illegal immigrants. He stated, “This was the big debate we had, you know, with the immigration bill, that I ended up opposing it, and part of the reason I did oppose it is I think we created a new pathway to citizenship. I don’t think there should be a new pathway to citizenship. Their children are becoming citizens. And I think if you break the law coming in, that your reward shouldn’t be automatically granting something that is prized by people around the world, but I also think it’s not the opposite. It’s somewhere in between. So, I don’t think it’s rounding you up and putting you in camps, but I also don’t think it’s saying, ‘Hey, here’s a reward be citizen [of] the greatest country in the world,’ after you broke the law. I think the real answer is, secure the border, and let’s stop this once and for all, allowing mass migration without any kind of rules at the border. And so I do believe that we have to have an organized border, and we haven’t done a good job.”
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