Former President Bill Clinton made a stark admission.
Former President Bill Clinton conceded a change is needed to New York’s “right to shelter” law as top state officials have sounded the alarm about illegal immigrants arriving in New York City in recent months.
“It’s broken. We need to fix it … it doesn’t make any sense,” the former president told host John Catsimatidis on WABC radio’s Cats Roundtable show on Sunday.
He added: “They come here, and we’re supposed to shelter people who can’t get work permits for six months. We need to change that. They ought to work. They need to begin working, paying taxes, and paying their way. Most of these people have no interest in being on welfare.”
President Clinton did not directly address the recent surge of illegal immigrants pouring across the U.S.–Mexico border. Republicans and Border Control unions have said that the Biden administration’s policies have led to the rise in illegal immigration, namely after it terminated a number of Trump administration rules.
However, with the recent increase in illegal immigrants in New York City, President Joe Biden and Democrats will face political fallout, he said.
“The Democrats lost enough seats in New York because of reaction to the crime problem here and the sense that—we didn’t have—we my party—didn’t have a good common-sense approach to it,” he stated. “The swing vote is for common sense and solving problems.”
He further added that the U.S. immigration system is “built to handle about 400,000” people and argued that the federal government “should build more housing just over the Rio Grande,” referring to Mexico.
“Keep people there, and let them in as quickly as possible if they are going some place where we know they can get a job and they’ll be welcome,” the former president said, adding that the United States has “a negative birth rate” and suggested it can only be ameliorated by mass immigration.
That proposal bears some similarity to former President Donald Trump’s migrant protection protocols, or the “remain in Mexico” policy, which requires some alleged asylum-seekers to go back to Mexico to await immigration proceedings. The Trump policy was ended by President Biden in April 2022 after a judge struck it down.
