As home secretary, I will work to ensure that our immigration policy is fair and humane.
I'm passionately committed to making sure our world-leading institutions can attract the brightest and the best. But a student immigration system that treats every student and university as equal only punishes those we should want to help.
We should be able to have a conversation about immigration; we should be able to have a conversation about what skills we want to have in the U.K. and whether we need to go out of the U.K. in order to get them to boost our economy, and I don't think we should have a situation where we can't talk about it.
I would like to get immigration enforcement right. I think that there is a problem there, and it needs some really careful analysis and a brutal look at who's doing what and who's got what powers where.
Our nation is built upon a history of immigration, dating back to our first pioneers, the Pilgrims. For more than three centuries, we have welcomed generations of immigrants to our melting pot of hyphenated America: British-Americans; Italian-Americans; Irish-Americans; Jewish-Americans; Mexican-Americans; Chinese-Americans; Indian-Americans.
I hope I'll have the opportunity to debate how we reform and update our immigration system. I will relate my own story and that of the countless immigrants whose American Dream stories have helped build our country into the greatest nation in the world.
Comprehensive immigration reform should be debated and passed by Congress.
In Minnesota, we tend to be a little more open to immigration.
The American people are not anti-immigrant. We are concerned about the lack of coherence in our immigration policy and enforcement.
Legislation passed in the aftermath of September 11, 2001 enhanced our intelligence capabilities and strengthened our national defense, but until now our nation's immigration policies have not adapted to the needs of a post-September 11th world.
