Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Gov. Jay Inslee (D-WA) said “a lot” of the immigrants crossing the U.S. -Mexico border are “climate refugees.”
When asked about President Donald Trump’s proposal to move immigrants to sanctuary cities, Inslee said, “This is yet another bombastic chaos that is simply not going to work for this ineffective president for several reasons. Number one, you can’t threaten somebody with something they are not afraid of. We are not afraid of diversity in the state of Washington. We relish it. It is the basis of our economic and cultural success. We are built as a state of immigrants. We have welcomed refugees as we did the Vietnamese refugees with the Republican governor back in the day, and we continue to welcome—that’s why I was the first governor to say our state was the first to take Syrian refugees.”
When asked how he would solve immigration issues, Inslee said, “Number one, I would attack climate change because a lot of these people are climate refugees. Not all, but a lot of them. The fact that Donald Trump has waved the white surrender to climate change is wrong.”
He added, “It’s clear we have to be solution based rather than sort of trolling on the internet based. If you are solution-based, we have got to make the asylum process work. And that means we have to have more channels, more hearing officers to simply be able to process these cases. Look, you don’t change the law just because you got more cases in the federal court system or go get rid of judges as he suggested. We need more processing fas facilities to help these folks. While they are waiting for hearings, we welcome them to the state of Washington because we have found these folks frequently become pillars of our community.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
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