A recent “fact-check” column challenged my statement that President Donald Trump’s hard-line immigration stance has driven larger numbers of people to our border.
The author conceded that “asylum seekers are arriving at record levels,” but concluded there was no way to prove Trump’s policy or statements were a cause. She concluded my statement was “half true.”
Absent interviews with a credible sample of asylum seekers, one cannot definitively prove the thinking of thousands of people who fled their countries to come to our border. Neither the writer nor I have such a sample to draw from.
However, I have spent several hours this year meeting with asylum seekers in El Paso and McAllen, Texas. Some of the poorest people in the Americas, they cashed in almost everything they owned and set out on a dangerous journey.
When I asked why they came, they told me life is dangerous in their home countries, with criminal gangs running roughshod over them, threatening their children. Experts tell us that the president’s mindless decision to cut off foreign aid has made these countries even more dangerous.
These families told me that traffickers demanded thousands of dollars to move them to our border. They had no choice because of Trump’s decision to shut down the option to apply for safe haven from their home countries.
And then they told me that the president’s repeated threats of a wall led them to believe that any delay would jeopardize their chances to make it to the U.S.
That explanation rings true to me, not half true.
We need border security, and we should never knowingly allow dangerous people into our country. A bipartisan, comprehensive immigration reform bill, which I co-authored, passed the Senate six years ago. It would have fixed our broken immigration system and is still the best starting point for a productive national debate on immigration.
U.S. Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Illinois
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Worst states to live in
With all the recent discussion about the worst cities to live in, I wondered what are the worst states to live in. Well lo and behold, it turns out that nine of the 10 worst states to live in are strongly supportive of President Donald Trump and the Republican Party.
The states ranked as the worst states to live in are Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, New Mexico, South Carolina, Oklahoma, West Virginia, Alaska and Kentucky. Most, if not all, have Republican governors and are represented by Republican senators in Congress.
It would appear that Republicans need to improve the living conditions in states they control, and Democrats definitely need to fix the problems existing in many large cities.
Victor Darst, Huntley
