Marco Rubio Quotes

It's different when you talk about immigration in the abstract... It's very different when you sit in front of a family, and [undocumented] children who grew up in this country, and who go to the same school you once went to... They thought if we only enforce the law, people will self-deport... It's not going to happen. The solution is not the status quo, or deportation when you're talking about breaking up families.

The White House looked into a plan that would allow illegal immigrants to stay in the United States. The plan called for a million Mexicans to marry a million of our ugliest citizens.

The current practice of extending U.S. citizenship to hundreds of thousands of 'anchor babies' must end because it creates a magnet for illegal immigration into our country. Now is the time to ensure that the laws in this country do not encourage law-breaking.

Do all children have some inherent right to live in America if they have done nothing wrong? If not, then why should the children of illegal immigrants have such a right?

What happens is, illegal immigrants can run across the border, drop a baby, and say, 'Ha-ha, there's nothing you can do now. My kid's an American citizen.' Well, that wasn't the intent of the 14th Amendment. Americans would not agree with that. It creates a horrible incentive.

The anchor baby situation has got to stop.

Criminals take advantage of weak laws, like giving driver's licenses to illegal immigrants.

We can't go on forever with 11 million people living in this country in the shadows in an illegal status. We cannot forever have children who were born here - who were brought here by their parents when they were small children to live in the shadows, as well... What's changed, honestly, is that there is a new appreciation on both sides of the aisle, maybe more importantly on the Republican side, that we need to enact a comprehensive immigration reform bill.

Our message to the world will be this. You cannot obtain legal status or become a citizen of the United States by illegally entering our country. That's right. People will know that you can't just smuggle in, hunker down, and wait to be legalized. It's not going to work that way. Those days are over.

We have 11 million people said to be in our country illegally. Forty percent of them are said to have overstayed their visa. Do we know where they are?

On top of that, illegal immigration costs our country more than $113 billion a year. And this is what we get. For the money we are going to spend on illegal immigration over the next 10 years, we could provide 1 million at-risk students with a school voucher, which so many people are wanting.

I think that Donald Trump has been very clear on this. We're not going to have amnesty . What we're going to do is to get those who are breaking the law out of the country as quickly as possible to make sure then that you deal with people in a humane way. I think that's what he's been saying.

In real life, there are right-wingers, there are anti-immigrant activists who want to overturn this constitutional right that we have to become Americans when we're born in this country. There's lots of people who believe that this has led to the phenomenon of the anchor babies. I am an anchor baby. My parents were able to receive their residency and citizenship because, I, a U.S. citizen child of theirs, was born in Los Angeles.

If we in fact were to begin enforcing the law against people who are hiring people who are here illegally, we would go a long way towards eliminating the problem.

Illegal immigration is crisis for our country. It is an open door for drugs, criminals, and potential terrorists to enter our country. It is straining our economy, adding costs to our judicial, healthcare, and education systems.

Obama wants to raise the issue of immigration reform so that he can demonize Republicans as anti-Hispanic. That's why Obama ignores the broad support for an immigration plan that would provide border security once and for all and then deal with the illegal immigrants who live here.

We have over 500,000 illegal immigrants living in Arizona. And we simply cannot sustain it. It costs us a tremendous amount of money of course in health care, in education, and then, on top of it all, in incarceration. And the federal government doesn't reimburse us on any of these things.

Amnesty is not the answer as it will only encourage more illegal immigrants to enter.

Illegal immigrants make a rational choice when they decide to violate our immigration laws. They weigh the costs, including the risks of getting caught, against the benefits of a better life.

Every time anybody in Washington talks about legal status, amnesty, anything of that nature, it becomes a magnet that lures people in quickly into the United States.

What the president is doing is flooding the job market with illegal immigrants that he is giving temporary work permits to. Not fair.

The 'anchor baby' thing needs to be fixed... Anchor babies are an unconstitutional declaration of citizenship to those born of non-Americans. It's wrong, and it's immoral.

Besides taking jobs from American workers, illegal immigration creates huge economic burdens on our health care system, our education system, our criminal justice system, our environment, our infrastructure and our public safety.

Because the worst of all worlds is when you pretend like you have an immigration policy, you make coming into the United States without our permission illegal, and then you actually don't enforce it.

Our Nation's immigration laws are disrespected both by those who cross our borders illegally and by the businesses that hire those illegal immigrants.