John Hope Bryant: “Mr. Chairman, at the beginning of last year the gentleman from Texas [Mr. Smith], the chairman of the subcommittee, and…”

“Mr. Chairman, at the beginning of last year the gentleman from Texas [Mr. Smith], the chairman of the subcommittee, and I, in my capacity as ranking Democrat on the subcommittee, set about to write a commonsense immigration bill designated to address very real, very objectively provable problems with our immigration policy in the United States today. We set about to write a bill that did not involve Proposition 187 hysteria from the right and did not involve unnecessarily generous efforts to bring in lots of other people, perhaps coming from the left. We set about to write a bill that dealt with real problems. We set about to deal with problems such as this. Legal immigration, and I am not talking about illegal immigration, I am talking about legal immigration under current law, resulted, between 1981 and 1985, in 2.8 million people entering the country legally. Ten years later, between 1991 and 1995, 5.3 million people entered the country legally, twice as many, and these figures do not include the 3.8 million backlog of relatives of these people who are now waiting to enter the country when their time comes.”