Angie Craig: “I do have to stand in opposition to the Vitter amendment and hope my colleagues will oppose it. We are all finding out…”

“I do have to stand in opposition to the Vitter amendment and hope my colleagues will oppose it. We are all finding out that what we are attempting to do is phenomenally complicated, with all the different kinds of categories of work status and reality that we as the Senate and the American people are awakening to. There is one reality. We have a lot of undocumented foreign nationals in our country. By definition, they are illegal. Some--and many--have been here 5 and 6 years or more or less. They are law abiding. They are hard working. They have not violated the laws, other than they walked across the border. And they did violate a law when they did that. Earned adjustment is an attempt to bring some reality to this by saying, if you have been here and you worked a while, then you can stay and work: You will pay a fine, you will have a background check, but we will provide you with a legal status to stay and to work--not citizenship. If you want citizenship, you go to the back of the line and you qualify. But we are talking about a legal work status. Some call that amnesty. I call it earned adjustment because we are beginning to find out who is here, why they are here. There is a background check. Are they legal in the sense, did they violate laws, other than walking across the border? And I do not mean to take that lightly. The Vitter amendment wipes out all of that. It wipes out the work of the committee.…”