Immigration Reform

Floor Speech

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Mr. GUTIERREZ. Mr. Speaker, as The New York Times said in an
editorial last week, there is an immigration crisis looming next year,
but it has nothing to do with the border. Rather, it is the huge effort
that will be needed to fulfill the President's executive actions and
get millions--millions--of American families out of harm's way by
protecting them from deportation and destruction.

Sure, we are celebrating the series of executive actions taken by the
President, but we are also rolling up our sleeves and getting to work.
So I want to talk just a little bit about what we are doing in the city
of Chicago and what I am hoping my colleagues here in Congress and my
colleagues across the country in community-based organizations, the
legal community, and immigrant and Latino neighborhoods in every State
will do to help with getting people ready to sign up when the window to
submit applications opens in 180 days and the government's review of
cases begins.

This coming Saturday, the 13th, at 9:30 in the morning I will be at
Rebano Church on the north side of Chicago, and more than 500 families
have already preregistered for an orientation. We will go over what the
President's announcement means for individual immigrants and their
families. Then those who have preregistered will have an opportunity
for a one-on-one preliminary evaluation of their eligibility from
people we are calling family defenders.

We are already scheduling follow-up events this month and into the
new year, and we will be ready to accommodate the huge demand for
accurate and trustworthy information.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel has been my consistent and outstanding partner in
the effort, and we are both committed to making Chicago the model for
the rest of the country; and for the advocates, the legal community,
the business community, the public sector, we are all working together
to make that a reality.

That is right. New York. Listen up, L.A. Get ready, Miami, Houston,
and Dallas. We are going to work to protect as many families as we
possibly can in the city of Chicago, and we are challenging you to keep
up.

But it is not just the major immigrant gateway cities where we need
to organize to protect American families. As the President showed us
yesterday, cities in the South like Nashville are leading the way to
integrate and assimilate immigrant populations. The spirit of inclusion
is of utmost importance as we help families come forward, register with
the government, submit their paperwork and fingerprints, and get ready
and into the system.

I have told my House colleagues that I plan to be on the road a lot
at the start of next year, traveling anywhere they need me to travel to
help them conduct outreach and educate immigrant communities where they
live. But it is not just the blue districts where we must support our
immigrant communities and make sure they register. It will be necessary
in red districts, too; States like South Carolina, Arizona, and
Alabama, States that tried unsuccessfully to push their immigrant
community farther underground. I will accept invitation from those
States, too, to get the word out and educate the community in whatever
way I can.

I can't tell you how many people have come up to me and said:
Congressman, I don't know if this will help my family, my dad, my mom,
my neighbor, or my parishioner, but I hope they will not still have to
live in fear of deportation.

There are millions who will not be able to come forward and sign up
because their cases cannot be reviewed under the President's
guidelines. I tell them that what the President has announced is bold,
it is broad, and it is extremely generous and helpful to the United
States and our immigrants who have no other way to get in the system
and on the books; but it cannot go as far and it does not replace the
need for congressional action and legislation.

But let us all remember that, by the end of this week, the clock is
going to have run out on the best chance the House has had in decades
to address immigration in a bipartisan and measured manner. The Senate
did half the work by giving us more than a year to craft a bipartisan
answer to their proposal, and we tried in many, many different ways to
help this House rise to the occasion, to get out of the partisan ditch
we have dug for ourselves and to put the country on a path to a safe,
legal, orderly immigration system that protects the country and its
people by welcoming its strivers and innovators from around the world.

In the end, the House was asleep at the switch and let the country
down. But even as I work with people across the country to protect as
many American families as possible, I pledge to my colleagues in both
parties in the most sincere way possible, please work with us to solve
the immigration issue so that we can move forward as a nation.

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