Des Moines, IA — Marco Rubio dismissed Donald Trump’s immigration plan today as not feasible, and said he disagreed with the billionaire about ending birthright citizenship.
“I’m open to doing things that prevent people who deliberately come to the U.S. for the purposes of taking advantage of the 14th Amendment, but I’m not in favor of repealing it,” Rubio told reporters at the Iowa State Fair Tuesday morning. “I haven’t read his plans, I’ve only read press accounts on some of them. But obviously there’s some ideas that have merit, but the majority of it is really not a workable plan that could ever pass Congress.”
Rubio also said Trump’s plan to deport all the illegal immigrants already in the country was unrealistic.
“We have 12 or 13 million human beings that have been here for a long time. And there is really no, there’s not really a realistic way of rounding up and deporting 12 or 13 million people and our nation wouldn’t want to do that anyway,” Rubio said.
Rubio, who was a co-sponsor of the failed “Gang of Eight” immigration overhaul two years ago, said changes to the immigration system would have to happen incrementally.
“We’re not going to be able to do it in one big piece of legislation,” he said. “I mean, we learned that two years ago the last time we tried.”