Luis Gutierrez Quotes

Let me respond with a few points, the first being that all immigrants pay taxes, income taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, gasoline taxes, cigarette taxes, every tax when they make a purchase.

Because the truth is, today's immigrants, as they have for generation after generation, work the longest hours at the hardest jobs for the lowest pay, jobs that are just about impossible to fill.

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

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

There is this kind of sense in the immigrant community, first we were going to do immigration reform, but then 9/11 happened.

It is so difficult to, day in and day out, hear these incredibly painful stories of the destructive nature of our broken immigration system.

We watched the U.S. citizenship immigration services web site in March. They had six million, two hundred thousand hits, and two million people downloaded applications for citizenship. So what we're doing is attempting to help people in that process.

I will argue until my last breath for a pathway to citizenship that is quick and efficient because I want to end this chapter. I want to end it ... But let me say, conversely, I am as committed as any Republican to ending illegal immigration as we know it ... They want to end it. So do I.

Mr. Speaker, Americans want, need, and rightfully expect Congress to protect them from the prying eyes of identity thieves and give them back control of their Social Security numbers and personal health information.

According to the study, approximately 16.7 million U.S. workers born in Latin America had a combined gross income of $450 billion last year, of which 93 percent was spent locally.

It is not new or unusual for the real Americans, meaning those immigrants who came to America a little bit longer ago, to fear the outsiders, the pretenders, the newcomers.

Are we going to go out and arrest and detain and deport 11 million people? Nobody would argue that that is what we are going to do, because we have never demonstrated the political will to do that, nor have we ever committed the requisite resources to do that.

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.

So where are they moving today? They're going to move to be meaner to immigrants in order to bring their conference together.

I have only one loyalty and that's to the immigrant community.

As far as income tax payments go, sources vary in their accounts, but a range of studies find that immigrants pay between $90 billion and $140 billion in Federal, State, and local taxes.

The politics, policies, the President [Barack Obama] and the American people are all pointing in the right direction to fix our immigration system and pass legislation this year.

The next step has to be the necessary step. It's always to put the immigrant community and the civil rights movement ahead of partisan politics.

Nothing happens here in this building, in the House of Representatives, if there's no demand from outside the Capitol.