US President Donald Trump addressed the American people in a live broadcast on Saturday morning regarding the "badly broken immigration system" in the US.
Trump's insistence to build a wall alongside the US-Mexico border and Democrats refusal to approve funding for it has led to the longest running Federal shutdown in American history.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 19, 2019
In his speech, Trump stressed that the American concept of citizenship makes no distinctions among races or faiths provided those who wish to become Americans do so legally. He went on to say that the current immigration system is "badly broken" and that there's a "crises on our southern border."
Trump went on to describe how, in his words, criminals and drug-lords enter the US illegally and spread "everywhere in our country."He described mothers who provide their daughters with birth control pills during their journey north because they know their daughters will face sexual assault and stated that each year 70,000 Americans die due to drug-related issues.
His proposal includes providing asylum seekers with a path to claim asylum in their own countries, extending the rights of 300,000 immigrants who were brought into the US illegally by their parents to remain in the US, and building transparent steel barriers in strategic locations across the southern US border.
"Walls are not immoral," Trump said and claimed the goal is not, and never was, to build a wall from sea to sea as the current border is composed of natural elements such as rivers and mountains that already make illegal immigration to the US difficult.
Trump also said that the new proposal includes elements that, at one time or the other, were supported by Democrats as well and that "this is a common sense compromise."