Thread: Hunter Outlines Iraq Strategy, Immigration Plan

This is rather lengthy so only posting the part about the fence and illegal immigration. To see the entire interview please click on the source link.
~~~
Hunter Outlines Iraq Strategy, Immigration Plan
September 26, 2007

In the newest in a series of interviews with presidential candidates, Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., details his ideas for handling illegal immigration in the United States and discusses how his experiences as a veteran shape his views on Iraq war policy.

Pushing the border fence
JUDY WOODRUFF: Let me bring you back home and ask you about a couple of issues, in particular immigration. I looked at your campaign Web site. You say this is one of the -- border security is one of the principle tenets of your campaign. Why do you feel so strongly about this 700-mile-long fence along the border?

REP. DUNCAN HUNTER: You know, when I got this congressional district in San Diego -- what a wonderful place to represent, incidentally, a great, great home for Lynne and I -- I represented at one time the entire California-Mexican border. And when I came into that district, the border between San Diego and Tijuana, Mexico, was the number-one smugglers corridor in America, through which most of the illegal aliens and most of the narcotics that flowed into the entire country traveled. They came through that narrow corridor between Tijuana and San Diego.

It was a no man's land, where at nighttime you would have armed gangs, some with automatic weapons, robbing, raping, murdering illegal aliens as they came across, because when people come across, they usually have lots of cash, their life savings on them. And so these gangs would besiege 20 or 30 people, they could make a lot of money robbing two or three groups of people coming across illegally.

It was so bad we actually had a plain-clothes police force that dressed like illegal aliens in our city police department. They would go down to the border and wait to be attacked by the gangs. I built that double-border fence, and that's two fences with a Border Patrol road in between, and I wrote the law to mandate that fence's construction when the Clinton administration came into power, was in power, but when the Republicans came into power in 1994.

When I built the double-border fence, the smuggling of illegal aliens and narcotics dropped by more than 90 percent in our sector. And the crime rate in the city of San Diego, by FBI statistic, went down 50 percent. So I wrote the law in October that extends the San Diego border fence, actually 854 miles across Arizona, New Mexico and Texas.

The smuggler's corridors of those areas, we don't take them across the cliffs of the Big Bend National Park or the extremely rugged areas. We take them across the areas where they're smuggling most of the people.

To date, the Bush administration has built very little of the double fence. I saw Mr. Chertoff the day before yesterday. He said they've done 70 miles of single fence, but I could -- I will finish that entire fence, 854 miles, in six months. And I think that's even more of a security issue today than an immigration issue. We have to know who's coming into this country.

JUDY WOODRUFF: You also have been adamant in saying that you think that the illegals, known illegals in this country should be deported. How do you go about finding them?

REP. DUNCAN HUNTER: Well, I think, to some degree, we're like a boat that's got a big hole in it, and we're bailing water furiously. You have to plug the hole in the boat, which means you have to secure the border.

Once you secure the border, we have a deportation system, in fact, for people that say, "You can't deport people by the thousands," we deport thousands of people from this country every month. And if we don't, if we don't adhere to the law, the many people who are here right now, the millions of people who are here right now, who came in illegally after the amnesty of the 1980s, came in after the U.S. Senate, the U.S. House held up a big sign and we said, "This time we really mean it," 1986, I believe. We said, "We really mean it. Nobody else can come in illegally." And folks came in illegally and left tire tracks on those signs.

Now, if you don't have -- if we don't follow the law, if we say, "OK, we didn't really mean it, we're going to have another amnesty," you will have another wave of people trying to get in to catch what they perceive will be the third amnesty.

So you have to follow the law. And besides that, you've got people waiting in line. And whether it's ever stated or not, the number of people that have to wait in line, follow the law, actually are put off and are delayed because of the huge number of people who take cuts in that line by coming in illegally, so you've got to have a law. And you've got to follow the rule of law.

And we're like a house that doesn't have any sides to it. And we argue over how wide the front door should be open. We have the biggest front door in the world in this country. We've got to have sides on the house. And that's what the border fence and Border Patrol will comprise.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/politics ... 09-26.html

It's refreshing to hear someone actually say we should be deporting All illegal immigrants! I'm tired of hearing WE CAN'T deport them all.

Duncan Hunter for President 2008!

Im leaning His way.Ive heard him before and I like him alot.Go Duncan!