Former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach says that while the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) has focused largely on other issues, about 1,800 miles of the United States-Mexico border still needs to be secured and calling immigration the “number one issue” facing the nation.
During an exclusive interview with SiriusXM Patriot’s Breitbart News Daily, live at CPAC, Kobach told Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow that while the country’s mass illegal and legal immigration system may be the leading issue among voters, the conservative conference has devoted little-to-no time to the subject.
“There are so many problems in our immigration system,” Kobach said. “President Trump is the one we elected to solve them and here we are at CPAC, talking about other stuff.”
Mentioning the lone CPAC panel that is set to touch on the issue, Kobach said: “I wouldn’t even call it a panel, it’s just [National Review‘s] Rich Lowry asking Ted Cruz a few questions.”
Kobach continued:
I’ve been on immigration panels in the past. They’ve devoted a lot of attention to this issue. Why in the world CPAC is spending so much time talking about China, which of course is an important issue every year, but it is not the number one issue right now defining the country, the president, the judicial branch, and the legislative branch. [Emphasis added]
Immigration has remained one of the top issues among all U.S. voters for at least a year, the latest Harvard/Harris Poll finds, while the majority of Republican voters, conservatives, and Trump supporters agree that immigration is the number one issue in the country.
Listen to Kobach’s full interview here:
Most important, Kobach said, is the fact that the nearly 2,000-mile long U.S.-Mexico border largely remains open for human smugglers, drug traffickers, and illegal aliens looking to falsely claim asylum in the country.
“There are huge sections of the border that have either nothing whatsoever to impede people coming in or all they have is what’s called a “Normandy barrier” — that’s just a horizontal steel beam supported by some posts to stop a car, but you can hop right over it or get on your knees and go right over it,” Kobach said. “It’s ridiculous.”
Kobach said:
Let’s put this into perspective. We have 1,933 miles of border. Of that, fewer than 100 miles have border barriers that can stop a pedestrian. 100 miles out of 1,900 miles. The other 1,800 are wide open to smugglers and people just walking right in. President Trump got 55 miles of funding for Congress. If he’s able to reprogram all the money he wants to, another $8 billion … he’ll get another 250 miles. So guess what, [Trump] gets 300 miles and we have 1,800 miles that need to be secured. We are so far behind on this problem. [Emphasis added]
Since Trump declared a national emergency at the southern border — as illegal immigration skyrockets to Bush era levels and 70,000 Americans die from drug overdoses every year — Democrats and a number of Republican lawmakers have said they oppose the use of executive emergency powers to stop illegal immigration into the country.
Kobach noted that while Democrats and Republicans oppose Trump’s national emergency at the border, they hardly opposed former Presidents Bush and Obama’s national emergencies — some of which had no impact on America’s working and middle class.
“We have had 58 national emergencies already declared and 31 are still active … I brought a couple of examples with me,” Kobach said. “Did you know that of the 31 national emergencies that we already have in effect, perhaps you didn’t remember but Bush declared a national emergency about fraud in the Belarus election.”
“In 2015, President Obama declared a national emergency about what? A failed coup in Burundi,” Kobach said. “Now these things had no tangible impact on the lives of Americans. So the notion that we might declare too many national emergencies on things that aren’t really national emergencies … in contrast, the crisis at the border is a national emergency.
“Thousands of Americans are dying every year because of homicides committed against them by illegal aliens, drunk driving, or other traffic accidents by illegal aliens. We know this, the Angel Families are a perfect example of this. That is a national emergency,” Kobach continued. “The thousands and thousands of pounds of drugs coming in, killing Americans — that’s a national emergency. The terrorists coming in, a national emergency and the tax burden that we all feel because of illegal immigration.”
In the last decade alone, the U.S. admitted ten million legal immigrants, forcing American workers to compete against a growing population of low-wage foreign workers. Meanwhile, if legal immigration continues, there will be 69 million foreign-born residents living in the U.S. by 2060. This would represent an unprecedented electoral gain for the Left, as Democrats win about 90 percent of congressional districts where the foreign-born population exceeds the national average.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
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