Former GOP presidential candidate Ben Carson said on Sunday that Donald Trump’s stance on the deportation of illegal aliens is similar to Bill Clinton’s when he was president.
“What hypocrisy. What incredible hypocrisy,” Carson told “Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace, claiming that Trump is held to a different standard regarding his position on the illegal immigration issue.
Carson, a retired neurosurgeon who is a Trump surrogate, pointed to Clinton’s 1995 “State of the Union” speech in which he received a standing ovation after calling for the deportation of illegal aliens from the U.S.
“Go back and look at the 1995 ‘State of the Union’ address by Bill Clinton and see what he said,” Carson told Wallace.
“He says basically the same thing, but when he says it, ‘Wow!’ Great standing ovation. ‘This is a great president!’ When Trump says it, it’s ‘hate speech,'” said Carson.
In his remarks, Clinton said that Americans had a right to oppose illegal immigration. Illegal aliens take jobs from Americans and “impose burdens” on taxpayers by taking welfare benefits, he said.
“All Americans, not only in the states most heavily affected but in every place in this country, are rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country,” Clinton said during the speech. “The jobs they hold might otherwise be held by citizens or legal immigrants. The public service they use impose burdens on our taxpayers.”
‘That’s why our administration has moved aggressively to secure our borders more by hiring a record number of new border guards, by deporting twice as many criminal aliens as ever before, by cracking down on illegal hiring, by barring welfare benefits to illegal aliens,” he continued.
Clinton went on to assure Congress that in his forthcoming budget proposal he would “try to do more to speed the deportation of illegal aliens who are arrested for crimes, to better identify illegal aliens in the workplace as recommended by the commission headed by former Congresswoman Barbara Jordan.”
Jordan, a black Democrat from Texas, was a staunch opponent of illegal immigration. From 1994 until her death two years later, she chaired the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform. The group sought more restrictions on immigration and called for deportation of illegal aliens and more penalties for employers who employed illegal aliens.
Clinton ended his remarks on illegal immigration to a standing ovation from lawmakers, saying:
We are a nation of immigrants. But we are also a nation of laws. It is wrong and ultimately self-defeating for a nation of immigrants to permit the kind of abuse of our immigration laws we have seen in recent years, and we must do more to stop it.
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