Kay Bailey Hutchison: “I rise to talk about probably the most important bill we are going to address maybe in my time in the Senate, certainly…”

“I rise to talk about probably the most important bill we are going to address maybe in my time in the Senate, certainly in the last 25 years, and in the next 25 years, from a domestic policy standpoint. There are some good features of this bill. I think we have run into many problems, one of which is it didn't go through committee, which I think everybody agrees has caused there to be so many conflicts and rewrites, and when you adopt an amendment, it changes something else. That should have been done in committee. Another is that this issue hits so close to so many people. So we see objections from all different types of groups, Democrats and Republicans, business groups and labor groups. So it is something that I think now is on the radar screen of the American people. It is something that I think is good that we are discussing because I do believe it is Congress's responsibility to fix this problem. It is a problem that was made in a 1986 act of Congress when amnesty was granted and the law was not enforced. There was no guest worker program that was going forward, so we had illegal behavior and there was a blind eye turned. Now it is 20 years later, after 1986, and we find ourselves having to deal with the inability to know who is in our country because we have not enforced the laws and we have not had a workable program to provide the jobs that would grow the economy of our country.”