Comprehensive Immigration Reform

Floor Speech

Comprehensive Immigration Reform

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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