The U.S. immigration debate is stuck on a comforting fiction: the belief that government screening can reliably identify extremist intent before someone enters the country, Rep. Randy Fine, R-Fla., told Newsmax on Saturday.
"Vetting is a magical term. That means if you just do enough research, you can know what's going on with people. But the fact of the matter is, you cannot know what is in someone's heart, and you cannot know what is in someone's mind," Fine told "The Count."
He argued that even the most thorough background checks can't expose a hidden ideology, especially when applicants arrive from nations where radical doctrines are prevalent and records are unreliable.
"And when someone is coming from a country that practices Sharia, that calls for the death of Americans, I do not know what level of vetting will get to the bottom of the problem," he added.
President Donald Trump said Thursday his administration will "permanently pause" migration from all "Third World countries" following the death of a National Guard member in an attack near the White House.
The comments mark a further escalation of migration measures Trump has ordered since the shooting Wednesday that investigators say was carried out by an Afghan national who entered the U.S. in 2021 under a resettlement program.
Fine said the real safeguard isn't an ever-expanding checklist, it's cultural allegiance.
"The problem that we have is this, if you want to immigrate to the United States, you should share our values. You should love this country, you should want to assimilate, and you should want to add value from day one and not live off the dole," he said.
In his view, immigration should be a two-way promise: opportunity from America, commitment to America from newcomers.
But Fine contended that the system has drifted in the opposite direction.
"And the problem that we have had in our immigration system is we are letting in people who hate America want to change it, do not want to assimilate, and can't wait to get on welfare," he said.
That dynamic, Fine argued, creates both a security risk and a civic risk — importing grievance while subsidizing it.
To reverse the incentives, Fine called for limiting access to public benefits for non-citizens and for tougher removal policies.
"That's why we've got to strip all immigrant eligibility for all welfare programs. And frankly, we've just got to kick a lot of these people out of our country, send them home. Right. We're incentivizing it. And there's also no follow up," he said.
Fine's comments land amid renewed national arguments over border enforcement, asylum standards, and the threat of terror infiltration. Supporters say his stance reflects a hard reality: ideology can be camouflaged, and paperwork has limits.
Critics counter that broad-brush assumptions about origin countries risk stigmatizing law-abiding immigrants who do want to assimilate.
Fine dismissed the notion that better vetting alone can solve the problem. For him, the priority is a system that selects for loyalty, demands integration, and doesn't reward those who come to take without joining the American project.
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Solange Reyner ✉
Solange Reyner is a writer and editor for Newsmax. She has more than 15 years in the journalism industry reporting and covering news, sports and politics.
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