Richard Hudson: “I appreciate my colleague pointing out some of the legislation that the Judiciary Committee has already passed because I…”

“I appreciate my colleague pointing out some of the legislation that the Judiciary Committee has already passed because I think it is important to understand that the House of Representatives is taking a different approach when it comes to immigration reform. So we passed the Border Security Results Act out of Homeland Security. We have also passed the Legal Workforce Act, which is the bill that reforms the E-Verify system, which gives us a much more workable E- Verify program, that gives our employers the certainty and the assurance that they can verify the citizenship of potential employees. The second piece of legislation that came out of the Judiciary Committee already is the Skills Visa Act. This has to do with what's called the H-1B visas. These are for your high-skilled workers. These are for folks in math, science, and technology who may come to the United States to go to university to learn these skills and get on this career path, but then they don't have a visa to stay here. Most industrialized nations in the world, 80 percent of the visas they give out are based on work skills and needs of the workforce. Here in the United States, it's about 12 percent of the visas we give out. We have a lottery to give out visas; and to me, that's ridiculous. We need to reform the system so we're giving out visas to the type of people that we want to attract to this country. So the Skills Visa Act is legislation we're considering here in the House that will do that.…”