Luis Gutierrez

Obama the President needs to stand up for what Obama the candidate and what Obama the Senator and what Obama the Chicago community organizer stood for and lead the Congress towards reform.

We need to build bridges between the LGBT community and the larger immigrant community. In the end, the bigger the tent we build, the more successful we'll be.

The Congressional Hispanic Caucus has been clear that deporting young people who have lived in the U.S. for years and were brought here through no fault of their own as children should not be the targets of deportation.

The underlying part of any comprehensive immigration bill is family unit.

In the immigration debate, some things are constant. They never change. One is that opponents of immigration reform will use it as a wedge issue and will blame everything from unemployment to rising health care costs on immigrants.

Lots of special interests play the immigrant blame game every day because they like things the way they are and don't see a need for change.

While jobs, education, and healthcare rank among the top issues for Latino voters, immigration is a threshold issue.

We should encourage people who have lived here peacefully for years to earn legal status over time.

I understand the frustration provoked by our broken immigration system. But 50 state immigration policies are just a recipe for more chaos.

We should be clear that we prefer a system that allows people to come to the U.S. with visas, not in the hands of smugglers.

Mr. Speaker, our Nation depends on immigrants' labor, and I hope we can create an immigration system as dependable as they are.

And let us not forget the Social Security system. Recent studies show that undocumented workers sustain the Social Security system with a subsidy as much as $7 billion a year. Let me repeat that: $7 billion a year.