Mr. President. I am pleased to join my colleagues on the Subcommittee on Immigration and Refugee Affairs in support of the conference agreement on legal immigration reform. The reforms we make today are the most farreaching reforms in immigration reform since the 1924 act. And they are far more positive. generous and forwardlooking than any legal immigration reform bill we have passed previously. My colleagues on the subcommittee began this process in the 1970s as part of the select commission on immigration reform chaired by Father Ted Hesburgh. I entered the immigration fray after that and have enjoyed working with my colleagues to help shape this bill. I am most pleased that we have kept family reunification as a cornerstone of our overall legal immigration policy and created new opportunities for employersponsored and business visas. Some people feel that immigrants are a drain on our economy and our society. How wrong they arel I look around at the city of Chicago. my State of Illinois and throughout the Nation to see the contributions immigrants have made. I have long felt that family reunification should be a cornerstone to our legal immigration policy. I am very pleased that the conference agreement substantially increases the visas available for second preference for the spouses and children of permanent residents. The current wait from Mexico of 11 years keeps a first grader from her parent until she is a senior in high school. This bill fully protects the fifth immigration preference. In the original version of this legislation. the fifth preference was set for extinction. The original version would have cut off future eligibility for married brothers and married sisters and reduced available visas by 67 percent. Under the original plan. people would have had to wait up to 75 years. AsianAmerican U.S. citizens in Illinois and around the Nation would have suffered the most.
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Some people feel that immigrants are a drain on our economy and our society.