WASHINGTON — Sen. Marco Rubio, one of the architects of the bipartisan immigration reform bill, urged caution Tuesday in suggesting any link between the bombs at the Boston Marathon and immigration.
Iowa Rep. Steve King suggested Tuesday that immigration reform should be put on hold in the wake of the bombings, which they might have been carried out by a foreign national.
King told National Review Online: “Some of the speculation that has come out is that yes, it was a foreign national and, speculating here, that it was potentially a person on a student visa. If that’s the case, then we need to take a look at the big picture.”
“We need to take a look at the visa-waiver program and wonder what we’re doing. If we can’t background-check people that are coming from Saudi Arabia, how do we think we are going to background check the 11 to 20 million people that are here from who knows where?” he added.
Rubio said that people should be very cautious in making such assumptions.
“We should really be very cautious about using language that links these two things in any way,” he told reporters Tuesday. “We know very little about Boston other than that it was obviously an act of terror. We don’t know who carried it out or why they carried it out, and I would caution everyone to be very careful about linking the two.”