Republican Presidential Candidate Donald Trump said yesterday he wanted immigrants so long as they came in legally, but he would take stiff action against illegal migrants.
"We want to have people come into our country, but they have to come in legally," he said on Friday at a campaign rally in Aurora, Colorado.
For illegal immigrants, he said, "All across our nation I make this pledge and vow to you. November, 5, 2024, will be Liberation Day in America, (there) will be liberation" from what he said was "the occupation" of the country.
According to the Customs and Border Protection agency, till August as many as 82,610 Indian citizens were recorded crossing the borders illegally and 96,917 last year.
His opposition has termed him "anti-immigrant" — a refrain most of the mainstream media have echoed but Trump makes a distinction between illegal and legal immigrants while most Democrats lump those who waited for years and went through rigorous scrutiny in order to legaly immigate with those sneaking in.
He would offer Green Cards to illegal aliens graduating from US colleges, far beyond any proposals by Democrats, who have been working on legalization of illegal immigrants.
"What I want to do and what I will do is, you graduate from a college, I think you should get automatically as part of your diploma, a green card to be able to stay in this country", he said in June.
That policy would be hard to execute, but in theory, sounds like such good news for the nearly 269,000 Indian students who attend US colleges and universities. According to statistics on the International Institute of Education covering 2022-23,.
Colorado is a blue state where Hillary Clinton carried it in 2016 and President Joe Biden did the same last year. According to a poll conducted by Keating Research at the beginning of last month, Harris has an 11-point lead.
He seeks to defy the odds by pointing out criminal acts committed by illegal immigrants as the focal point of a speech in Aurora after reports that an armed Venezuelan gang had taken over the apartment complexes instilled fear.
Trump interrupted his speech to reveal a video stringing news clips of crimes by illegal immigrants, from rape and murder to shooting at police.
He spoke against a black backdrop scribbled with "End Migrant Crime", and "Deport Illegals Now" as he accused his Democrat rival Vice President Kamala Harris of bringing in criminal illegal immigrants through "open border" policies and urged that she was the "Border Czar".
He quoted an old statement of Harris that "we don't want to treat people who cross the border illegally as criminals".
While promising mass deportations and strict action against criminal gangs, he said, "I'm hereby calling for the death penalty for any migrant that kills an American citizen or law enforcement officer."
Trump said that crime in countries like Venezuela had gone down drastically because they have emptied their prisons and mental hospitals and sent the inmates to plague the US.
He vowed to put into practice an 18th-century law, Alien Enemies Act, "to target and dismantle every migrant criminal network." This applies only to people of an enemy foreign country - and applying it across the board to all countries would be a challenge as would be a mass deportation campaign.
According to reports, so far this August 2.75 million irregular immigrants from various parts of the world were caught entering illegally and last year 3.2 million.
Aurora Mayor Mike Coffman, a Republican said while there have been some cases, it was an exaggeration to say that the city was a "war zone" run by Venezuelan criminal gangs.
He brought on stage a woman who had advertised a video recording of the Venezuelan gang armed with a high-power rifle overrunning an apartment building.
Harris, though Trump calls her "Border Czar", has said through her campaign that she was not handed border control, but merely asked to help other countries to cut off the illegal immigration towards the US.
Coming from Aurora, he headed straight for Reno in Nevada, a swing state that could potentially tip the winner in his favor where his lead is a sliver of 0.2 per cent.
He repeated most elements of his speeches — that Harris was a "Marxist", was incompetent, that the US was on a downhill trajectory, and that he would stop World War III, bring back jobs, cut taxes, reduce prices, and make the nation safe.
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