Peter Bergen Quotes

The voters in my district, and around the country, have demanded that Congress get a hold on the influx of illegal immigrants and tighten the security around our borders.

As the American public continues to focus more intensely on illegal immigration and securing the nation's borders, the number of members of the House Immigration Reform Caucus continues to grow.

I'm not backing down on immigration. I'm not backing down on the wall.

For me, the most important issue in the Republican presidential contest is immigration and its effect on our national security. On that issue Mr. Trump stands head and shoulders above the other candidates.

I'm not wise enough to know what is the right immigration policy for the United States of America.

Protecting national security amounts to looking for needles in a haystack. The work becomes more difficult if the haystack is larger. Restricting immigration generally, and illegal immigration in particular, limits growth in the haystack, and supports protection of national security.

If you can’t control your borders, you can’t control immigration. And if we can’t control immigration, there is no way re can reform immigration.

You can’t have open borders and win the war against terrorism at the same time.

Immigration reform is something that the Democrats have promised and the Republicans need.

It's great that Trump has engendered a heated debate over illegal immigration and our open borders.

I have fought on the front lines to prevent illegal immigration. I know Donald Trump will stand with me and countless Americans to secure our border.

We must give Trump credit for asking many politically incorrect questions and challenging mainstream Republican dogma on immigration.

I will tell you unequivocally, a wall from sea to shining sea is not the right direction to go.

Mr. Trump never made any derogatory or disparaging comments about Mexican immigrants... He was talking about Mexico. They're allowing people to pour through their borders, and that's a problem for our national security.

Immigration and border security are two separate issues, but Paul Ryan has taken the wrong side on both of those, in fact.

If we are to believe that our immigration laws simply have no value, as our current policies would have us believe, should we then simply throw them all out, the entire lot of immigration law? I hope not.

In terms of immigration, we're seeing a lot of Democrats and Republicans use the really elastic term, 'Comprehensive Immigration Reform,' and they don't totally understand what that means. For us in El Paso, it's part of a larger discussion about the nature of the border.

Immigration is the most explosive issue I've seen in my political career.

I'm on record saying nothing about immigration until we secure the borders. The borders are not secure.

I think in the U.S., the border fence is no longer an immigration issue primarily; it's a security issue.

The immigration thing has to be brought to a head, and I feel that the best way to do that is endorse the worst, in the sense of he is a racist and he knows what I'm talking about.

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.

The Republican Party looks at massive immigration, legal and illegal, as a source of cheap labor, satisfying a very important constituency.

This is something that I witnessed out on the campaign trail for three years, which is that there is a total disconnect between the rhetoric regarding immigration and the reality. And I'm speaking as a border state.

Yes we need enhanced border control. Yes we need to focus our efforts on those who pose a threat to our country. But let's not fall into the trap set by the Tea Party and others who would tell you that every single undocumented individual is a drug smuggler, a terrorist, or a threat to the American way of life. That is simply not true.