John McCain
Town Hall
Greenville, SC 01/10/08

TRANSCRIPT:
MCCAIN: "[...] Now on the issue of illegal immigration. This meeting is adjourned. My friends, I want to look you in the eye and tell you, I know what the message is. The message is, we must secure our borders. I will secure our borders. I will secure our borders! And I know how to do it. I know how to do it, I come from a border state where we have terrible problems with illegal immigration, as I'm sure you know. More people cross our border illegally than in any other state in America in the last several years. I will secure the borders first.

"And Americans have lost trust and confidence in their government because of Katrina, because of corruption and spending, etc. So they don't believe we'll do it, okay? So, I'll do it. I will have the border state governors certify that our borders are secure.

"Then we move onto the temporary worker issue, we work to address the 12 million people. Our first task, by the way, is to get rid of the two-million people that Secretary Chertoff has said have committed crimes in this country and are still in this country. They've got to be out immediately.

"I will secure the borders, but I also have to give you a little straight talk here, okay. And that is, we will address the issue in a human and compassionate fashion with others. We will secure our borders, but we have to be humane and compassionate about it. I got to look you in the eye. I'm not interested in calling a soldier in Iraq and telling him that I'm deporting his mother. But we have to secure our borders, we have to get rid of these people that are here illegally. And we have to address the rest of the issue, whether it means going back to the country they came from before they can come back. There's a lot of ways to work this out, if we can stop the demogodry and sit down and work it out, once our borders are secured, but no American will agree to, we all love Ronald Reagan. I love Ronald Reagan, but I tell ya he wasn't perfect. And a lot of Americans remember that in 1986 we passed a law where we said that we would give amnesty to a couple million people and secure the borders. Well we didn't. And no one wants to see that happen again. That's why the top priority is to secure the borders."

LABEL: JM SC 1-10 (BH#60) CAKDG- Clip C

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