Biden: Dreamers 'Become Americans Before a Lot of Americans Become Americans'
Democratic presidential candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden asserted Thursday that recipients of former President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program “become Americans before a lot of Americans” do.
Biden made the comments about the so-called Dreamers while speaking about immigration at a town hall-style meeting in South Carolina, according to Breitbart.
“We have to find a pathway for Dreamers. You know Dreamers?” Biden said, referring to the hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants brought to the U.S. as children who were granted temporary protection from deportation under the Obama administration, as The Daily Wire noted.
“I love people that say, ‘Let’s send them back.’ Can you imagine you’re 4 years old, your mom says you’re crossing the Rio Grande, and you say, ‘No mom, I don’t want to go, we’re going to stay here?’ Come on. Come on,” the former vice president said.
“And these kids who come, and they end up doing well, they become Americans before a lot of Americans become Americans,” Biden said. “No, I’m serious. They get in school, they do well, they contribute to the community, they contribute to the country.”
Joe Biden on illegal aliens: “And these kids who come, and they end up doing well, they become Americans before a lot of Americans become Americans … I’m serious”pic.twitter.com/FX5LhKtt8i
— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) August 30, 2019
Dreamers were given protection from deportation not by an act of Congress but by an executive order signed by Obama.
President Donald Trump would eventually rescind DACA in 2017.
Democratic lawmakers have made it a priority to permanently legalize Dreamers.
“Number one: We legalize the Dreamers,” Biden said Thursday.
“Number two: I would send, immediately, an amendment to the desk of the United States Senate and the House of Representatives — a bill to the desk — that said the following: ‘We have to find a pathway to citizenship, earned citizenship, for the 11 million undocumented.’
“Thirdly, the idea that we are changing our nature as a people by not allowing the notion of people seeking asylum here — what’s that Statue of Liberty all about? It’s about asylum. And the idea that I would be surging asylum judges to the border to make sure these people had hearings.”
Biden also had strong words of praise for those who cross into the U.S. illegally.
“The people who come are people who have courage, who have resilience. People who have optimism,” he said.
“Since the 1700s, there has been a constant unrelenting wave of immigration, met by xenophobia, three or four times, lasting for anywhere from a year to sometimes longer, but always being overcome,” Biden asserted.
“Look at the people who have the courage to come!”
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