Former US president and Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on Friday vowed illegal immigration and let people come inside the country legally, a move that would help communities like Indian-Americans, a significant majority of whom have entered the US through legal processes like H-1B visas.
"I will end the illegal immigration crisis by closing our border and finishing the wall, most of which I've already built," Trump told his cheering supporters at the Republican National Convention wherein he accepted to be the party's presidential candidate for the November 5th general elections.
"I think everybody as a Republican, as a patriot in this room, and most Democrats, we want people to come into our country, but they have to come into our country legally. Legally. Less than four years ago, I handed this administration the strongest border in American history," he said.
Under the Trump administration, he said, "If you came in illegally, you were apprehended immediately and you were deported. You went right back. The current administration terminated every single one of those great Trump policies that I put in place to seal the border. I wanted to seal the border."
"Again, come in, but come in legally. You know how unfair it is? So many people, hundreds of thousands of people, have been working for years to come into our country. And now, they see these people pour into our country at unprecedented levels. So unfair. And we're not going to do it. We're not going to stand for it. They suspended wall construction," Trump said.
Illegal immigration, he said, has resulted in crime, corruption and inflation.
"Today, our cities are flooded with illegal aliens. Americans are being squeezed out of the labour force, and their jobs are taken. You know who's taking the jobs, the jobs that are created? 107 percent of those jobs are taken by illegal aliens. And you know who's being hurt the most by millions of people pouring into our country? The Black population and the Hispanic population because they're taking the jobs from our Black population, our Hispanic population, and they're also taking them from unions," he said.
Describing it as an illegal immigration crisis, Trump said: "It's a massive invasion at our southern border that has spread misery, crime, poverty, disease, and destruction to communities all across our land. Nobody's ever seen anything like it. Then there's an international crisis, which the world has seldom been part of. Nobody can believe what's happening."
