EDINBURG, Texas - According to U.S. Sen John Cornyn, tens of hundreds of border crossers fly into Mexicali Airport in Baja California and then take an Uber to the nearest Border Patrol station to claim asylum.
Cornyn said he learned about this from visiting with the Border Patrol chief in Yuma, Arizona. Cornyn spoke about border security at a luncheon hosted by the RGV Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. The event was held at the Edinburg Conference Center at Renaissance.
“Recently, I went to the Yuma Border Patrol sector, which is in a sleepy little Ag community in southwest Arizona with some of my colleagues, Democrats and Republicans. The acting Border Patrol chief said to us, ‘Welcome to the Yuma sector. We encountered people from 147 different countries, speaking more than 200 languages last year.’
“And we thought, how in the world could that possibly be true? So Mark Kelly, one of the senators from Arizona, pointed out that Mexicali is a city in northern Mexico with an airport and that literally people are flying in there. And then Uber-ing over to the Border Patrol and turning themselves in and claiming asylum.”
Cornyn participated in a Q&A during the luncheon, with questions posed by Julian Alvarez, senior vice president of business development for Lone Star National Bank. One of Alvarez’s five questions was about border security.
“Let me say very clearly, legal immigration, has been a blessing to our country. It has been a blessing, an unequivocal blessing. It has helped us allow the best and brightest, the hardest working people in the world to come to our country and seek a better life,” Cornyn said.
However, undocumented immigration is out of control, Cornyn opined.
“The cartels, these organizations continue to get rich as more and more people come across the border. The last few years, there has been roughly seven million people come across the border. That includes one and a half million what the Border Patrol calls ‘got-aways.’ And we know that they're probably not up to a lot of good if they're evading law enforcement,” Cornyn said.
“My strong belief Julian, and is that despite the great efforts being done by our Border Patrol and CBP, DPS, and others, that we are fighting a losing battle. And we're going to continue to see more and more people coming across.”
Cornyn offered a solution to stem the flow of undocumented immigrants.
“We need to say, number one, that if you transit, a safe third country, you don't you can't qualify for asylum in the United States. You may recall, I think it was last year, 15,000 Haitians showed up in Del Rio, Texas, a little town of 35,000 people. Can you imagine, in any one of the cities around here, 15,000 people show up and say, ‘Here I am, I'm ready to come into the interior of the country.’ But, of course, they've been living in South America for the previous few years. A perfectly safe environment and certainly not like Haiti. So that's an example of the kinds of things that I think we could do.”
Cornyn received applause from the audience when he said the US-Mexico border could not and should not be closed.
“So , one of the reasons why I have invited a number of my colleagues to come to the Valley and to the border, in particular, is because you hear some pretty crazy things, when people talk about the border. Occasionally I'll hear senators from other states say, we need to seal the border. Well, I always ask them, do you know how many jobs are created in the United States based on binational trade with Mexico?” Cornyn said, to applause.
“And then I hear some people say, well, you need to build the wall. Well, okay. You know, I've learned from the experts, which are the Border Patrol that this is a three-legged stool. It's technology, it’s people, and, yes, in some hard-to-control locations. it's infrastructure. Something we used to call a fence that was supported on a bipartisan basis. Now everybody calls it a wall. But you can't just put up a piece of infrastructure and expect the the border to be safe or (to be able to) control the flow of people and drugs coming into the country.”
