Politics & Power Quote by Chris Cannon

“Top concern” is doing a lot of political work here: it frames immigration not as a policy domain with trade-offs, but as an urgent, quasi-emergency consensus item. Chris Cannon, speaking as a politician, leans on a familiar governing trick: take a messy, decades-long systems failure and narrate it as a present-tense crisis that demands immediate tightening. The phrase “for good reason” forecloses debate before it starts, inviting listeners to treat skepticism as naïveté.

The number range, “between eight and twelve million,” is strategically elastic. It signals magnitude without committing to precision, and that vagueness is a feature, not a bug: it keeps the audience focused on scale and anxiety rather than the contested methods of counting undocumented residents. Then comes the rhetorical hammer: “illegal aliens.” It’s a term engineered to harden sentiment, blending criminality (“illegal”) with estrangement (“aliens”). You’re not meant to picture neighbors, workers, or parents; you’re meant to picture a threat category. “Obviously” adds another layer of pressure, implying that the conclusion is self-evident and dissent is irrational.

Context matters: this kind of language surged in the late 1990s and 2000s, as border enforcement politics intensified and national-security framing seeped into domestic policy. The subtext isn’t merely “enforce the law.” It’s “the state is losing control,” a storyline that justifies expanded enforcement powers while sidestepping the economic demand for immigrant labor and Congress’s repeated inability to modernize legal pathways. The quote’s intent is to consolidate fear into mandate: if it’s “out of control,” then force looks like governance.