Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., suggested on Friday that America desperately needs migrants in order to function as a society.
MSNBC host José Díaz-Balart spoke with Jayapal about the ongoing crisis at America’s southern border.
"I just don’t know what it’s going to take for there to be some action, you know? Some action. It seems as though inaction is the way of benefiting politically from this. And it’s just tragic," Díaz-Balart said.
Jayapal lamented that "immigrants are used as a political football" before calling upon Republicans to work with Democrats, arguing Americans "need" immigrants.
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"This country would collapse without immigrants," she said. "I’m an immigrant, I’m the first naturalized citizen to be ranking member on the Immigration Subcommittee, and I know that the opportunity that we have here is so phenomenal, but so is the responsibility, for us as a country, to continue to welcome in people who are fleeing terrible conditions in their home countries."
Jayapal has a history of saying the best way to solve the immigration crisis is to allow more people to immigrate to the United States.
In a September appearance on CNN, she claimed the GOP is a major instigator of the crisis along the southern border.
"Republicans have no interest in trying to fix this. Don’t forget, Jake, that when Donald Trump was president, in March of 2019, he actually ended the support that we were giving to Central American countries to actually stop — you know, help aid people in their countries so that they wouldn’t necessarily feel that they had to make the journey here," Jayapal said.
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She went on to blame former President Trump, suggesting he, "put in place all these things that eliminated legal ways for people to come to this country. Let me just tell you that when we said to Haitians that they could actually come to the ports of entry and there was a legal way for them to be able to get into this country, then all of a sudden, that’s what they did. Nintey-seven percent of Haitians do it that way."
