Rubio: ‘You Can’t Come Here As a Refugee If We Can’t Vet You,’ And We Can’t Vet ‘Most’ Syrians

Florida Senator and Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio stated, “What we’re saying is, you can’t come here as a refugee if we can’t vet you. And all I’ve said is we are not going to be able to vet most of these people” on Monday’s “Hannity” on the Fox News Channel.

Rubio stated, “it’s not that America is saying we don’t want any refugees. What we’re saying is, you can’t come here as a refugee if we can’t vet you. And all I’ve said is we are not going to be able to vet most of these people. Now, common sense still applies. If it’s a 6-year-old orphan, if it’s a 90-year-old senior citizen, if it’s a Chaldean priest from the Middle East, you can vet people like that, I mean that’s common sense. But someone we know nothing, there is no database. I don’t care how many databases they run these names against, there is no reliable database for to use, to vet thousands coming from an unstable part of the world, and where documents are often forged. And that’s the point we’ve made repeatedly, is we know that this — we know for a fact that ISIS is seeking to use the refugee crisis as a way to infiltrate fighters into foreign countries. How could we possibly ignore that?” Rubio also said that the admission of refugees who aren’t dangerous is one that you have to 100% right on, and that agency heads could not personally attest that the refugees can’t be guaranteed to be safe.

Earlier, Rubio said, “you just ran clips from Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama that just boil my blood. No one — who is saying that we’re at war with Muslims? No one is saying that we’re at war with an entire religion. We’re helping the Kurds. They’re Muslims. We’re trying to empower Sunnis on the ground to defeat ISIS. They’re Muslims. We work very closely with Jordan and Egypt. They’re Muslims. We are at war with radical jihadists who are motivated by their interpretation of Islam, and by the way, they consider Sunnis that don’t agree with them as heretics. They consider all Shia as heretics. They consider, obviously, Christians and Jews as heretics. We are in a civilizational struggle between these radical lunatics, who are motivated by their interpretation of their faith, and our values of liberty and freedom and the opportunity for all.”

He added, “the Egyptian military, is someone we need to be working more closely with. They’re a key part of the Camp David Accord security arrangements. They’re Muslim. And they’re — they say that these guys are radical Islamists, because that is what they are. And it is important to identify who they are and what they’re motivated by, because if you don’t know what — if you’re not going to acknowledge what motivates your adversary, then you can’t come up with a strategy to defeat them. They are not motivated by wanting to govern Syria and Iraq, they want to dominate the world.”

Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett