Roy Blunt: “I thank you for the time. I want to talk about the hard work my colleagues have put in on this bill. It looks as though…”

“I thank you for the time. I want to talk about the hard work my colleagues have put in on this bill. It looks as though it is going to get a number of votes today. It will not be getting mine. I think it is important, as we look at these issues, to understand that once a bill actually gets to the President's desk and gets signed into law, we are probably not going to visit this again for a long time. I think it does not put border security first or it does not address what I have more and more grown to think of as the other border, which is the hiring desk. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said the underlying Senate bill would only cut illegal immigration by 25 percent. It does not seem to me that is nearly good enough. I think the estimate was that if this bill did not pass, 10 million people would come into the country in the next 10 years. If it does pass, 7.5 million people would come into the country in the next 10 years illegally. Some of them will come across the border. A lot of them come here now legally and then they just stay. I do not see anything in this bill that does what we could be doing there. I voted against proceeding to the amendment this week, the Hoeven- Corker amendment, because I did not think it really focused--as the Cornyn amendment did that I cosponsored--on granting legal status only after we get the border secured rather than doing it before. In my view, these challenges need to be met.…”