Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the famously outspoken Democratic congresswoman from New York, says she has a simple approach to fixing the immigrant crisis in the U.S.
“The answer should really be, we should make it easier to be legal, documented and citizens of the United States of America,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
Ocasio-Cortez, talking to the “The Daily Show” host Desus Nice in an interview Monday night, said the country needs to return to how things were done in previous generations when the process for becoming an American citizen was more streamlined.
“From all parts of the political spectrum, one of the big issues that we have when it comes to immigration is the fact that we have an undocumented population,” Ocasio-Cortez said on the Comedy Central show. “Now you can fix that by trying to build a wall or you can fix that by trying to document people and create a path to citizenship.”
Ocasio-Cortez acknowledged one of the biggest immigrant-related issues facing several American cities including her own — she represents a New York congressional district that spans parts of the Bronx and Brooklyn and as Nice pointed out, is one of the most diverse in the nation — that problem being overburdened migrant shelters. Ocasio-Cortez blamed that on the complex path to citizenship.
“We’ll have folks that might say, ‘Look at these systems, that our shelter system has weight and things like that,” she said. “But one of the reasons our public systems experience weight is because people don’t have a documented and reliable path to work and sustain themselves — just like all of our ancestors did and our grandparents and our great-grandparents.”
While Ocasio-Cortez did talk about how to help undocumented migrants already in the country, she not address the surge of migrants on the Mexican border looking to enter the U.S. In August, the U.S. Border Patrol apprehended 36% more migrants on the border with Mexico than it had in July of this year, a total of 181,059. That marked an 82% increase from June. According to officials, the surge has increased even further in recent weeks.
“You know, I always love when people talk about like, ‘Oh well, my grandfather came, and he wrote his name wrong in a book and now he’s a citizen,’” Ocasio-Cortez continued. “And, can we put two and two together, that our processes today are so difficult that they make our immigration process difficult? But that doesn’t mean that immigrants don’t create a positive contribution to our country and our economy and our society.”
Watch video of the full five-minute interview with Ocasio-Cortez in the video above.
