Washington Times
By Seth McLaughlin
July 13, 2015
Former
Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum said Monday the issue of legal
immigration must be front and center in the 2016 GOP nomination race,
arguing that working-class
Americans have suffered from the influx of millions of immigrants over
the past two decades.
Speaking
at a breakfast hosted by The Christian Science Monitor, the 2016 GOP
presidential hopeful said that 35 million immigrants — both legal and
illegal — have come
into the country over the last 20 years and said he supports cutting
legal immigration by 25 percent a year in hopes of helping working-class
Americans that are facing stagnant wages.
“It
is not necessarily bad,” Mr. Santorum said of the current levels of
legal immigration. “But we have to analyze what the impact is … on those
who are struggling the
most in America.
“And
to do that is not jingoistic. It is not xenophobic. It is simply a
rational policy discussion that we should be able to have in this
country without being called
various names that are not particularly appetizing,” he said.
Mr.
Santorum, who finished second in the 2012 GOP primaries, said Monday
that he plans to spend 19 or the next 33 days in Iowa, which hosts the
caucuses that he won in
2012.
Mr.
Santorum, who has struggled in the early polls, is pushing a populist
message on the campaign trail, and gone further than any of his rivals
by calling for stricter
caps on legal immigration.
“You
can make the argument that immigration is good for America, but if you
look at stagnant wages, if you look at how immigrants are primarily
taking all the net new
jobs and what the impact is on those wages and benefits, I think it
pretty clear what’s happening,” he said.
“So
to suggest, as I have, that we have to make changes to that, I think is
simply a topic that needs to be front and center and talked about, and I
think most Americans
would like to have this conversation without being made to feel by many
that you are anti-immigrant,” he said.
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