Elections

Rand Paul: Stop Middle Eastern Immigration Until ‘We Can Figure Out Who’s Coming, Who’s Going’ [VIDEO]

Steve Guest Media Reporter
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[crscore]Rand Paul[/crscore] called for a halt in allowing individuals from Middle Eastern countries from entering America “until we can figure out who’s coming, who’s going… because there’s a whole segment of the world that is intent on sending people here to destroy us.”

Appearing Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” with Chuck Todd, Paul argued that “people who want to come to this country don’t have constitutional rights. Once they get here they do.”

Todd, in the wake of the San Bernardino terrorist attack, asked Paul, “What would you say to the country to make them feel safer?” (RELATED: Attorney General Loretta Lynch: The ISIS Threat Is ‘Evolving’)

“I think what we’ve had in the past is the government has said, ‘We need to collect the whole haystack.’ The whole haystack is American’s privacy, every American’s privacy,” Paul explained. “We have to give up all of our privacy. Well, what I’d like to do is make the haystack smaller. So I think we have to be very careful who comes here from the Middle East. Now I’ve introduced legislation to say right now let’s stop it from about 34 countries.” (RELATED: Rand Paul Calls ‘Bulls**t’ On The Need For More Phone Surveillance)

Todd asked, “That’s a version of profiling?”

“Well, people who want to come to this country don’t have constitutional rights,” Paul insisted. “Once they get here, they do. But coming here is not a constitutional right. So we as of a nation have the ability and should have the ability to decide who can come here and when they come here. Right now, we don’t know who is here.”

“The woman that was ended up being married to this terrorist, I don’t think she was properly vetted. I think she came here and I don’t think we adequately knew enough about her and I think there’s also some indication the papers she filed to come here were a lie to begin with. So I don’t think we’re doing an adequate vetting process of those coming to our country.”

Todd asked if the visa programs for fiancés, students and tourists would be in “jeopardy” because “many terrorists that have come here and committed acts from 9/11 to this woman have come here on some form of a visa.”

Paul claimed, “Well this is where the big problem is. We have 11 million said to be in the country illegally. Forty percent of them are said to have many overstayed their visa. Do we know where they are?”

“There 150,000 students here from the Middle East, if forty percent of them have overstayed their visa, don’t we need to know who they are? What they’re doing? Are they obeying our rules? And so what I’m asking for, let’s make the haystack smaller. Let’s say for a while until we can figure out who’s coming, who’s going and who’s overstayed their visa, let’s have extra scrutiny and figure out what’s going on because there’s a whole segment of the world that is intent on sending people here to destroy us,” Paul insisted.

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