[Congressional Record Volume 156, Number 23 (Tuesday, February 23, 2010)]
[House]
[Page H658]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                    COMPREHENSIVE IMMIGRATION REFORM

  (Mr. POLIS asked and was given permission to address the House for 1 
minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. POLIS. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to praise President Obama for 
taking on the very difficult and challenging issue of entitlement 
reform and dealing with the tens of trillions of dollars of unfunded 
liabilities that are structured within the current system.
  The traditional ways of dealing with unfunded liabilities and 
entitlements include cutting spending and increasing revenues, and I 
applaud President Obama for proposing a budget freeze on the nondefense 
portions of the budget. I urge my colleagues to consider supporting 
that as well as supporting a freeze extending across the defense 
component of the budget.
  I would like to propose, however, a third area in addition to 
spending cuts and revenues that we can use to address this entitlement 
crisis, and that is comprehensive immigration reform. By adding 10 or 
20 million new taxpayers, we can have a major impact on the unfunded 
liabilities facing our country. By encouraging engineers and physicists 
who graduate from American universities to stay here rather than move 
to other countries to practice their trades, we cannot only make 
America more competitive and create jobs, but we can also address the 
looming entitlement crisis by creating more taxpayers here at home.
  I encourage my colleagues to support comprehensive immigration 
reform.

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