President Donald Trump on Friday said he has “tremendous support” from Republicans to make a compromise on a path to citizenship for recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, despite backlash from his far-right base.
During an interview with CNBC Friday, Trump said the Republican senators he’s been courting on immigration reform — Sens. Tom Cotton (R-AR), David Perdue (R-GA), John Cornyn (R-TX) and Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) — are “willing to shift more” on their stance on protecting DACA recipients if it means Trump will get his border wall.
NBC and The Daily Beast reported Thursday that the White House’s platform on immigration — which will be revealed Monday — will offer a decade-long path to citizenship for 1.8 million DACA recipients in exchange for $25 billion in border wall and security funding, which Trump said will be more than enough to cover construction.
“I don’t need $25 billion to build a wall,” he said. “We’ll build a great— that’s what I do. We’ll build a great wall and we’ll have a lot of money left over and we’ll spend it on other things.”
The White House also plans to propose the termination of the diversity visa lottery program and family-based immigration. The news of Trump’s planned compromise sparked outrage from pundits on the far-right, with Breitbart News even bringing back to it’s “amnesty Don” headline for the President.
Despite the backlash, Trump said he thinks he can get the Republicans, as well as Democrats, to agree to a compromise because he will “consider it a great achievement to solve the DACA problem.”
“I think Cotton, and Perdue, and Goodlatte, and the people that I’ve been dealing with — Cornyn, so many of the people — these are great people,” he told CNBC. “These are people that really have shifted a lot. They’ve really shifted a lot, and I think they’re willing to shift more, and so am I.”
Watch the interview below:
Watch CNBC’s full interview with President Trump from Davos from CNBC.
“I don’t need $25 billion to build a wall,” he said. “We’ll build a great— that’s what I do. We’ll build a great wall and ***we’ll have a lot of money left over and we’ll spend it on other things.***”
I’m sure many of my friends are just saying no to der Furor’s still-unofficial policy statement, but Democrats need to be ready to negotiate. First, the idea of turning our backs on almost 2 million young people is unacceptable, unless we get to the point where we can look each of them in the eye and tell them that the cost to others was too great for us to help them. Then, looking at the mid-terms and beyond, Democrats have to be active on immigration, but not paint ourselves into the corner of forgetting that many people have honest and reasonable feelings that the way we let people into the country needs to be changed. That does not mean going along automatically with gutting family-based immigration, or just throwing out the diversity lobby, or jumping to increase the number of H-1B visas, but it means being prepared to talk about reasonable change.
Of course, it’s dollars to donuts that this is just another Trump attempt at a fake out, but we cannot just assume that. (Remember: When you assume, you make an ass out of you and me.)
The damn wall is a two decade+ project, and whatever is done will be piecemeal, halting, done in fits and starts. Just the surveying, engineering and pre-construction phase will eat up the remainder of this decade. Then there’s the imminent domain lawsuits, right-of-way disputes, fights with individual municipalities and businesses. Bidding contracts to let. Lawsuits over those awards. Inevitable bankruptcies or failure to perform issues with subcontractors. Just concede the funding on the damn wall and the next Dem Prez can go about scuttling the entire clusterfuck later.
The end game is for Americans to work 12 hours a day for 9 bucks an hour with no health insurance, until we die. And we can bring our spouses and children to work with us on Sunday, if we want a half day off to go to church and get all our yard work done at home.
Won’t Mexico have the left over money?