Rep. Steve King, the Iowa Republican who famously said that most DREAM Act recipients have “calves the size of cantaloupes” from running drugs across the border and then led the House GOP’s efforts to reel back President Obama’s DACA program, said this morning that President Trump’s decision to end DACA will lead to DREAMers who have been deported creating a Peace Corps-like force that will teach their home countries “how a civilized people interact with each other."
In an interview on “Breitbart News Radio” today, shortly before Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that the Trump administration would be rescinding the DACA program that provides deportation relief to some undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children, King discussed a tweet that he had sent this morning stating that deported DACA recipients “will make great ‘Peace Corp’ volunteers in home countries,” an idea that he also discussed in an op-ed in March.
King argued that DREAMers who have been deported to their home countries will make a large, involuntary Peace Corps like force that could create the “best economic and cultural development, civilizational development that, say, Mexico could ever experience”:
I’m making this point that if we shut off the DACA program, and there are 800,000 of them in the United States today, they would deploy—and I use that word that way—back to their home territories, most likely. And they would go back there with a U.S. taxpayer-funded education, many of them the college education, they will have top-notch English skills, they would understand how a free-enterprise economy works, how a generally corrupt-free society, first world works. They would have seen the transportation system we have, the educational system, the research and development systems that we have, how a civilized people interact with each other. All of that would go with them back to their home countries, and wouldn’t that be the best economic and cultural development, civilizational development that, say, Mexico could ever experience?
If these are their best and brightest—some of them are—just give them to these people that advertise DACA and what if their words are right? Send them back home again, it will have far more impact than you’ll get out of Peace Corps volunteers.
Later in the interview, King argued that legal immigration is a “natural filtration system” that has already brought the best people from other countries to the U.S. He also returned to his infamous “cantaloupe calves” remark, saying that “most of these guys that are carrying these packs [across the border] that range from 65 pounds up to 90 pounds or so, most of these guys that are carrying this, they’re younger than 18 years old” and may lie to get DACA status.
