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Today, Congresswoman Veronica Escobar (TX-16) attended the 2023 Munich Security Conference, participating joining the conference’s international townhall on migration titled “Resetting Migration: Moving Toward Opportunities.”

Congresswoman Escobar participated alongside Kyriakos Mitotakis, Prime Minister of the Hellenic Republic and Ylva Johansson, the European Commissioner for Home Affairs. The discussion was moderated by the Editor in Chief of the National, Mina Al-Oraibi.

Below are some selected remarks by Congresswoman Escobar:

“The United States Congress has not passed immigration reform since 1986. That was the last time that the U.S. Congress opened up legal pathways, and that was under a Republican president, Ronald Reagan. 

“Ten years later, in 1996, Congress passed new laws – a Republican Congress and a Democratic President, this was President Clinton – that shrank legal pathways. They made it so that there were permanent bars for some migrants, and that really – from my perspective – was the beginning of what has been a failed approach to immigration. And that failed approach was ‘let’s limit legal pathways and let’s focus only on the border'… The border and border enforcement and border policy is one component. But when you make it the only component – which is what we have done for decades in the United States – you have set the system up for failure.”

To watch the full discussion, click here.