Joe Wilson: “I find parts of this amendment to be difficult to understand, at least in the real world and the way the laboratories…”

“I find parts of this amendment to be difficult to understand, at least in the real world and the way the laboratories operate. Sandia National Laboratory in my district is a multi-program laboratory. Yes, it does nuclear defense work, but it also does a whole lot of other things. This amendment would prohibit foreign visitors from sensitive countries to any facility on Sandia National Laboratories, and the only exceptions are for when it is necessary for national security. This means we are no longer going to have any foreign visits that deal with the solar energy farm or the micromachines program or nuclear fusion or semiconductors or lithography, or a whole range of scientific developments arrayed with computing. We need our scientists to be engaged in the most advanced science in the world, and the reality in this country today is that half of the graduate students in engineering in American universities are not American citizens. We need to stay on the cutting edge of science, and we would make a mistake if we cut ourselves off from that science.”