No One Defended Immigration at the First Presidential Debate
Immigration is a top issue for American voters and was widely expected to play a major role in tonight’s debate between former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden. In a section devoted to the issue, neither candidate could muster up a positive vision for the country’s immigration system, focusing instead on enforcement-heavy rhetoric and neglecting the benefits of immigrants.
Asked about the high number of illegal border crossings under his watch, Biden quickly took a hawkish tone: “By the way, the Border Patrol endorsed me, endorsed my position.” He criticized Trump for “separating babies from their mothers” and “putting them in cages” and pointed to efforts to hire more asylum officers. “Now we’re in a situation where there’s 40 percent fewer people coming across the border illegally,” he said, “and I’m going to continue to move until we get to…the total initiative relative to what we’re going to do with more Border Patrol and more asylum officers.”
Trump chided Biden for deciding “to open up our country to people that are from prisons, people that are from mental institutions, [and] insane asylums,” and claimed that “we have the largest number of terrorists coming into our country right now.”
“In that final couple months of my presidency, we had—according to the Border Patrol, who is great—and by the way, who endorsed me for president,” Trump continued, “we had the safest border in history.” Trump dodged a question about the specifics of his mass deportation plan while claiming that “people are coming in and they’re killing our citizens at a level that we’ve never seen.”
Article from Reason.com
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