Speech #CREC-2018-01-11-pt1-PgS154_t49

Mr. President, today I was honored to be invited to the White House and included in a small meeting with President Trump, and it was very clear that I was invited to the White House to stand firm with President Trump today. We talked about immigration, and today I was proud to stand with our President. We have been crystal clear. Chain migration must end, period. Any solution to our current immigration crisis that the U.S. Senate will consider must include ending chain migration. Before I talk about the details of what chain migration is, I want to put it in perspective. Our immigration crisis today has been longstanding. We had a law written in 1965 and other changes in 1986, but it has really not been since 1991 that there has been any meaningful immigration change. Three times in the last 11 years, well-intended people in this body and in the House have done a yeoman's job of trying to solve the comprehensive problem of immigration in the United States--without success. Here we are, again, right now, facing a deadline that the President has put on, and rightfully so. We have a sense of urgency. The President has done a couple of things. He has defined the scope of the problem, and he has defined a sense of urgency for the people in Congress. The legal immigration system right now is broken, but to deal with that, we have to deal with our entire immigration system in pieces. The reason I believe most past efforts have failed is that they tried to do a comprehensive solution. Today, we are breaking it into three areas. One is our legal immigration system, and the next step might be our temporary work visas. Today, we bring in about 1.1 million legal immigrants a year, and I will talk about how that relates historically. But we issue about 2.2 million temporary work visas a year. Then the third issue is, of course, the people who are in the United States illegally. President Trump had a meeting 2 days ago at the White House.