The candidates were pressed on the ongoing border crisis, which has seen record numbers of illegal immigrants entering the U.S. in recent years.
“Our laws are being broken every day at the southern border,” Christie said, vowing to send the National Guard to help secure the border states.
Ramaswamy declared his desire to scrap the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment birthright citizenship clause, which grants citizenship to children born in the U.S. even if their parents entered the country illegally.
“I favor ending birthright citizenship for the kids of illegal immigrants in this country,” he said. Claiming to have “actually read the 14th Amendment,” Ravaswamay said that “the kid of an illegal migrant who broke the law to come here” should not qualify as an American.
“If you come here illegally,” Scott similarly argued, “you are not [under the jurisdiction of the U.S.].”
The moderators pressed candidates on their response to crime surges in many American cities.
“We can’t be successful as a country if people aren’t even safe to live in places like Los Angeles or San Francisco,” DeSantis said. He said he and his wife met three people in California who had recently been mugged in the streets. He urged support for American police. “In Florida, we back the blue,” he said.
Haley offered similar support for the police. “You take care of those who take care of you. We have to start taking care of law enforcement,” she said. Citing insufficiently strict criminal policies, she argued: “We have to start prosecuting according to the law.”
Healthcare, education
At times the candidates seemed to struggle to stay on-topic, to the apparent exasperation of the debate’s moderators.
Asked if the Affordable Care Act — also known as Obamacare — would remain as federal healthcare policy, Pence briefly pursued a tangent about mass shootings, leading moderator Dana Perino to humorously ask: “So does that mean Obamacare is here to stay?”
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Pence subsequently vowed to return “all Obamacare funding” to U.S. states.
DeSantis, meanwhile, blamed high healthcare costs in part on the overall economic outlook. “Everything has gotten more expensive. We’ve got to address the underlying problem,” he said.
Haley vowed to radically transform the U.S. healthcare system, promising to “break” the current healthcare paradigm and “make it all transparent.” She also proposed to address current tort law governing medical lawsuits.
Circling back to his earlier criticism of electric vehicles, Burgum said: “We talk about, ‘Why do we have the most expensive health care in the world?’ It’s because the federal government got involved the same way they did with EVs.”
“Every time the federal government gets involved … things get more expensive and less competitive,” he claimed.