Rep. Steve King of Iowa, one of Congress’ most strident opponents of immigration, was not pleased this week when congressional Democrats announced that they had reached a deal with President Trump to protect undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children, telling Fox News Radio’s Todd Starnes yesterday that any such deal should include radical anti-immigrant priorities such as attempting to end the Constitution’s guarantee of birthright citizenship.
King told Starnes that he had spoken with Trump last week before Trump announced that he would rescind the DACA program that provides temporary deportation relief to Dreamers and that he had had a conversation with White House Chief of Staff John Kelly yesterday that was “to a degree reassuring.”
“If there is to be a deal struck” on DACA, he said, “the border security and domestic enforcement needs to be locked in to the absolute maximum.” He added that “on top of that,” making English the country’s official language should be thrown “into the mix” as should a legislative end to birthright citizenship for “babies that are born in the United States to illegal mothers or illegal parents.”
King said he also wanted to see legislation preventing states from counting undocumented immigrants when apportioning congressional districts, which the Supreme Court declined to do last year. That change, he said, would move “between nine and 11 congressional seats out of the Democrats’ hands in states like Florida, Texas, California and up into the hands of Republicans, conservative Republicans, Utah, Indiana and perhaps Iowa.”
Earlier in the interview, Starnes asked King about Trump’s tweet asking if “anybody really wants to throw out good, educated and accomplished young people who have jobs, some serving in the military.” King returned to his bizarre analogy between Dreamers and the Peace Corps, saying, “if that turns into a valid statement, then we should never let any Peace Corps volunteers leave America.”
Anyway, he said, Dreamers “came here to live in the shadows” and so should be allowed to continue do so: “I’d say they came here to live in the shadows. If we let them do what their objective was when they arrived, and that’s live in the shadows until law enforcement encounters them, they get their objective.”
