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U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) joined The Sean Hannity Show to discuss the mass migration crisis, the various factors that caused it, and more. Listen here and see the transcript below. 

On the biggest issues facing the country:

“I think we’ve got these major issues that play out over time. The debt is one of them. It’s just unsustainable. Everybody tells you that. Everybody knows it. It’s one of those things that we keep kicking the can down the road on, and we’re not going to be able to do that much longer. Interestingly enough, China is kind of facing the same thing now, too. 

“But if you went out there today and talked to people, two things [would stand out]. Number one is, life is just way more expensive. I don’t care what Biden says. For everyday people, the stuff that we need, the necessities—housing, food, you name it—are more expensive. The other is, we’re being invaded. I don’t know any other way to describe what is happening at our southern border. What’s frustrating about it is that it’s not just being tolerated; it was encouraged. 

“It was our hope that as part of this debate on spending money on Ukraine, we would be able to do something real when it came to the border. The administration doesn’t need a law to do that. It doesn’t look like that’s going to happen. Even though we keep fighting, it looks like we in the Senate at least just walked away from any chance of doing anything. People don’t understand it. They just don’t understand how we could spend three or four days here on that and not deal with our own invasion.”

On the Biden Administration’s failures that caused the immigration crisis:

“The reason why we have an illegal immigration deluge has nothing to do with a broken system. It’s because they’re not applying the law. Joe Biden is the first president in American history who made the decision to release virtually every single adult that comes here illegally across the border. It’s never happened before in our history. Not even Obama did that. 

“On his first day in office, Biden put a 100-day moratorium on deportation. He told everybody throughout the campaign he would, and as the president did within the first month, reverse all the Trump immigration policies. That included not detaining people. Immigration is a complex area of law, but some aspects of it are not difficult to understand. The law details who’s allowed to be in our country, and it says, if you’re here, and you’re not allowed to be here, you’re supposed to be detained until you’re removed. 

“There have been some very narrow exceptions that throughout our history have been applied on a case-by-case basis. He basically took the exception and made it the rule. They’ve released people, and so, more people come. That’s why this happened. It’s not going to get better. It’s going to get worse. Now, we’re seeing a crime wave. And I think something worse is going to happen.”

On the national security threat caused by America’s open borders:

“Use common sense. Do we not think that ISIS, al-Qaeda, virtually every terrorist group, Hezbollah, Hamas: do we not think that these people are aware that the largest, biggest, most successful smuggling operation in the history of the world is operating, right now, off the southern border of the United States? Do we think that they don’t realize this? Common sense tells you that if they wanted to get terrorists inside the United States, and they do, they would use that. They would use that system. 

“They claim they vet [the migrants]. Let’s suppose they did vet them. There are at least 12 countries in the Western Hemisphere where, if you have enough money, you can buy documents and passports with fake identities, claiming to be someone you’re not. We know this. So I think we have to assume, unfortunately, and I really do hope I’m wrong, that it is just a matter of time before something really bad happens. When it does, people are going to look at all these people up here in Congress and say, why didn’t you do anything about it? And the answer is going to be, we were here through Super Bowl weekend, and it was all about stuff that’s happening around the world.

“I do think we have to be involved in [these things around the world]. I think most Americans are not on Putin’s side. But I think they ask themselves, how can we help another country with their own invasion and not help our own country with our invasion? We can’t be strong for other countries when we’re weak.”

On the poorly constructed Senate immigration bill:  

“Immigration law can be tricky, because one word in a sentence changes the whole meaning of the thing. One of the things they did is create an asylum corps, basically thousands of new asylum officers—not judges, officers—who at the border would have the power to basically either grant an immediate work permit and allow into the country those who showed up at the border, or they would actually even have the power to grant them asylum right there and then on the spot. 

“I interviewed yesterday with Jake Tapper on CNN, who’s always been fair to me, but he says there’s no pathway to citizenship in this bill. But that’s what asylum is. Most people don’t realize this: asylum is a pathway to citizenship. If you are granted asylum, you are basically granted a green card. In five years, and the time under asylum counts toward those five years, you are allowed to become a citizen and a voter, which is what Democrats want. They see a chance for one or two million new voters that are going to give them credit for allowing them into the country. 

“So, that was in that bill. The restriction on it was something called the ‘convention of torture,’ which means that you can only give [asylum] to people under that international treaty [against torture]. Well, the way it’s been defined is, you can basically not deport anyone to any country where criminal gangs kidnap people, kill people, extort people, and harm people. That’s like, 105 countries in the world. That’s a huge loophole. It was right in the [bill]. It was a tricky way to achieve what they’ve always wanted. How does that make the system better? It makes it far worse than what it is today.”

On Rubio’s stance regarding the ongoing immigration negotiation:

“I never asked for a bill. It bothers me when I read, ‘Republicans asked for a deal, and they rejected it.’ I didn’t ask for a bill. I said, ‘I want Biden to reverse all of the executive orders that he made, which created this crisis.’ That’s what I wanted to see. And if [Biden] did that, then we would move forward and pass this bill, but he didn’t do that. But then they proposed a bill. And there are some things in there that change the asylum standard. Good. We should do that. It’s not going to change this migration problem, but it’s an important thing we should do. But they give us this asylum core, which is going to be able to give people either asylum or an immediate work permit, not even the six-month wait that’s going on now. 

“By the way, hundreds of millions of dollars [are going] to all these sanctuary cities to help them with the costs of inviting all these people into our country, and now they’re crying about the cost that it’s inflicting on their communities. So they’re taking money away from taxpayers’ services to provide people with housing and the like. I don’t know if you saw the crybaby mayor of Denver saying that the only people that were not to blame here were the migrants themselves. It’s hypocrisy. Why are we bailing out sanctuary cities?”

On the Hur report investigating President Biden: 

“Here’s the really interesting thing about it. What the report basically said is, a crime was committed. All the elements of a crime are here. The only reason we’re not going to prosecute it is because we don’t think that a jury will convict a man who is clearly suffering from age-related dementia. So, in essence, he was not cleared. It basically just said, ‘This is why we can’t take this case to trial.’ So, ask yourself one of two things. If, in fact, the president’s argument is that he doesn’t have age-related dementia, what they’re basically arguing is, he should have been charged.”

On Biden’s and Trump’s mishandling of classified documents:

“There’s a lot of hypocrisy embedded in this. They used prosecutorial discretion not to pursue the issue of Joe Biden because of the dementia issues that I’ve mentioned. But they chose to go after Donald Trump even though there’s no harm alleged. In essence, no one’s alleging that somehow the stuff was provided to a foreign power. Now, the country’s been deeply divided. Confidence in our judicial system has been undermined. 

“You saw the boxes in Joe Biden’s garage just thrown around messily. He was a private citizen at that point. I’m not excusing [Trump]. I don’t think these documents should have been anywhere outside of where they should have been. But at least in Mar-A-Lago, they had Secret Service agents, and they had locks on the doors, and they had cameras everywhere. With Joe Biden, anybody could have stolen those things, just walked into his garage and taken them.”