Melvin Watt: “My colleague from Texas (Mr. Smith) would have us believe that this is about fraud. It is not. Regardless of how many…”

“My colleague from Texas (Mr. Smith) would have us believe that this is about fraud. It is not. Regardless of how many people come in having been imported into our country as slaves or as sex objects, there still has to be an application to stay, and that application has to be evaluated, so the fraud is taken out in that context. It may be that if the gentleman is worried about fraud, it would be 4,000 in the first 5,000 who have engaged in some fraudulent activity. That is not the issue here. The issue is would we send a woman or child who has been sexually abused and put into slavery in this country back into another country where that kind of activity was going on, so whether the victim is the 499th or the 4,099th, or the 515th or the 5,015th should not be the issue. The issue is what should our policy be, and we should open our arms to these people. Mr. Speaker, I keep hearing these estimates and the statement that there was some bipartisan agreement. Let me be clear that there was no bipartisan agreement about this number.”