Angie Craig: “I will be brief. Obviously, Senator Sessions is on the committee and had been speaking prior to this interlude with our…”

“I will be brief. Obviously, Senator Sessions is on the committee and had been speaking prior to this interlude with our leaders. I have worked 5 years to get a piece of this bill, and I have a piece of the bill that is currently before us. At the same time, I have voted consistently to allow my colleagues who disagree to have a vote on their issues. Senator Sessions and I rarely disagree on issues. On this we disagree. He is very artful in casting certain provisions of it one way. I could argue it the opposite way. I suspect my arguments would sound nearly as logical as his. But what is important here is the final shaping of a very important piece of legislation. Controlling our borders is an absolute must that we have denied ourselves for now two decades. Everybody talks about the 1986 act. It didn't work. No, it didn't work. It didn't work because we didn't realize, at least some didn't, that we were sending a signal out that if you could get here and wait your time, some day you might become legal. You might become a citizen. We didn't realize that we put a megaphone to the world and said: Come one, come all. We also had an economy and job-creating environment in which there were jobs to be had. We didn't control the border. Again in 1996, a decade later, we attempted to tackle it again. Numbers had grown. We didn't control the border. In 1999, I began to work on the agricultural issue.…”