Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour) | Oireachtas source

We have two objectives in this. There are 50,000 undocumented Irish people in the United States who cannot come home for funerals and family events. We need to secure a path to legalisation for these people. Since 1965, the flow of legal emigration from Ireland to the United States has dried up and we want to find a way of doing that. The Bill passed by the US Senate would provide a path to legalisation for the undocumented Irish and provide for an E3 visa available to 10,000 Irish people per year to travel and to work legally in the United States. It would make a major change. In the House of Representatives, there is no agreement on the Bill and it is a sensitive political issue. My assessment of the situation is that the people I have spoken to accept that immigration legislation will be passed by Congress at some stage. There are some 11 million undocumented people in the United States. It is a huge issue and it plays politically. In the run-in to elections, people look over their shoulders and what they are hearing in their constituencies and districts and respond accordingly. The most recent issue to come into play is the number of unaccompanied children crossing the US-Mexican border.

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