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STORY: "Elon here, I’m at Eagle Pass. I just arrived." Billionaire Elon Musk waded into the U.S. immigration debate on Thursday (September 28).While paying a visit to the Texas border with Mexico to meet with local politicians and law enforcement, Musk - a native of South Africa - said he was trying to obtain what he called an "unfiltered" view of the situation.The visit came amid an upswing of arrivals of people seeking asylum in the United States in recent days."As an immigrant to the United States, I'm extremely pro-immigrant, and I believe that we need a greatly expanded legal immigration system and that we should let anyone in the country who is hardworking and honest and will be a contributor to the United States, we should have expedited legal approval for anyone who sort of falls in that category. But then, by the same token, we should also not be allowing people in the country if they're breaking the law." Thousands of migrants have recently arrived in northern Mexico by freight trains and on buses, then crossed the border into Texas, Arizona and California.The sharp increase follows an earlier lull in unauthorized border crossings, after President Joe Biden's administration implemented a new asylum policy aimed at discouraging such activity.Musk visited Eagle Pass, where the uptick in migrants wading across the Rio Grande past coils of razor wire has been particularly notable. He called for an "expedited legal approval" as part of a "greatly expanded legal immigration system" that welcomes "hard-working and honest" migrants. "I think we want to do both things; smooth out legal immigration and then stop, you know, sort of a flow, a flow of people that is of such magnitude that is actually leading to a collapse of social services. If we don't do something soon, we're just going to have, like I said, a collapse in social services, as we're already seeing in New York.”
