|
|
Vivek Ramaswamy on Immigration |
RAMASWAMY: There's two sides to this. One is, we do have to seal that Southern border. Building the wall is not enough. They're building cartel-financed tunnels underneath that wall. Semitrucks can drive through them. We have to use our own military to seal the Swiss cheese of a Southern border. But we also have to be honest. There's a demand-side problem in this country too, a mental health epidemic. We have to bring back mental health care in this country, not with pumping pharmaceuticals, but faith-based approaches that restore purpose and meaning in the next generation of Americans. Many of them are getting it through social media. If you're 16 years old or under, you should not be using an addictive social media product, period. We can revive the mental health of this country while stopping the fentanyl epidemic.
He wants to "universally" deport undocumented immigrants and opposes any path to legal residence because "we are a nation of laws. That is something we cannot compromise on."
He added that, for people brought to the US as children, he would be open to a process allowing them to return after being deported. But all legal immigration, he says, should run on a "meritocratic" points system, with lottery-based paths eliminated.
He said citing undocumented immigrants' economic contributions was tantamount to making economic arguments for slavery: "'The vegetables will rot in the field, we need people to pluck our crops'--[slaveowners] were saying that in the South in the 1860s," he said.