Flashback: Biden praised ‘constant,' 'unrelenting’ stream of immigration into US

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President-elect Joe Biden, during the Obama administration, said the U.S. benefits from a “constant” and “unrelenting” stream of immigration -- and that those with white European heritage becoming a minority in the U.S. is "a source of our strength."

Biden, then the vice president, made the comments at a 2015 White House summit on “Countering Violent Extremism.” In those remarks Biden described the U.S. as a nation of immigrants and a “melting pot.”

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"It is the ultimate source of our strength, it is the ultimate source of who we are, what we become,” he told roundtable participants. “It started all the way back in the late 1700s. There has been a constant, unrelenting stream of immigration, not in little trickles but in large numbers.”

He spoke of a conversation he had with former Singapore President Lee Kuan Yew. The former president told Biden that China was looking for a metaphorical “buried black box” -- or the secret that allows “America to constantly be able to remake itself, unlike any other country in the world."

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Biden said that he believed there were two parts to that “black box” -- one was an “overwhelming skepticism for orthodoxy.”

“There is a second thing in that black box: an unrelenting stream of immigration, nonstop, nonstop,” he said.

He went on to comment about potential demographic change in the U.S.

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“Folks like me who are Caucasian, of European descent, for the first time in 2017 we’ll be in an absolute minority in the United States of America, absolute minority,” he said.

“Fewer than 50% of the people in America from then and on will be white European stock," he said. “That’s not a bad thing, that’s a source of our strength."

Biden made similar comments a year earlier, where he reportedly spoke to the National Association of Manufacturers on the need for immigration reform “from a purely economic point of view.”

According to The Hill, which reported on the comments, Biden said a key to U.S. economic strength is the “constant, unrelenting stream” of immigrants into the country.

“Not dribbling,” Biden said. “Significant flows.”

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Biden has promised to take a different, more open stance on immigration compared to the Trump administration's. Among his proposed policies are significantly raising the refugee cap, expanding the number of temporary visas, creating a “pathway to citizenship” for illegal immigrants, and eliminating the limits on employment-based visas by country.