Gutierrez' Prepared Opening Remarks, Christian Science Monitor Breakfast

Press Conference

REPRESENTATIVE GUTIERREZ: Thank you for letting me talk with you today and thank you to the Christian Science Monitor for inviting me. I am glad to see a number of immigration reporters who are veterans in the group and a few who are new to the immigration issue or maybe just new to me.

I want to lay out some parameters and then I can expand on them or we can talk more during Q &A.

I have been careful to adhere to the first rule of working in a bipartisan secret group: "Don't Talk About The Secret Group."

While it has been widely reported that I am part of a group of four Democrats and four Republicans on the House side crafting a bipartisan immigration bill, I will neither confirm nor deny that here.

That said, I have been a part of numerous conversations across party lines and nothing I say here should be construed as speaking "for" or "on behalf of" a secret group, if it in fact exists.

I will say that immigration is incredibly complicated and that I do not anticipate the announcement of a bill or bipartisan principles in the next week, but I am hopeful that after recess, after Easter, the process will move forward quickly in both the House and the Senate.

We are under a time pressure, not one set by the President, or the Senate Leaders or the Speaker of the House or Democratic Leader Pelosi.

We are under a time pressure to resolve this issue because the moment is right politically and the further away we get from Election Day 2012, the less urgency there will be.

And more importantly, every day we wait is another 1,400 or so immigrants who are being deported every day in our nation's incredible escalation of deportations and family destruction. Hundreds of parents will not come home to their children today. Hundreds of U.S. citizens will be orphaned, turned over to family protective services or uprooted to live with relatives today and every day we wait to fix our immigration system.

I notice we have a mix of English language and Spanish language reporters here today and the sense of urgency on this issue is strikingly different in the media of the two languages.

In Spanish this is a human rights issue, a civil rights issue, and family preservation issue. In English, by and large, this is a political issue. A horse-race issue. Who is ahead and who is behind? I am not surprised, but I wanted to point that out as we begin.

I also want to reiterate my commitment to a path to citizenship. My name will not be on any bill that prevents citizenship for those who are legalizing. Perhaps not an easy path or a uniform path for every undocumented immigrant who is legalizing to arrive at a green-card at the end of the exact same process taking the exact same number of years for every person legalizing, but I will not prohibit immigrants who are legalizing from ever being citizens if they choose to apply.

I have talked with Republicans including Reps. Paul Ryan (R-WI), Raul Labrador (R-ID), and Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL) and they understand that we should not legislate a permanent, non-citizen under class and I think they agree with me and that many of the leading Republicans also agree. They have said, as Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) said while speaking at a Monitor Breakfast just like this one a couple of weeks ago, that we can come to agreement on allowing people to eventually apply for citizenship without creating a "new special path to citizenship" only available to those who are legalizing.

We can come back to this, but I think there is an overlap between the Republican position and the Democratic position that we do not prohibit citizenship, which makes me optimistic that the policy to satisfy these two overlapping demands can be crafted.

I would like a clean, clear, quick path to citizenship and I think a lot of people on my side would, but we are working to find bipartisan agreement and I don't get to write the bill all by myself.

But I think it is important to underscore that all the talk about a new attitude or a new approach or a new openness by Republicans on immigration is true and I have seen it in every conversation I have had on immigration with Republicans.

John McCain put it succinctly, trying to sum up the difference between the pre-election Republicans and the post-election Republicans: it is politics. That is true but it goes further.

As I have said before, there are many Republicans who want immigration reform off of the table because they are worried about Democrats running the table in an electoral sense with Latino voters -- and a lot of other voters -- if they continue to be seen as the party hostile to immigrants.

In other words, Republicans cannot start a conversation with Latino voters if they continue to be the party opposed to legalizing immigrants and stand firmly in favor of restrictive immigration policies and in favor of 11 million people, mostly Latino immigrants, being driven out of the United States if, by some miracle, Arizona-style laws actually worked and were able to induce mass "Self-Deportation."

As some have said correctly, the GOP policy of "self-deportation" self-deported their candidate from living in the White House.

But I know that some Republicans want to go beyond politics and solve our immigration problems because it is the right thing to do.

I think many Republicans were quiet as the strident House Republican message of enforcement-only, deportation-only, and "no amnesty forever" was the dominant Republican approach.

You still hear those Republicans at hearings occasionally going with the old talking points about immigrant murderers and rapists and gangbangers and welfare cheats. Some of the hard liners cannot help themselves.

But there are a lot of Republicans who because of their faith or their free-market ideals or because of their admiration for people like Ronald Reagan take a different, more humane, and more practical approach.

Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-SC) is a good example, I think. From the day he was named as the Immigration Subcommittee chairman, he started talking about immigration in a new way. He wanted to focus on the people, the humanity, and get away from the stereotypes and the labels like "illegals."

He told Gannett News in January: "Peoples' desire to improve their lives resonates with me, no matter where they're from."

And he went on to say that "In my district, what's said from the pulpit carries a lot of weight in terms of how we define morality." And he had heard Baptist preachers talking about the immigration issue and immigrants themselves in a new way. In a human way. As God's children, too.

In the hearings he has called, he has selected three witnesses to the Democrats one witness in each of the three hearings we have had in the subcommittee and it has been remarkable.

None of those witnesses were from the advocacy groups that oppose legal immigration like NumbersUSA or FAIR or the Center for Immigration Studies. Those groups dominated the Republican witness lists on immigration for more than a decade.

But now we tend to have three Republican witnesses and one Democratic witness and I agree with all four, I share values and an approach to this issue with all four.

The questions from almost all -- not all, but almost all -- of the Republicans are aimed at figuring out solutions, exploring realistic options, and are based on the premise that legal immigration is basically a good thing.

That is a huge change.

The people who lost on Election Night were the opponents of legal immigration in the Republican Party and they are mostly on the fringes of this debate looking in at this point. They were driving the Romney immigration message and the Republican platform, but they are almost nowhere to be seen.

You still have a few Republicans that go straight to welfare and crime and make all immigrants out to be threats, but they are no longer the center of the Republican debate.

Finally, as an example of where we are and where I think this debate is heading, I want to talk about Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI).

He and I are scheduled to speak at a joint appearance at the City Club of Chicago to discuss immigration on April 22. The event sold out in the first 12 minutes that tickets were on sale.

I don't think there is a line of the Ryan budget I would endorse and I don't think there is a line of a Gutierrez budget he would endorse if such a document existed. But people are interested in how we are finding common ground on immigration.

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