Attempting to win over voters after polls show her support waning, GOP presidential candidate Michele Bachmann has signed a pledge stating she vows to finish the border fence at the U.S.-Mexico border.
“That will be job number one,” Bachmann said of finishing the fence. “And it will be every mile, it will be every yard, it will be every foot, it will be every inch of that border, because that portion you fail to secure is the highway into the United States.”
The pledge, which she signed Saturday, comes from an advocacy group calling itself Americans for Securing the Border (ASB), which says it is “dedicated to stopping the flow of illegal immigration and enhancing U.S. security along the US-Mexican border” by aligning itself with candidates willing to “support the construction of a date-certain, double fence across the entire US border with Mexico prior to the end of 2013.”
Bachmann was the first presidential candidate to sign the pledge, and ASB’s National Chairman Van D. Hipp said the Iowa Congresswoman is “no stranger when it comes to border security.”
She told her audience in Perry, IA that they have to have discussions about immigration, and told them that talking about it does not make the racist, adding that ‘illegal’ immigration is a drain on the American society.
And though she made claims that federal, state, and local governments incur billion dollar fees due to undocumented immigrants, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found that only “modest” fees were likely incurred by state and local governments as a result of so-called illegal immigration, though they did say there was no consensus on how to determine the cost on a national level.
