By Jonathan Easley - 08/09/13 02:35 PM ET
The Hill



Rep. Buck McKeon (R-Calif.) said Congress should focus its immigration policy on securing the southern border with Mexico because Arab terrorists disguised as Hispanics could try to cross into the country illegally.

“There are people that can’t tell the difference between a Hispanic person and an Arab person,” the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee said at a town-hall meeting, according to a video obtained by Buzzfeed. “If you get an Arab that’s coming into this country to be a terrorist, they can mingle in, and they can get in here, and then they can do damage.”

McKeon said he supports an immigration reform policy that includes a pathway to citizenship for the nation’s estimated 11 million illegal immigrants.

“I would secure the border,” he continued. “I would come up with a program to make everybody here — you say 11 million, we don’t know how many there are — we need to find out, and one way I think to do it would be to make everybody legal. To give them some kind of status to bring them into the system, and then we have to follow the system.”

Rep. Luis Gutiérrez (D-Ill.) said in an interview Friday that 40 to 50 House Republicans would support immigration reform. Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has said he will only bring an immigration bill to the House floor if it is supported by a majority of his conference.

http://thehill.com/video/in-the-news...ntry-illegally