employment & immigration Pete Buttigieg: Trump immigration approach backward

Presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg said Sunday that President Donald Trump's administration has a completely backward approach to solving the rising influx of undocumented immigrants, focusing too heavily on criminalizing migrants.

Many migrants, he said, are not coming to the United States to pursue the American dream but to flee violence in Central America.


Buttigieg said on CNN’s “State of the Union” that supporting stability in the region would be a far more sustainable solution than separating families and locking up migrants as the Trump administration has done. But, the mayor of South Bend, Ind., pointed out, the Trump administration is threatening to decrease spending in developing and improving the area.

"We've got this completely upside down," Buttigieg told CNN's Jake Tapper.

The Afghanistan veteran also said Democrats do not have a clear foreign policy, reacting too far in the wrong direction after what they see as the disaster of the Iraq War.

"We were so horrified by the wrong steps taken toward Iraq that I think some in the Democratic Party felt pushed in the direction of isolationism, which I also don't think is the right way for us to go," he said.

Buttigieg added the Trump administration is benefiting from a deteriorating situation at the Mexican border because it can be used as a political tool.

"If immigration were solved, if we had comprehensive reform, this administration could claim it as an achievement," Buttigieg said. "But it's more useful to them as a crisis unsolved than it would be as an achievement if they actually did something."