President Donald Trump's comments on Haiti and African countries were not "constructive at all," but it's not fair to draw conclusions about the president that he did not intend, Sen. Rand Paul said Sunday, while commenting that he knows personally that Trump is not biased against Haiti.
"I know personally about his feelings towards Haiti and towards Central America because when I was not a candidate for president and he wasn't a candidate for president, I went down there on a medical mission trip," the Kentucky Republican, an ophthalmologist who often travels to other countries to provide eye surgeries, told NBC "Meet the Press" anchor Chuck Todd.
"When we asked Donald J. Trump as a private citizen to support those trips, he was a large financial backer of both medical mission trips," Paul told Todd. "I know for a fact that he cares very deeply about the people in Haiti, because he helped finance a trip where we were able to get vision back for 200 people," said Paul.
Paul said he does think people jumped "a little bit to a conclusion," when they had heard Trump had said he'd rather see people coming into the United States from places like Norway, rather than Haiti or Africa.
"Let's take the whole scenario and put different words in there and let's say, "We'd rather have people from economically-prosperous countries than economically-deprived countries," or, "We realize that there are more problems in economically-deprived countries, therefore there's a bigger impetus for them to want to come," said Paul. "Then it wouldn't have been so controversial."
The senator added that wants to see an immigration compromise, but that won't happen "if everybody's out there calling the president a racist...both sides now are destroying the setting in which anything meaningful can happen on immigration."
On Sunday in a tweet, Trump called for people to come into the country through a system based on merit, but Paul said merit should also consider people who are willing to work, not just those who are already highly educated.
"We also need people to pick tomatoes and who will work in the agricultural sector, and there's merit to that also,"said Paul. "If you come here and you're not going to work, you have no merit."
Meanwhile, Paul told Todd that he can support a compromise on DACA, and he's been offering one to the Democrats for six months, but has been rejected.
"My compromise all along was, those who are here, the kids that came here or their parents brought them here illegally, we could internally immigrate them, but just count them against the normal totals," said Paul. "But the Democrats have sort of sniffed at that and said, "Oh no, we want just, you know, our dreamer act without anything."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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