He noted that Democrat Martin O'Malley has criticized Hillary Clinton for saying she would have sent thousands of Central American children home. Van Susteren asked Gringrich why a Democrat would advocate open borders: "Because they are nuts," Gringrich responded. "I mean, I can't give you -- in the age of ISIS, in the age when the Europeans just captured an al Qaeda leader who would come in as a Syrian refugee, I mean, I can't explain why some Democrats are so out of touch with reality that they advocate things that are by any reasonable standards suicidal." Republican Donald Trump says he would build a wall and deport 11 million illegal aliens, but Gingrich indicated that such a vast deportation plan is nutty, too: "Well, I think building the wall is clearly possible," Gringrich said.
But as for Trump's deportation plan -- "I think that's not practical at all at a very human level. Imagine the number of churches that will become sanctuaries. Imagine the number of families in which half of them are American citizens born in the U.S. And now you are going to go ahead and you're going to become the party that destroys families?" Gingrich asked. "And I think you have to look him in the eye and say, let's go down and visit the school in your neighborhood, or the church in your neighborhood, or the store in your neighborhood, Donald, where you are going to walk in and I'm going to point out the people you are going to uproot. "Now, are you really going to do that? And the truth is you are not. And grandmother, as I said in 2012, ain't going to self-deport. So you are going to have immigration police who go out and rip apart families and leave the American born half here and send the other half?
A US Border Patrol agent looks toward Tijuana, Mexico along the old border wall.
"And this is the party that believes in the family? I think once you get into that level of conversation, what people want to know is you're going to stop from coming in. You are going to control the border. You are going to find a way to make everybody legally accountable. "And over a very long period of time people might get citizenship, but they are not getting it next year. They're not going to get it in the near future. And to get it, they have to learn English and they have to learn American history at which point, frankly, they will be prepared to be Americans."
Gingrich said "the great genius of America" is that over time, "we are going to talk this through." "When you look at the impact of illegal immigration on Los Angeles today, where the number of people who are potentially available for Medicaid is extraordinary because we have tolerated this enormous wave of people who have come into the U.S. who don't have language skills, don't have very good job skills, want to work very hard but aren't prepared for the modern economy, and this is a, this is a real national problem."
Gingrich: 'Controlling the Border Is Going to Be a Real Issue' in 2016