Conservative columnist Ann Coulter and Breitbart Border and Cartel Chronicles Director Brandon Darby spoke on an immigration panel moderated by OANN host Jack Posobiec at Turning Point USA’s fifth annual Student Action Summit.

In West Palm Beach, Florida on Friday, the three discussed the various factors involving the crisis on the southern border of the United States.

“I think what people in Washington, New York, L.A., and San Francisco don’t understand is how the country is being so slammed with drugs,” said Coulter. “Ordinary, sweet little towns out in rural America — in fact, I think a lot of the people in L.A., San Francisco, New York, and Washington are happy to know that Americans out in the middle of the country are dying off of overdoses.”

Coulter added that 90 percent of the drugs coming into the U.S. are coming from the cartels operating south of the unsecured U.S. border.

“This is what Mexico does all the time — and the U.S. State Department does this all the time,” added Darby. “They’re like, ‘Look, we caught this cartel boss.'”

“The cartel boss is part of the problem, but the cartel boss is not the problem,” he explained.

There’s a cartel boss, and then around that cartel boss, there’s this circle of power. There’s politicians, bankers, financiers, lawyers, diplomats — those are the real problem. They’re very happy if you take El Chapo. They don’t care, they just replace that part of the pie. They don’t care, it’s this circle. And so, if we can’t go after the circle, if we can’t go after the people who launder the money, who give the money, who work with them, and meet with them, and give them material support, we’re never going to actually address the problem.

“And if we don’t actually address that problem, we’re never going to do anything about the immigration problem we have in this country, and we’re going to lose our country,” said Darby. “So if we want to stop that, yes, we need to change policies here — yes, we need to build the wall.”

“But all of those things are treatments for an underlying problem,” he added, “and that underlying problem is a nation that is led by paramilitary cartels south of our border. If people from El Salvador wanted to come north to work and Mexico had jobs, they would just stay in Mexico, which would be fine with me — that’s the kind of thing we have to start looking at.”

“The Democrats — a lot of them think they’re helping other places in the world by allowing everyone to come here, but they’re not helping them, they’re actually hurting those places, and they’re hurting us in the process,” said Darby.

Posobiec noted how the U.S. engages in “nation-building” in other countries but doesn’t appear to give Mexico the same attention, despite the nation being so much closer to home.

“How ridiculous is it that we’ll do these nation-building projects in Afghanistan, and Botswana, and Burundi, [but] the one where you could at least make the argument that there’s a direct benefit to the American citizens is just south of our border?” asked Posobiec.

Coulter offered her response.

“It’s like you’re reading my mind,” she said. “Whenever I see Brandon’s articles, I want to tweet them out and say, ‘You know, this is two miles from where Americans live. This is 20 miles from where Americans live, not 7,000.’ Why isn’t the media talking about it? I mean, other than Brandon Darby at Breitbart.”

“It’s very, very strange — this is happening right on our border,” continued Coulter. “It’s as if you have ISIS and al-Qaeda together, doing their beheadings and mass murders, and it’s cheek by jowl with us, with no border in between, but no, no, no, tell me what’s going on in China. Tell me what’s going on in East Timor.”

“Of course this influences us,” added Coulter of the Mexican drug cartels. “Why can’t we bring the military back and send them to Mexico?”

This portion of the panel begins at timecode 08:33 in the video above.

You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.