Sen. John McCain Discusses Senate Moving Past Border Security Debate

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) called the Senate vote on a motion to end debate around the immigration bill amendment that increases funding for border security an "important hurdle" to get over Tuesday morning on CNBC's Squawk Box. The vote on the amendment passed 67-27, needing 60 votes to proceed, moving the legislation a bit closer to getting out of the Senate and into the House of Representatives. A total of fifteen Republicans joined Democrats in the vote to support of the motion. "I remain guardedly optimistic that eventually we will have this done. The status quo is, at least one thing everyone agrees on, I think, is the status quo is unacceptable," said McCain. "[We] have eleven million people living in the shadows and they're not going to self-deport." While many expect the bill to pass in the Senate, the House of Representatives is a different story. McCain said it would be a "tough slog" to pass the bill in the House. McCain offered calling on friends in the business community to help move the process along with House members unwilling to budge on their positions, saying that "the business community is very important with a lot of these members." He hopes that the bill will include a pathway to citizenship, but McCain said it may not. "If it doesn't, then we've ignored the lessons of some European countries, who've, you know, who've had mass immigration from other countries, and they live in their own conclaves and they don't assimilate," said McCain. "The greatness of America is the assimilation of wave after wave of immigrants that's come to this country, which has made us the greatest nation in the world." The bill was put together by a bipartisan group of senators called the Gang of Eight, of which McCain is one. It would allow the 11 million unauthorized immigrants in the United States to apply for citizenship, while increasing funding to better secure the Southwest border. It would also require businesses to crosscheck a federal database to know the immigration status of their new employees among other things.