Gregorio Sablan: “I thank my friend from the great State of New York and the great city of New York for inviting me to speak on the need…”

“I thank my friend from the great State of New York and the great city of New York for inviting me to speak on the need for comprehensive immigration reform for our Nation as a whole and, specifically, about how the broken immigration system hurts people I represent in the Mariana Islands. In 2013, the Senate passed a comprehensive immigration reform bill, with Republicans and Democrats voting together, that would have gone a long way to fixing immigration. The bill gave people who came here illegally but are now contributing to the economic prosperity of all Americans a way to come out of the shadows, and it provided for substantial improvements in border security--just what the President says he wants. The Republican-led House decided not to take the path the Senate had courageously shown us in 2013, but I hope that, in this 116th Congress, we can dust off that comprehensive immigration reform bill and breathe new life into it. Because our immigration problems still need fixing, we have a solution, ready-made, that already passed the Senate with Republican and Democratic votes. I worked with the Gang of Eight in the Senate who drafted that legislation. I was able to include a section that dealt with groups of people in the Mariana Islands who fell through the cracks when Congress extended U.S. immigration law to my islands in 2008. Let me begin by saying that none of the people I wanted to help came into our country illegally or stayed illegally.…”