- In our first look tonight, an interview with Wisconsin U.S.
Senator Ron Johnson.
He's here as fallout from a contentious oval office meeting
over an immigration fix, including protection for
dreamers, continues to spread.
The president rescinded the Deferred Action for Childhood
Arrivals last year, but has said he'd be willing to reinstate the
program in return for border wall funding.
In the midst of a bipartisan meeting of senators with the
president on DACA, the president reportedly made incendiary
comments over a plan to reinstate temporary protected
status programs for El Salvador, Haiti and some African nations,
reportedly asking why are we having all these people from
bleephole countries come here?
Senator Johnson was not among those in the meeting but he too
is looking for an immigration fix.
He joins us now.
Senator, thanks very much for being here.
- Happy new year.
- What is your response to President Trump's reported
comments about the U.S.
taking immigrants from bleephole countries referring to some in
Africa and others?
- Totally inappropriate and he should apologize.
When you enter the public realm, I don't care what your past was,
I don't care what kind of salty language you might have used,
you stop doing it.
You have a certain responsibility,
a certain decorum you need to conduct yourself in public with.
You have children watching.
You have nations watching.
Totally inappropriate, very unfortunate.
Because a couple days before that,
I think the president showed himself in really a good light
with a bipartisan group of senators and house members
really trying to find areas of agreement.
I hope people take a look at that extended video of that
almost cabinet-like meeting, where he did show himself in
command.
He showed himself listening and you can really see exactly how
the process works.
You have a principal in charge of the meeting,
then you have members of Congress.
You all get about maybe a minute to make a comment.
But you saw an attempt try and find areas of agreement,
which is how you actually accomplish things.
- Let's just back to the other for a moment.
You call it unfortunate, but do you condemn it?
- Yes.
And, again, the best thing he can do is admit it,
apologize it and move on.
Truthfully, it's going to be helpful to have the president
involved in this, but this is Congress's responsibility.
We have got to pass legislation to fix the dreamer problem,
but also to fix our broken legal immigration system as well.
I think we have a great opportunity.
I think the vast majority of Americans,
I think the vast majority of members of congress want to fix
the dreamer issue, but also want to secure our border,
want to have a legal immigration system that makes sense,
where we can start limiting the abuse of chain migration,
the diversity lottery that through the combination our last
two terrorist attacks have been perpetrated by people who came
to this country in some way shape or form that way.
So again, there's common sense approaches I think the American
people would support.
We need to get back on that and pass the legislation.
- How does all of what's blowing up right now affect the
possible passage of any of that?
- It shouldn't affect it at all because what President
Obama-- er, President Trump said a couple days ago was he will
sign what we put on his desk.
It's incumbent upon us, senators,
house members to come up to that agreement.
We're going to have to hash it out between ourselves.
- There was an agreement, a bipartisan agreement that was
presented to him, and this was the result.
- But again, that was with a small group.
You know, this was the exact same thing in 2013.
I was totally supportive of what the Gang of Eight was doing,
but my counsel to them at that same time was work with the
House, get the House to pass immigration reform first because
in this case it was the higher hurdle.
You kind of have to--
when you're looking at a piece of legislation,
where's the choke point?
What is the higher hurdle?
In this case I think it's going to be the House.
So let's be working with our house colleagues.
There's another effort with John Cornyn and Steny Hoyer and Dick
Durbin, trying to think of the other person involved.
But there's about four of them that are also working.
I'm trying to work with all the groups quite honestly.
I'm Chairman of Homeland Security,
certainly involved in border security issues,
as well as the immigration laws as well.
So this is a strong attempt by a number of members of Congress
including myself to get this thing actually accomplished.
- I heard Dick Durbin say this morning that he would take this
package that was presented in the Oval Office and introduce it
in the Senate.
How would you vote on that?
- I still don't know the details of their specific
package.
I think an awful lot of the elements are quite good in there.
To a certain extent addresses some of the chain migration issues.
But I want to see the details because it is --
the devils really are in the details of this.
But from my standpoint, we have got to start closing the
loopholes created by bad law, bad legal precedent that
incentivize people to come to this country illegally.
We have to limit chain migration to a common sense level.
Right now Frederica, we let about 1.1 million people in this
country legally in terms of permanent,
legal residence every year.
65% of that is some kind of chain migration.
22% is diversity lottery.
Asylum refugees.
Only about 14%, 15% has anything to do with work.
That is a crazy system, when you have literally millions,
probably hundreds of millions of people
want to come to this country.
We can't assimilate all those people.
We've got to limit.
We've got to limit it on a merit-based system.
We've got to fix our system.
- What's regarded or called chain migration is not allowing
citizenship based on being sponsored by one's children.
I heard Dick Durbin say that that language, chain migration,
is super offensive because it hearkens back to --
- It's what people use.
It's not meant to be offensive.
It's just describing something that allows an immigrant to
allow in their parents, their children.
But what ends up happening is it does chain,
where those people then can bring in their children,
their parents.
All of a sudden one individual and you've got cousins and adult
children, adult siblings.
That's what we need to limit to something
that just makes common sense.
- I want to just go back one more time to the president and
his comments and ask you whether or not you believe that those
were racist utterances on his part?
- I don't want to put labels on things.
It's just completely inappropriate and he should
apologize for it.
- All right.
I know that you have worked a lot on the opioid problem,
and the president this week, just yesterday or Wednesday --
- I was in the signing ceremony.
- That's right.
Didn't the president there say something about how he has the
answer to fix this problem?
- I don't know what he was talking about there.
But again there's a good example of a very bipartisan effort,
finding an area of agreement.
We all agreed that this opioid problem is a huge problem.
This particular bill, INTERDICT Act,
authorized and then funded detection devices for fentanyl,
which is really becoming dangerous.
President Trump before he signed it,
allowed every member of Congress in there,
I think at least four or five Democrat Senators,
Democrat House members, Republicans there,
all asked us to make comment.
And it really was a very good example of how you accomplish
things like you do in the business world.
You tenaciously pursue areas of agreement.
The problem in politics all too often people exploit areas of
division.
I'm trying to find those areas of agreement.
- All right. We need to leave it there.
Senator Ron Johnson, thanks very much.
- Have a good day.