Contributions of Hardworking Portuguese Immigrants Are An Important Part of Our Country's History

Floor Speech

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Mr. COSTA. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to celebrate the passage of legislation this week called the AMIGOS Act. It is a bill that will spur Portuguese investment in our economy and help create jobs here in America.

As a proud Portuguese American and a co-chair of the Congressional Portuguese Caucus and a member of the Hispanic Caucus, I joined with Congressmembers Cicilline, Nunes, and others, in being the original cosponsors of the AMIGOS Act. I want to thank my colleagues this week for their support in the passage on a bipartisan basis.

Our friendship with Portugal and the contributions of hardworking Portuguese American immigrants are an important part of our country's history and our heritage, as well as our economy.

The United States is Portugal's largest trading partner outside the European Union. In 2018 alone, trading between our two countries reached in excess of $5 billion. This will only increase that economic activity, because this bill will make it easier for Portuguese investors, business people, to increase their operations in the United States, growing both our economies, drawing our nations even closer together, and creating more jobs.

More than 100 Portuguese companies today already have operations in the United States. What do those operations do? They create jobs. They create opportunities. And they build additional prosperity on both sides of the Atlantic.

We have done our part. Now it is time, we hope, that the United States Senate will do their part so that we can send this bill to the President that has, again, strong bipartisan support. It will obviously be good to get this measure passed, hopefully, before the end of the year.

Senators Whitehouse and Toomey, again bipartisan, have already introduced their version of the legislation, the AMIGOS Act, in the United States Senate. We thank them for their strong efforts and their partnership.

Sharing prosperity in this instance can only benefit both the United States and Portugal, and it is this kind of commonsense trade policy that we need to be advocating for, along with continuing to build on our partnerships both within the European Union as well as within South America and with Asia, and, of course, with our closest neighbors, Canada and Mexico.

Trade obviously done properly can create good-paying jobs in America and benefit our relationships and our economic activity with those countries who we value the most.

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