PILGRIM: Senator Sessions, you wrote an op-ed in yesterday's "Washington Times" which we'd like to refer to. It criticizes the Pence-Hutchinson immigration reform proposal. And so we'll bring this up and take some of your points. You criticized the plan on four key points. You say it will allow for a virtually unlimited number of immigrants to come to the United States.

It favors low-skilled workers. It provides more preferences for the eight NAFTA and CAFTA countries over the rest of the world. And it gives no preference for English language or employment skills that help make immigrants a success to our economy. Are you concerned that this sort of a compromise plan may be the way it goes?

SESSIONS: You know, we need a comprehensive reform. I really believe that. We need to throw out this system and develop a new system of immigration that serves America's national interests, our legitimate interests as a nation. And that includes accepting people who have higher skills. It includes allowing people to apply and wait in line based on merit.

We're not doing that. It should reject something like this plan and almost every other plan that says it allows temporary workers, but they get to bring their families, they get to extend, extend, extend for 12, 15, 17 years. By then, nobody can ask those people to leave. Their children are in high school or in college.

So we need to be really realistic and establish a new plan for the future that we can enforce as well as enforcing the border. And we do a good workplace enforcement with a biometric identifier so that people can't commit fraud. And we work the border and we have an honest and fair system of who should be admitted. I think we can make it work. Right now, we are a long way away from that.

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