Front runner in the race for U.S. Senate, Republican Marco Rubio, is advocating that undocumented people living in the U.S. should go back to their homeland and “try to enter” the U.S. under an immigration system that must be fixed. Rubio was responding to how he believes the U.S. illegal immigration problem should be solved, in a three-way debate with Charlie Crist and Kendrick Meek on Sunday morning.
Rubio said that he has never advocated the rounding up of illegals, but noted that, there must be a legal immigration system in the U.S. that works. He suggested that the U.S. should make its borders more secure and fix the legal system.
When pressed by one of the moderators in the debate, CNN’s Candy Crawley, as to how in fact the problem of the 12 million people living without papers in the U.S. would be solved, Rubio said that illegals should return to their homeland and try to enter through a system that must be fixed.
“And then you’ll have a legal immigration system that works and you’ll have people in this country without documents that will be able to return — will be able to leave this country, return to their homeland and try to enter through a system that now functions”, Rubio said.
In 2009, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security estimated that Florida had about 720,000 illegal immigrants.
