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Grassley: Immigration ‘a trickle’ before Biden
by Gregory R. Norfleet · News · March 27, 2024
During his time in the Senate, Joe Biden worked in a bipartisan manner, but U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley said that changed after Biden won the presidency.
Grassley (R), who visited the Hoover Presidential Library and Museum on Monday, said he only spoke to Biden once since the Democrat moved into the White House. Before then, the two found common ground on the Voting Rights Act, criminal justice reform, and human trafficking.
When asked about Biden, Grassley clarified that he gets along with the president but disagrees with his policies.
“If he was president like he was a senator, we wouldn’t have all this crazy stuff going on,” he said. “He seems to be very partisan now.”
Asked who he turns to as a trusted news source, Grassley suggested getting news from multiple sources to get a comprehensive picture.
He used the issue of illegal immigration on the southern border as an example.
“You look at how it was under both Republicans and Democrats before Biden opened up the border and it was just a trickle of people entering this country illegally under George W. Bush, Obama, and Trump, compared to what’s happening now,” Grassley said. “But it’s a difference of philosophy. Those presidents who had lower numbers thought we shouldn’t have an open border, thought the law says you can’t enter our country without our permission, and though the law ought to be enforced. This president doesn’t believe he can enforce it now. That’s not telling you what’s truth or not truth, that’s just a fact. They don’t want to enforce the law and that’s it.”
Speaking to the press separately, Grassley said he does not believe in an “open border.”
“I believe that the president ought to enforce the law,” he said. “We’re a very inviting nation from an immigration standpoint.”
He said about a million people come to the United States every year without breaking the law, “and we’d welcome even more of them.”
Tyson Foods recently announced that it would close its plant in Perry, Iowa, affecting about 1,200 workers. This news came out about the time that news broke that the company it would seek to hire about 52,000 immigrants seeking asylum, many of whom qualify for work authorization under the Employment Authorization Document after six months.
Grassley said the two do not seem connected, though he called closing the Perry plant a “catastrophe” for the town.
“And it’s a catastrophe for the 342 producers who sell their pigs to Tyson to process,” the senator said. “We should never have a situation where an American employee, whether he’s a citizen or a person that’s otherwise here legally, ought to be replaced by somebody who’s here illegally.”
At the public meeting, Grassley fielded several political questions, including one woman asking why neither the Republican nor Democrat parties chose older candidates for president.
The senator said it goes back to the process of primaries and caucuses.
“It’s a democracy and voters are deciding who they want,” he said. “In a democracy like ours, whether Republican or Democrat, how do you question the verdict of the ballot box and the voter making a decision?”
Grassley noted that both parties had other candidates, but the process weeded them out.
“If you think it’s bad in the Republican party, I think Democrats, and a majority of Democrats, think Biden’s too old. So you even question moreso the Democrat choice of Biden in the final analysis,” he said.
He cited a recent poll where Republicans questioned the judgment of Republican voters selecting Trump.
Grassley said that before he was elected senator, he remembers overhearing one man in a crowd saying, “it must be election time; the politicians are in town.”
“I thought to myself, that’s an awful thing to have people think about you,” he said.
That prompted him to commit to visit every county in the state every year to host a question-and-answer session with constituents.
“(That) would maybe prove to people that I’m not in your county just because I’m running for reelection,” Grassley said.
He said that since he was elected in 1981, only one time did he visit a county and no one showed up. Other visits pull in only five or six, though sometimes he will see “a thousand.”
“It depends how worked up people are,” Grassley said.
The senate is currently in recess and the senator said that come Easter he will have 67 more counties to visit this year.
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