John, you were going to say something?
SENATOR CORNYN: Mr. President, to your point, America is the most generous country in the world when it comes to legal immigration. And I think we ought to draw a very clear line between legal immigration that benefits our country —
THE PRESIDENT: Right, absolutely.
SENATOR CORNYN: — and illegal immigration, which is a threat to public safety.
I just wanted to make the one point. I agree with what Tom Cotton and others have said, what you’ve said, about being able to enforce the law and keep families together. It’s not a mutually exclusive choice. We can do both. And I’m confident we will achieve that goal.
But I just want to point out that, coming from a border state, like Mac and I do, the border — the illegality along the border is a complex problem because it is — as somebody pointed out, it’s “commodity agnostic.” In other words, they said it’s people, it’s drugs, it’s weapons. And you talk about an opioid crisis in the United States — it’s not just prescription drugs; it’s heroin that comes from Mexico.
THE PRESIDENT: Right.
SENATOR CORNYN: So this is a very complex situation. We need law and order along the border. Everybody agrees with that. We need to be compassionate in the way we handle these families. But it’s important to remember that larger context, because the cartels and the criminal organizations that benefit from this, they’re just making a lot of money and keeping this situation very dangerous for everybody involved.
THE PRESIDENT: And, John, in many ways, they’re using the children and always — they’re using the children as a ticket to getting into the country.
SENATOR CORNYN: Absolutely.
THE PRESIDENT: And we have to remember that. You know, there’s a number of the 12,000 children; 2,000 are with the parents, and 10,000 came up with some really horrible people, in some cases. You have the coyotes, you have the traffickers — the human traffickers — not only drug traffickers, but you have the human traffickers. And they use these children as passports to get into the country. So we have to work on that, too. It’s a very complex issue.
It has been going on — you shouldn’t feel guilty, because it’s been going on for many, many years. Many, many decades. But we’re going to solve that, along with a lot of other problems that we’ve already solved. We’re doing well at solving problems.
You know, when I became President, we had North Korea; we had the Iran deal, which was no good; we had lots of problems with trade and bad trade deals. There are a lot of things that we’ve solved and we’re solving that, in theory, I shouldn’t have had to solve. These are things that should have been solved for a long time. Even on trade.
We should have never allowed our past leaders — should have never allowed China to get to a point where there’s a $500 billion trade deficit with the United States. When they went up, we should have gone up. We should have gone up together — not where you allowed one to get so far ahead. And that includes the European Union and it includes many others. Shouldn’t have happened.
So we came at a time where there were plenty of problems to solve, and one of the big problems is immigration. And I hope that within not too long a distance — and I mean beyond just one problem of immigration. You can mention the word “comprehensive,” or you don’t have to use it. A lot of politicians don’t like the word “comprehensive immigration reform.” But I really think we have an opportunity to redo the whole immigration picture, and that’s what I’m looking to do, ultimately. But right now, we want to fix this problem and I think we’ll be able to do that.
Donald J. Trump
