Sen. Lindsey Graham: ‘You’re Not Going to Secure a Border Just by Adding National Guard Troops’ – By Melanie Arter (cnsnews.com) / April 9 2018
(CNSNews.com) – Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday that President Donald Trump’s plan to send National Guard troops to the U.S.-Mexico border won’t secure the border, and that the problem will never be fixed without comprehensive immigration reform.
When asked if he agreed with Trump’s plan to send thousands of Guard troops to the border, Graham said, “Well, he’ll be the third president to do so. And here’s what I would tell him, there makes some sense to send soldiers to the border but you’re not going to secure a border just by adding National Guard troops. You got to go to the root cause of this.
“The caravans come from the triangle countries, Honduras and Guatemala in particular because the conditions are so bad. If you don’t have comprehensive immigration reform so it’s easier for American companies to hire, you have more labor available to American companies, you will never fix this problem,” he said.
Graham said the reason why there’s an illegal immigration problem along the Mexican border and not the Canadian border is because “Canada has a sound economy.” He said you have to “fix the economic magnet” and that building a wall on the border alone won’t fix anything.
“And here’s what I would tell the American people. We have two borders, one with Canada, one with Mexico. I’ve never met an illegal Canadian. I went to New Hampshire to look for them and couldn’t find one when I was running for president,” he said.
“The point is that Canada has a sound economy, people from the south of us do not have sound economies, and if you don’t fix the economic magnet, you’ll never solve the immigration problem. So building a wall alone won’t do anything,” Graham said.
When asked about whether there will be a deal on Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), Graham said, “Well, there’s a pony in there somewhere, Martha, and I’m looking for that pony. Number one, the court is probably going to rule for the president down the road that he can terminate DACA. That creates some chaos for the DACA recipients who came here on the average age of 6 with nowhere else to go.”
He said there’s a deal to take care of DACA recipients “and get the border wall we desperately need, plus interior enforcement, to make us safer. That deal can be done, and I’ll make a prediction on this show that there will be another effort to marry up border security and DACA by the spring, early summer.”
Graham said he’s “hopeful” that it will go through, “because if we fail, it’s just a disaster for the DACA recipients and for our national security, and 70 percent of the American people want us to do both.
“It may fail, but I believe we owe it to the American people to try again, and I’m going to try again, and I think the president is open-minded to trying again,” he said.
