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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.