Andy Biggs: “I thank the gentleman from Georgia. I can't help but to be struck here as I reflect on the markup that we had, as we…”

“I thank the gentleman from Georgia. I can't help but to be struck here as I reflect on the markup that we had, as we have listened to the Rules debate earlier, plus this debate. I can't help but be struck by the very notion of this is kind of what happens whenever you start moving the goalposts on what a law should be. So under the Obama Administration, deferred action was provided for children who were brought into the country by a certain date and time, through no fault of their own, and that number was about 800,000 people applied for that. Now, the estimate is somewhere in the neighborhood of an additional 1 million who might have qualified who didn't file the requisite application. And now, this particular bill, as several of my colleagues across the aisle have said, will apply to anywhere from 2.2 to 2.7 million people. You can see the number starts creeping as we go forward here, as we change laws, and we acknowledge certain ideas about what the law should be. So this actually is not about DACA. We left DACA a long time ago. And, quite frankly, there is no age limit here. So even an alien who entered the U.S. illegally 30 or 40 years ago, could be granted a green card under this bill. So we see that it has other problems as well. So then we start talking about gang members, and we say, Oh, yeah, no, no, this is really tough on gang members. But in fact, the denial provision is written so narrowly that it will almost never exclude gang members.…”