[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 160 (2014), Part 7]
[House]
[Pages 9911-9912]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                    COMPREHENSIVE IMMIGRATION REFORM

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Illinois (Mr. Gutierrez) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. GUTIERREZ. Mr. Speaker, some things do not change after a 
primary, even a primary result that no one, including the winning 
candidate, had predicted. The thing that does not change with the 
political winds in Washington is the calendar. There are only 10 
legislative days before the July Fourth recess.
  Another thing has not changed. The Republican Party and the 
Republican leadership have a difficult choice. They can choose to 
address the immigration issue head-on and get it resolved, and give the 
Republican nominee in 2016 a fighting chance in his or her run for the 
White House, or they can go back to the bunker, sharpen their anti-
Obama knives, and never get to the White House in the next generation, 
possibly two.
  As I have said on the floor before, if there is no serious 
immigration reform action headed toward a floor vote in the House by 
July Fourth, we will not see action at all, and it will be left up to 
the President to rescue the country from the worst aspects of our 
dysfunctional immigration system.
  On the Democratic side, we all prefer a legislative solution where 
the House, like our counterparts in the Senate, pass bills signed by 
the President. But in the absence of anything resembling leadership 
from the legislature, the President will not just sit back and watch a 
bad situation get worse. He will act in accordance with existing law to 
protect all immigrants he can. I believe he can protect literally 
millions of them through executive action.
  Immigration reform is not dead. It will just move to the White House 
for action if none comes from this House. So with 10 days left before 
July Fourth, where do we stand? The majority leader released his 
legislative schedule for the month of June, and reforming our 
immigration system is nowhere to be found. Immigration is the single 
most important issue to address for the Republican Party's ability to 
be competitive at the national level after this fall, and it is nowhere 
on the schedule before this fall.
  So what lessons have we learned? Half-measures to legalize some 
immigrants here and allow legal immigration for some industries there 
doesn't seem to have much political traction with conservative voters 
in the South. Blocking sensible immigration reform and sending out 
mailers decrying ``amnesty'' at the last minute doesn't seem to have 
much traction with southern voters in conservative districts.
  Articulating, however, a firm argument for why deporting 11 or 12 
million

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people is not a realistic proposition, defending your position that 
legal immigration is preferable to illegal immigration, and making 
clear that the only way to actual border security is a combination of 
enforcement, legal immigration, and addressing the legal status for 
immigrants already living and working here seems to work pretty well 
with southern conservative voters.
  That is what the gentleman from South Carolina, Mr. Graham, would 
tell us, or the gentlelady from North Carolina, or every poll that has 
been taken in recent memory. And we know that in every part of the 
country outside the most conservative districts, mainly in the South, 
supporting the end of illegal immigration and a broad and rigorous 
legalization combined with serious workplace and border enforcement is 
not only the policy that works, it is the only policy that is viable 
politically.
  So every pundit on TV last night said it was time to man the 
barricades. They said immigration reform with a Republican stamp in a 
Republican Congress is dead because the American people want to be 
protected from the threatening world outside, and Republican 
Congressmen want to be protected from their threatening voters.
  But it is still up to the Republican leadership how they plan to 
proceed. Not a single Republican who opposes immigration reform needs 
to vote for it--not one. And we will still have a majority of the House 
voting to do what a majority of Americans want them to do; that is, 
address our broken immigration system.
  Next week in Judiciary we will have a hearing on the crisis of 
unaccompanied minors fleeing Central America, and we will be pointing 
fingers at everyone but ourselves, and not, I would note, using the few 
remaining legislative days available to craft a sensible border and 
immigration strategy as our colleagues did in the Senate almost a full 
year ago.
  Let us not accept the latest excuse for inaction on immigration, 
especially from those who want to take no action under any conditions. 
This Nation--built by and sustained by 400 years of immigration--needs 
a coherent system, and we need politicians brave enough to craft one.

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