Former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach says the United States is a “sinking ship” when it comes to the current mass flow of illegal and legal immigration.

During an interview with SiriusXM Patriot’s Breitbart News Daily, Kobach said the country is in crisis mode in terms of soaring illegal immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border, while current legal immigration levels that admit more than 1.2 million legal immigrants every year remain the same.

Kobach said:

We’re in a sinking boat right now in terms of our actual current immigration crisis. People often use that analogy on immigration, you’ve got to plug the holes before you start bailing water. Well talking about legislation in Congress is kind of like designing a new bailing system for the distant future. [Emphasis added] We’ve got an imminent crisis right now and plugging the holes has got to address how the asylum system has been busted wide open. There are specific things that can be done without Congress that will require determined action by the president and his team. [Emphasis added]

A few actions that can be taken with the approval of Congress, Kobach said, is implementing a “Safe Third Country” agreement with Mexico which would effectively ban border crossers and migrants from arriving in the U.S. from Mexico to claim asylum.

“If we had that with Mexico, then the people fraudulently claiming asylum, or if there are a few who have legitimate asylum claims, walking through Mexico and then setting foot in America, they would not be eligible, they would have to claim asylum in Mexico, because that would be the first safe country their feet hit,” Kobach said. “If we had that, it would immediately free up the system.”

Kobach said President Trump’s administration must also stop giving out work permits to border crossers while they await their asylum hearings, which are often years down the road:

We are giving work permits to these individuals who are coming in right now … the work permits last as long as they are paroled into the United States … and then they’ll be here for six years waiting for their asylum hearing and they can work that entire time. [Emphasis added] So imagine us bringing in, in addition to the one million plus green cards, in addition to all of the H-1B, H-2B … all the different work categories. We are bringing in a rate of less than 100,000 a month additional flood of people with newly minted work visas given to them because of very poor policies, also which date to the Obama administration but are now still continuing in the Trump administration. [Emphasis added] The number of people, beyond U.S. citizens, who are coming into the workforce right now is staggering both because of our crisis at the border and because of our longstanding policies of giving so many work visas and green cards out. [Emphasis added]

Currently, as Breitbart News has reported, Border Patrol agents are apprehending nearly 100,000 border crossers and migrants every month at the southern border. Due to the lack of federal detention space and a recent expansion of the Catch and Release program, many border crossers are released into the interior of the U.S.

By the end of the year, researchers project that about half a million border crossers and illegal aliens will have successfully crossed through the southern border into the U.S., undetected by Border Patrol. This is in addition to the roughly 630,000 illegal aliens who are likely to overstay their visas by the end of the year.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.