DeMint on Immigration: “Incomprehensible, Comprehensive Bills” Not the Solution
T. Elliot Gaiser /
The Heritage Foundation
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Both the process and the content of the current immigration bill violate America’s core principles and legacy of immigration, according to Heritage President Jim DeMint.
“This whole process is not really American, to take a few people and go behind closed doors and then come out and suddenly have it on the floor of the Senate for debate,” said DeMint on “The Mike Huckabee Show” earlier this week. (Listen here)
“Instead of incomprehensible, comprehensive bills that are thousands of pages, we need to take a step-by-step approach so people know what we’re doing, and with immigration, the obvious priority is to fix the system that’s broken,” he told Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech on the “Coffee and Markets” podcast.
“We don’t have a citizenship problem. We have an immigration system problem,” he said.
DeMint said the bill will impose massive costs on the Medicare, Social Security, and welfare systems. “There is a significant cost to taxpayers for those who come here illegally,” he said. “In other words, they take more than they pay into the system.
In addition, the bill will sap opportunity from those who have applied to come to the United States legally. “We’ve got 4 million people who want to come to America, have applied to come here, who can’t come here lawfully,” he said.
“Immigration is a very important part of our heritage, and we need to protect those things that immigrants from all over the world come to America for, and that’s freedom and opportunity,” said DeMint.
