Diane Black appeared on Fox Business’ After the Bell with Melissa Francis Monday to discuss the ongoing immigration reform negotiations.
As an introduction to the segment, Francis aired Nancy Pelosi’s recent claim that President Trump’s ‘America First’ immigration framework is a ploy the “make America white again.”
Francis asked, “You know, I always wonder: Does it impact the negotiation when politicians go out to the camera and say things like that, or do you understand that she’s sort of talking to her base, and everybody has this rhetoric, and when you come back together, it’s like that didn’t happen. What’s it really like behind closed doors?”
Black replied, “I’m just going to tell you my experience with Ms. Pelosi, and that is that she has a pretty good heavy hand with her own conference. But I know behind the scenes, with having dealt with her own members, that they are not all in agreement with her. And I think they are getting worn out with the kind of political partisanship that she just spews all over the place. Most people that are rational people here willing to sit down and talk about this issue of DACA and of securing our borders.”
The Republican gubernatorial candidate continued.
“The first thing for me is, absolutely, the safety of our country and securing our borders,” Black said. “And so, we’ve got to do that first and come to a consensus on what that means as far as dollars go. And then I think we can talk about other things like the visa lottery program and other pieces of this, the chain migration.
Francis responded, “Yes. I also think that if you watch President Trump’s negotiating style, one of the things that he does is give the other side what they’ve been asking for out of the gate, and it sort of throws them off-balance, because then, what do they have to complain about? And that was kind of what happened here.”
The FoxNews host continued:
They were screaming ‘DACA, DACA, DACA,’ so he gave even bigger on DACA. You remember the the original number was, like, 700,000, and he’s like, ‘You know what, I’m going to push it up to include their family, too; we’ll go for almost 2 million,’ and it’s sort of like Democrats didn’t know what to battle back against, so they kind of started yelling about the rest of it, that it’s ‘on the back of everyone else.’ It’s a different kind of negotiating technique that they’re not used to.
“What are your thoughts on that?” Francis asked.
“Well pardon the old phrase, ‘egg on your face,’ but I think you’re exactly right,” Black responded, adding:
The President even opened up the doors to the media, to come in and see that he is sitting at the table and he wants to speak in a bipartisan way pf how we can get this resolved.
But at the top of that list is security, and we work down from there. I will tell you frankly that the pieces that he’s put on there with DACA are not what we had originally heard from the President, and so there are a number of us conservatives that are not on board with him there at this point in time.
We believe that perhaps there should be, yes, a legal status [for DACA] but a path to citizenship would be something that would be more difficult for us because that is not what was talked about. But this is all a negotiation an we’re going to hear what the President has to say, first of all, and then we’re going to sit down and talk about it.
“That’s what we should be doing rather than having – as Nancy Pelosi does – this venomous talk that goes out there and just gets everybody upset. And as I say, even her own members are not happy with her about that,” Black concluded.
