Political Quotes

“I thank the gentleman from Minnesota. With due respect, it is really the American people who have kept the fire under this issue. The American people do not want Congress to continue to ignore our broken immigration system. What would ignoring immigration do? What if we just said we're not going to deal with it, you know, that there's too much to work on? We've got, you know, health care. We've got energy. Why bother doing immigration? You know what? Failure to act on immigration reform will mean that we will likely have twice as many illegal immigrants in 10 years than we have now--twice as many. Instead of 10 or 12 million, we could be talking about 20 or 25 million. The longer we wait, the bigger the problem gets. The goal of immigration reform needs to be to eliminate--to bring to zero--illegal immigration. If immigrants who have been living in our country illegally want to become taxpaying American citizens, they need to pass a background check, pay extra taxes, work towards citizenship, learn English, register. We need immigration reform that is both principled and pragmatic. We in this country have the right to decide who lives in our country and who doesn't, but we haven't been exercising that right. We've been allowing millions of people to live here without knowing who they are or what they are doing. Yet we continue to refuse to take action, and we do so at our own peril.”