Immigration
Floor Speech
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Mr. HUDSON. I thank my colleague, Mr. Speaker. It's an honor to be here tonight.
I'm a new Member of Congress. I was elected just
last year. I ran for Congress the first time I had ever run for office because I want to come up here and fight for people, because there are folks back home that are frustrated, they feel like their government is not being responsive to their needs. So I'm here to represent them and be a voice for those people.
I think of the homebuilder in Monroe, North Carolina, who told me he's just struggling to keep his head above water and he'll take any kind of work just to keep his crew intact so he can keep them together. He'll do remodeling work or anything. He's not even worried about profit so much as being able to keep afloat.
I think about the families across the Eighth District of North Carolina who are looking to us for solutions. That's why I'm here tonight to join this conversation, to talk about immigration reform. The key to immigration reform, as far as I'm concerned is, we've got to look at compassion and we've got to look at fairness.
When it comes to fairness, we are a Nation of immigrants, but we're also a Nation of laws. So we've got to make sure we're enforcing the law in this country and we're respecting the rule of law when we're looking at making changes to immigration policy.
We also need to look with compassion on those who have come here to the United States seeking that American Dream when we try to determine what we're going to do going down the road.
But I think the key to this is the approach we're taking here in the Hous of Representatives. The Senate has passed an immigration bill. It's a bill that was cobbled together behind closed doors. It was a bill that in my opinion went too far too fast. We're taking a much more thoughtful approach here in the House. We're going to go through the committee process. We're going to bring legislation to the floor so that we can debate these key issues affecting immigration as single issues and let the American people take part in this conversation and tell us what they think about issues like border security.
Now, the key to immigration reform in my opinion is we've got to secure the borders first, and any legislation that we pass out of this Chamber, any agreement we make with the Senate on immigration, we've got to have a trigger so that no other pieces of this immigration puzzle fall into place until we've got that border secure. So we're going to work hard to make sure that's part of our solution.
There are actually five pieces of legislation that have already passed out of the Judiciary and Homeland Security Committees. I serve on the Homeland Security Committee. We passed the Border Security Results Act of 2013.
What this does is it requires the Secretary of Homeland Security to develop a comprehensive strategy to secure the border. What a radical concept: let's actually have a plan. And so what we're saying in the House is: give us a plan. We want the Department of Homeland Security to work with the border sheriffs to come up with a plan to secure that border and come back to Congress and say, here's what we need. Here's the sections where we need fences. Here's the other types of technology, whether it be drones or other types of technological monitoring. These are the pieces of the puzzle we need to secure the border.
And a key to this is we have to have a metrics so we can measure whether the border is secure or not. Currently, we know the numerator, but we don't know the denominator. We know how many folks we're stopping coming across the border, but we don't know how many we aren't rounding up. And if you talk to any of the border sheriffs, you'll know that we're not anywhere close to being secure. So that's a key component of this legislation.
I look forward to talking more about some of the legislation that came out of the Judiciary Committee, some of the pieces of this immigration reform puzzle that we need to discuss.
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Mr. HUDSON. I appreciate my colleague pointing out some of the legislation that the Judiciary Committee has already passed because I think it is important to understand that the House of Representatives is taking a different approach when it comes to immigration reform. So we passed the Border Security Results Act out of Homeland Security. We have also passed the Legal Workforce Act, which is the bill that reforms the E-Verify system, which gives us a much more workable E-Verify program, that gives our employers the certainty and the assurance that they can verify the citizenship of potential employees.
The second piece of legislation that came out of the Judiciary Committee already is the Skills Visa Act. This has to do with what's called the H-1B visas. These are for your high-skilled workers. These are for folks in math, science, and technology who may come to the United States to go to university to learn these skills and get on this career path, but then they don't have a visa to stay here. Most industrialized nations in the world, 80 percent of the visas they give out are based on work skills and needs of the workforce. Here in the United States, it's about 12 percent of the visas we give out. We have a lottery to give out visas; and to me, that's ridiculous. We need to reform the system so we're giving out visas to the type of people that we want to attract to this country. So the Skills Visa Act is legislation we're considering here in the House that will do that.
The third piece of legislation is called the SAFE Act. One of the issues we've talked about, we have to enforce the rule of law. Frankly, we don't have enough Federal agents enforcing the law. So what we need to do is empower States and municipalities, local governments that want to enforce the immigration law to be able to do that. That's what the SAFE Act does.
And then the fourth piece is the agriculture guest worker, AG Act. That is a critical piece for our economy. There are at least 11 million undocumented workers here in this country that we know of. Many of those folks don't want citizenship. What they want is the ability to work here legally. If we have an ag worker program that actually works, this is the H-2A program. Frankly, when I'm home, and I go home every weekend and meet with our local folks and I see farmers across our my district, I ask them, How many of you are using H-2A program? You'd be amazed how few use the program, because it's not workable.
And so as my colleague from Colorado asked the question that he hears at town hall meetings, Do we really need to do immigration reform, yes, we do. We can't just secure the border with a fence and technology if we still have that attraction, that need for illegal workers to fill jobs in this country. We've got to have a pathway to bring in legal workers, whether it's in agriculture or home-building, or some of the more high-skilled types of jobs. We need a legal pathway to fill those positions; otherwise there's going to be this tug of illegals that will continue to happen.
So we can build a 10-foot wall, but someone is going to invent an 11-foot ladder. So it has to be a comprehensive approach. That's why we need the ag guest worker program, as well. So as you can see, we in the House are looking at this step by step. We are looking at what are the actual problems so we can address them in a very thoughtful way so that we aren't just rushing to get a big bill, as was once said by a former Speaker of this House, Let's pass this bill so we know what's in it. Well, we don't want to make that mistake again. We don't need a big, huge, comprehensive bill. We need to look at these issues in a very thoughtful, comprehensive way.
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