As one Representative gave Evans from Colorado's eighth congressional District is joining me by phone in between meetings because he's very important. Representative Evans, first of all, welcome to the show.
I'll always get to be on with you. And I would say I'm very, very busy would probably be how I would characterize it.
Well, okay, busy busy man, let's talk. We're jumping right in because I know I don't have you for that long. Let's talk about the Dignity Act for a moment. I've been lurking in some Republican Facebook groups kind of just gauging the room right to see as people are discussing this, and you can imagine, as you've probably already seen, you have two camps. One camp says this is amnesty hard pass, never going to happen. And then you have other Republicans
who are saying, look, this is where I am. We finally got a little modicum of border security. There's never been a better time in the last twenty five years when we had decent border security, with more money committed to border security to really work on immigration reform. Obviously, you're in the second camp. Let's address that amnesty accusation that is being made.
Yeah, first and foremost, it's absolutely not amnesty. There's no pass to citizenship in this bill. The end period barnup, no pass to citizenship, and there's no free handouts in this bill. What the Dignity Act does is it sets a hard date. That date is before Biden. It's a December of twenty twenty. Anybody that was in the country before that date, and you got to meet a whole bunch of other criteria. Can't be taking federal benefits. You have to be willing to pay any back taxes for
anything that you've taken under the table. You have to pass both a criminal and a security screening. So what all of these requirements mean is that really the only people that are even eligible to apply from the get go are people that, Okay, maybe they're in the country illegally, but they haven't been committing crimes, they haven't been causing problems, they haven't been stealing federal welfare dollars. That means they've been working. And as you said, the immigration system has
been kind of a mess for several decades. I wish this wasn't the case, but here's some of the numbers, forty two two percent of the ag labor force in the United States is illegal. I don't know the percentages for some of the other big industries, you know, construction, housing, things like that, but we know there's a significant percentage of the labor force in these industries that is here illegally.
But other than that, they're working hard, they're supporting American industry, they're building things here in the United States, and so how do we soort this problem out? That's what the Dignity Act says is if you meet all of those different requirements, you're working hard, not causing problems, willing to pay back taxes, all these other different things that you have to do, then no amnesty. Right off the bat. You got to pay a thousand dollars fine in order
to enter into a seven year program. You can call it a program. If we're going to talk in terms of fine here, you can call it something like probation something like that. But you enter into a seven year program where you renew every year. So if you're not meeting these requirements, you start not paying your taxes, you get in trouble. You're taking money under the table. Guess what you're tossed out, and every year that you renew in this program you have to pay another thoughlean dollars.
This program doesn't cost the American citizens anything. Not only that, when you enter the program, you agree to have your wages garnished at a one percent rate, and all of that money then goes directly to American citizen workforce training. Other things that this bill does national everify, everify as the federal program by which employers can see if somebody is legally eligible to work in the United States. Right now, it's optional. This bill makes it mandatory. This bill puts
into federal law the self deportation mandates. This bill says, if you do not have legal status to work in the United States, you have to self deport under penalty
of federal law. So it really gets the conversation going about what do we do with the folks who are in the United States, have been here for a while and again are working jobs, supporting American industries, and want to have a path forward not for citizenship but for work visa that they only get by renewing every seven years in the seven year program, while paying a bunch of fees and having all sorts of other supervision.
So that was one of my questions that I wanted to ask because how much of this, if any? Because I have not read the bill, I figured this is the jumping off point. I'll read it when it gets massaged a little bit more by Rudy's input. Does this do anything about streamlining or updating the legal immigration process? Because I have a friend whose son in law is going to miss the birth of his first child because he can't get his husband visa worked out so he
can come here from the UK Okay. So the legal immigration system is an abject failure at this moment. Does this address any of that or is that a situation for another bill?
It helps, and it helps in a couple of ways. So in the big beautiful bill that we just passed, we actually have funding for more immigration judges because we know there's a massive backlog in the immigration system. Where the Dignity Act comes in, is it basically also enshrines in the law, effectively the remain in Mexico policy to where if and again this isn't federal law, this isn't
executive order like what we've seen with the administration. This is putting into federal law that if you want to come to the United States, you want to claim asylum or anything like that, you have to wait in another country outside of the United States while that asylum claim is pending. And so that helps to basically streamline and give an orderly flow for folks that are claiming asylum
who want to come to the United States. So that, in conjunction with the additional funding for more immigration judges that we had in the Big Beautiful Bill, it really does impose some reforms in the immigration space so you don't have these major backlogs, you don't have these mass influxes whenever you have some humanitarian crisis in another country.
It really does set up rules of the road so that we can have an orderly immigration system and try to clear a lot of this backlog without big influxes like what we saw under the mismanagement of the previous administration.
Now, I want to talk about the reality on the ground politically of a bill like this and the possibility that as I said, I mean, I think right now is the best time we've had in a very long time to talk about serious immigration reform, because politically that that has turned into quite the political football in terms of I think that was a huge reason that the Democrats got walloped in the last election cycle is because of unfettered immigration. So they've got to be paying attention.
But what does the political reality look like. You're going to lose some Republicans? Are you going to pick up Democrats with this? Have you found people across the aisle that are tired of this just being an ongoing political football and actually want to solve the problem And are there enough of them?
Yeah? So, I think there's a couple of really important things there. First, you mentioned the disaster of the last four years and what the new administration has done and what we've actually been able to put into federal law through the big beautiful bill around I mean forty six billion dollars for border wall, right, several billion more for border patrol agent recruiting and retention. So we've put into federal law a lot of resources to make sure that
the border stays secured. But as you said, that tends to increase the pressure to Okay, we've stopped the problem at the border, what do we do with You know, it's over eight million illegal immigrants are in the United States and working right now. Not just in the United States, but they're part of the labor force right now, and we have to do something with this at some point.
So what better time than right now with the Republican led House, Senate and presidency that's focused on America first issues, Because if we punt on this, as you said, the pressure is only going to build, and if we don't fix it now, eventually Democrats are going to have some power again in Washington, d C. And then they're going to make a complete and total mess of this. So I say we need to have the conversation, and it
truly is a conversation. This bill hasn't been assigned. Well, this bill doesn't have a date for a committee hearing yet definitely hasn't got a date for the House floor. So we're still having the conversation about this. This is driving the conversation. But if we don't have that conversation now with an American first, Republican led House, Senate and presidency, that doesn't mean that the pressure to fix it is
going to go away. That pressure is still there and it's going to grow, and if we don't do it, Gums are going to make a mess of this the next time they have power in DC.
I agree with that second part. I'm just hoping that you you know, one of my frustrations and I understand it, and I'm sure you do too. Representative Evans would people say, Look, I don't want anybody to skip ahead in the line. I don't want anybody to get special treatment that other, you know, people who've immigrated here legally have not gotten.
I understand that argument, but I'm also tired of I mean, it was like what twenty ten when Obama gave status to the Dreamers, and they still are just being They're flapping in the breeze like they still have no solid footing here in the United States, and it's absurd that we haven't been able to make this happen.
So I'm going to be this.
Do you think this is a jumping off point for a bigger conversation or do you think this bill as it is has a chance of passing as it is?
Well, I mean, no piece of legislation in Congress passes as it is if you look at the format was in when it was introduced to when it navigated its way through the House in the Senate, so I'm sure it will change. So really both things. Yeah, it's bipartisan. It's got Republicans and Democrats supporting this, and it's a broad swath of Republicans. You've got Republicans from very very moderate districts. We also have a Freedom Caucus member who's
supporting this bill. And so you have the complete range of Republicans that are supporting this a piece of legislation because they know the urgency, as you said, that we have here. And I'm totally sensitive to the argument about cutting in line. And that's why when you read the bill, there's a hard date in the bill that this applies to.
It's not a rolling five year period. It's a hard date that says this does not apply to anybody that was immigrated illegally to the United States January of twenty twenty one or later. So when you couple that, you know you got to go back five years, and the onus is on the individual to prove that this isn't government resources that are going to go to proving that the individual has to prove it, and if they can't prove it, well, then under the self deportation mandate and the bill get out.
Yeah, and I do think that if you can get this sorted out, it will it will change public sentiment about this going forward, in my view, because if you say, look, we've reformed the system that will allow people to come over here and work if they just want to work, right, we reformed that, we reform the legal immigration system, then the excuse making gets a lot harder to make, simply because when we make it easier for people who want to come here and take advantage of the American dream
to do so while making sure we're getting the bad actors out. I think most Americans are behind that.
Yeah, I mean that it's literally the national auto of the United States, e pluribusunem out of many want. And so we know that there's a lot of very, very talented people that come to the United States for that American dream, and so we want to be able to get those best, those brightest, those hard workers, those people that come here. I mean, look no further than there's a there's a great book about Thomas Nelson Publishers, which is one of the biggest publishers of Bibles in the
in the country. That was that was started by a Lebanese immigrant who came to the United States and that was his passion. And so as long as we are setting a very tough, very rigorous program to be able to get those hard working, best and brightest people. And if you're not one of those, then sorry, there's not a pathway forward. But if you are one of those, there is. That is something that helps the United States, not just internally in terms of our you know, our
economy and workforce and stuff like that. But we got to remember we're not in a vacuum globally. We've got major, major at at the international level, entities like China that would very much like to pass up the United States, and you serve our position of global leadership, and so we need to make sure that we are maintaining our position as the global leaders against foreign competitors like China.
And so when you're able to get the best and brightest people from other places that want to come to the United States, that gives us a leg up in making sure that we're able to beat the Chinese.
Representative Gabe Evans, I so appreciate your time today. We are out of time on late as a matter of fact, and I hope we can talk more about this in then your future.
Always enjoy being on with you, all right, Thanks