Political Quotes

“I thank the gentleman for yielding. Madam Speaker, today we have heard impassioned arguments from House Democrats about the need to gather better data on the American population. In fact, the majority leader just said: Obviously, we take information to better provide services to Americans. That is what he said. As required by the Constitution, the decennial Census is carried out every 10 years to conduct an actual enumeration ``in such manner as Congress shall by law direct.'' It is well past time--it is well past time that Congress, again, directs the Census Bureau to collect data on the citizenship of respondents. I realize that many of my colleagues do not believe that there is a crisis on our southern border. But just last month, CBP had 239,416 encounters along the southern border. And what that means is every encounter is either a surrender or an arrest of somebody who is illegally in the country. Of those, 25 percent involved an individual who had at least one prior encounter in the previous 12 months. This does not include the number of known and unknown getaways which, last year, are estimated to have been a million individuals we don't know anything about. So whether someone is a U.S. citizen is an important data point that should be recorded in the Census and on other Federal data surveys. If we are going to get information, as the majority leader said, this should be in that panoply of information.…”