On the recordFebruary 5, 2024
I thank my dear friend, Representative Escobar, for yielding time to me and also for her tireless work on this incredibly important issue. Mr. Speaker, the last time Congress passed comprehensive immigration reform was in 1986. That was nearly 40 years ago--before laptop computers, before cell phones, and before the internet became available to all. In so many ways, our economy and our need for workers has changed and grown. In fact, we have a workforce shortage at all skill levels, from farm and factory workers to nurses and physicians to high-tech and other STEM workers. Even though we educate the best and the brightest of foreign students, we send them home to compete with us because there simply aren't enough visas to accommodate them. Our immigration system hasn't changed to accommodate our needs. It is hampering our economic growth. While other countries, like Canada, are encouraging immigration, we are allowing our partisan disputes to get in the way of creating a system that is in our own best interest. Even worse, we have failed to update our system to tackle the rapid growth of migrants fleeing persecution and hazardous conditions in their own countries and seeking to enter our country by claiming asylum at our southern border. As one of my hometown immigration attorneys recently wrote in our hometown newspaper, many of these people would come in other ways, seeking legal visas if we had visa categories that accommodated them.…
