Sen. Tom Cotton slammed President Biden over his immigration policies, saying they’ve “completely opened our borders,” allowing lethal drugs to enter the country and immigrants to take jobs away from Americans.
Cotton (R-Ark.) pointed out that 100,000 Americans died in a 12-month span between April 2020 and April 2021 from drug overdoses, with the “majority of the drugs coming from Mexico.”
Deaths due to opioids, including highly potent fentanyl, accounted for more than 75 percent of fatalities during the yearlong span, the dates showed.
“Every state is a border state. And every town is a border town. Joe Biden’s immigration policy has completely opened our borders. We had more than 2 million people enter a country as illegal migrants in the first year of the Biden presidency. That’s like adding the entire state of Nebraska,” Cotton told John Catsimatidis on his WABC 770 AM radio show in an interview that aired Sunday.
“They are bringing with them drugs. They are, in many cases, gang members or hardened criminals,” the senator said.
He also said immigrants are “taking jobs from Americans, and driving down wages for Americans.”
Cotton said Democrats used to believe that enforcing border policies were “racist and nativist and xenophobic.”
But now “they seem to believe that borders are racist and xenophobic. That if you exclude anyone from the country, you are a racist and a xenophobe,” he told Catsimatidis.
He said a century ago when immigrants arrived at Ellis Island, they had to demonstrate that they weren’t carrying communicable disease and were able to provide for themselves.
“These are two of the most basic and long-standing principles of immigration law and policy in this country. That would be a pretty good standard to apply to our southern border today,” Cotton said.
He said the Biden administration won’t even meet that standard.
“One [Department of Homeland Security] official said, ‘We want to help them get to their final destination.’ Their final destination, if they don’t have a right to be here, should be back to their country of origin,” he said.
