Political Quotes

“I come to this debate with a tremendous prejudice which is born of the fact that I am a son of immigrants and the cousin of immigrants and the nephew of immigrants and distant relative to many immigrants. One would believe at the outset that I would be supporting any measure to retain the present system of legal immigration and allow all people who want to come to our Nation to safely arrive and begin to become American citizens. That prejudice I must set aside in the greater good of our country, and as a responsible public official, which I deem myself to be, I know that the time has come that we must do something about the total number of individuals who live in our country, or who will be coming into our country. So I am willing to set that prejudice aside for the time being for the purposes of this debate, not just for the time being but for a final conclusion of a bill that will do something about the sheer weight of numbers that we have of people in this country. The other prejudice I have, I must confess, is in favor of the bill as it came out of the Committee on the Judiciary. Why am I prejudiced in favor of the bill? It does seek to do exactly what I feel must be done, namely, to corral the gigantic numbers that we can foresee as future residents of our country; to lasso that in so we can control it better is a proper policy target for the Congress of the United States.”