AskJared #4: Immigration Reform

Congressman Jared Huffman (D-San Rafael) called for the House of Representatives to pass comprehensive immigration reform in a video response to a constituent email. Huffman released this video, recorded earlier in the summer, in response to recent reports that immigration reform may be pushed until early 2014. TRANSCRIPT: "Hi, Congressman Jared Huffman here and we're going to do something a little different with this "Ask Jared" segment. A few weeks ago I invited people to tell me on Facebook what they thought about immigration reform and so instead of responding to a specific letter we're going to talk generally about the issue of comprehensive immigration reform. I got lots of good feedback on my Facebook page. Thank you if you were one of the dozens of people who contributed that feedback. What I heard was a lot of broad support for comprehensive immigration reform. I also heard some concern about border security. Some people want to see more border security; many others were concerned about overly-militarizing the border as a part of an immigration reform deal. I want to tell you where I stand. I believe that common sense comprehensive immigration reform is vital to our country right now. I think it'll strengthen our economy. I think it's going to create jobs, and frankly I just think it's the right thing to do in light of the fact that we have 11 million undocumented people living and working in this country right now, and we also have all of these Dreamers, people who were brought into these--to the country by their parents at a very young age—have basically been Americans for all intents and purposes, made their way through our schools, in some cases graduated from our universities and served in our military. These are folks who deserve to have a chance to earn their way to citizenship. The economic side of this issue doesn't get enough discussion and so I want you to just consider some of the numbers. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that by fixing our broken immigration system we could reduce the federal deficit by about 200 billion dollars over the next ten years. That's a lot of money, and we need that we've got a serious challenge in facing our deficit and our debt. Immigration reform will help. It will also increase our GDP, in other words the size of our economy, by 3.3% over the next ten years. We need to get this economy moving and growing and we need to create jobs. There's no doubt about it, immigration reform will help us do that. And that's why you hear such strong support for comprehensive immigration reform, from the business community, and from the agricultural community. I support the Senate immigration bill, and hope to have a chance to vote yes on it here in the House of Representatives. It's not a perfect piece of legislation, but, I think it's the best opportunity that we're going to have, perhaps for a long, long time to come to tackle this issue in a responsible way. I will oppose à la carte attempts to deal with immigration. So, we've heard in the House of Representatives there may be bills that focus only on border security, or focus only high tech worker visas, or some other individual piece of the problem. We need a comprehensive immigration reform bill, and that's why I do support the Senate bill, even though I think, frankly, it overemphasizes border security. We have spent billions of dollars to tighten up and secure our borders. We have an enormous amount of military equipment, and personnel, and technology deployed in the borders right now. We have the most secure border we've had in years. I think it's time to focus on the other aspects of this problem. So, I hope that gives you a better sense of where I stand on immigration reform. I think we need to act, I think we need comprehensive immigration reform this year, hopefully as soon as Congress gets back from recess, and not a piecemeal effort that won't fix a broken system. Thanks very much for the feedback, and thanks for joining me today."