why should we subsidize companies that are willing to pay ceos in the tens of millions of dollars by giving them tax breaks that allow them to write off part of the seo salary when it is so high. if you are going to pay your chief executive more than a million dollars and you want to be able to write it off, then you have to be able to show you have also increased pay for your front-line workers as well. otherwise, you can raise the salary for maybe it'll make them think more about sharing some of the games with those who helped make the profit possible. we cannot continue to see middle-class workers have their incomes stay stagnant when the cost of college, housing, health care goes up. i will stop there. let's take questions. think you offer patiently listening. let me pick a few names.

ok, i have three names. we will go on the order that i selected them. the first ursuline named will get to go first. raise your hand. if you'll step out in the ilm will make it easier. we have microphones. the first person is anna garcia. then we have alexia. then hunter cobb. those three will go first and then we will just keep knowing down the line. if you could do us a favor, your question or comment as concise as possible and i will try to be as well. >> thank you for holding the town hall. my question is regarding the issue of unaccompanied minors that have gone through severe

trauma fleeing imminence poverty. how likely is it that these children are going to receive refugee status? >> the situation at the border, most of the kids are coming from three countries, el salvador, guatemala, and honduras. the law in place today which provides relief for those kids if they can prove they have a fear of persecution or death would allow them to get asylum, not refugee status. it is different. a refugee in the home country are saying they need to escape and someone on the ground says, yes. iraq.n syria, you have relief organizations who say absolutely you cannot remain here because you will perish because these terrorists or rubbles will come after you. we know you are a refugee and

then you get to come to a particular country. someone seeking asylum said they had to flee their country in secret and now they are here showing up at the doorstep of the border. if i am sent back, i fear persecution or death. please give me asylum. they would qualify if they could meet that standard for asylum. that a lot oftion people do not make. >> if they are under 18 years of , unaccompanied minors, the law says you treated differently than a minor that is with an adult. what are you doing here, etc. those who come with an adult go

through the process with an adult because it is far faster because you can ask the adult if you are are sick you did. then wedult says yes, process them quicker and we send them back. you have seen the news where some of these people were sent back because they could not prove they had a fear of persecution or death. fear of prove persecution or death? many will tell you that they have actually witnessed murder and torture of their family members or others. many have told stories about how it a do not join the game they will be killed. will bea gang, they killed. ableome kids, they will be to make those claims. it will be tough for a 10 or 12-year-old to make the claim which is why they are giving assistance.

the sticking point here is the time it takes to process them. because it's a large number and we are not equipped, there are 240 immigration judges in the united states. to give you perspective, in the county of los angeles, there are twice as many judges just in the county of los angeles as there are the total number of immigration judges for the entire u.s. andhave this bottleneck it's making the process take a while. but i think will happen is a number of these kids if given the opportunity to present their case will be able to make a claim. they will be given the opportunity. while they are waiting to have their hearing, the law requires they be treated under the lease restrict it setting as possible. you do not want to have a kid block the. if there's a way to have them with a responsible adult who is related, we will do that.

if not come you try to find a temporary setting, possibly foster care. is what you do. you monitor them and yet a hearing. there's legislation about whether we change the law or not. some people want to change the law so in five or seven days you can process them and send them back. i'm against that. i'm not one of those that for the grace of god could it have been me. i'm the son of immigrants. my country is better than that and we can do this the right way. at the same time, we don't have an obligation to keep kids who, simply for economic reasons. and you get aped permit, -- no. i want our country to have a good heart to we have to do this the right way. we have the situation where you

prove you really need a place to shelter were you might face persecution or death, absolutely. youuch as i feel for because of economic conditions, you've got to do it the right way. the next question from alexia then hunter. >> i'm over here. thank you for giving me a minute or two, congressman. good to see you again. sometimes, some of us who are of thew income, the city country keeps taking from us. you know it's very difficult. there are people out there who need but there are also the ones who don't want to give a penny. don't take some if you really needed, but when some of us are in dire need, teeth, glasses, and it's taken away from us and more, they

might as well just dig a hole in the ground and put us there. if there is anything us you can do to help your friends up there, thank you. the comment.te again, we have a responsibility as a sovereign nation to our whether it is through medicare, the pell grant program for students going to college, we try to figure out ways for all of us to succeed. i'm the first in my family to get a college degree. i got a lot of aid from the stanford. i worked all four years. summers i worked construction with my dad. been for pell grants, financial aid, student loans at low interest rates, i could not have gone to stanford. we have to do what we can. the best way to do well abroad is to do well at home. if we are strong domestically,

we can be strong abroad. your point is well taken. we are a country for a reason. hopefully by our example and with our assistance, we can help others do it well also. right now, especially since we're barely coming back from that deep recession, it's time to really make sure that we take care of folks in america who work very hard to build this country. shirkt think we will ever our responsibility around the world, i do think we need to be very smart about how we do things. whoher it is iraq or people come to our border, we have to do this the smart way. we don't want to give the wrong impression of what we are trying to do whether it is an iraq war kids at the border. thank you for your question. before hunter, let me pick out a couple more. it's pretty random, right?

ok, so the next three after hunter, liz amsten? i always seem to pick you. then luisen and perez. presente? ok, in the back. hunter, go right ahead. >> i listened to your little presentation on the economy with your graph and everything. this thing about the $800 , i think people are a little tired of these stories. the economy is not recovering.

not necessary. it did not work. the country is in a mess. what i would like to ask is if you look at china, china's economy is booming. they want people to think all that china is doing is building a housing bubble or something that they're building infrastructure, highways, railroads. are mining helium. a lot of americans don't know what that's about but it is fusion energy. obama is shutting down our space program. why don't you demand that obama get the hell out of there? we need a president like the kennedy who says we're going to

go to the moon and do things big again. if we had a driver like kennedy to land a man on the mountain, we could change education, industry. that's how to get the economy going. alexander hamilton knew how to finance industry. i would urge you to study this. you have opposed glass-steagall. we should have passed that instead of bailing out the banks. raised someu've good points. again, try to be concise. i apologize. these are great questions and i wish i could dive in and talk about it because that's what makes this job interesting. that is a recovery. as robust as it should be? absolutely not. for wall street, i voted against it. needed to dowe

something. i just don't believe because it whentoo much at the banks they decided to take mortgages all over the country in slice and dice into little pieces and combine them and make them into estateo it takes real whereas before the bank used to lend you money and they would hold that mortgage and you would pay on it. for the life of the mortgage, you have the same lender because the bank held at. so long as you were paying, they were ok because they were getting good interest off of you. someone on wall street got clever. what if we took all of these mortgages and packaged them together and now instead of one 1000age for $500,000 it is mortgages? you cut it up and you say, wall

street, sell this little piece of that package for x amount of money because it is backed by 1000 mortgages. and that's what wall street did. it took all of these mortgages, some good, some horrendous, and it sold them out there in the market. when people started saying they could not pay because interest they realizene up, their houses were not worth what they thought it they could not make the payments anymore. yes what? the banks could not pay on that stock anymore because they were not getting the money. that's what led to the crash and that's why you saw all of these homes just plummet so quickly. all of the paper was bad. all of the mortgages were terrible. the stock backed up by the mortgages was even worse. i said to the president, then

president bush, and my democratic leadership, if you want me to vote to give $800 billion to the folks who essentially helped maneuver this crash, i want to make sure the money will get down to the people, the decent people who are trying to buy a home. crazy.ket was i was looking to help my grandparents buy a small house in eagle rock. a two bedroom, one bath house. a lot of people bought thinking that's what the market was today. these are not people saying they were making 30 grand a year and there were a lot of them, too, which is what really led to the downfall. the money was all going to the banks. there are a lot of people who said i have a mortgage valued higher than what my home is

valued at that i made commitments on going to continue to pay my mortgage. even if i sold my house i would not get enough money. to me, those people were being very responsible hoping with time the value of the home would catch up to the mortgage. me, we should help them. you're paying that mortgage at 7% interest rate? guess what, let me let you refinance. you still have to pay on the value of the mortgage but at a lower interest rate so let me save you money on the interest and the banks would not renegotiate. they would not renegotiate because they could not. why? they no longer on the mortgage because they had sold at off to in 1000 littlet pieces. they had to get all of the owners of the mortgage to sign off on the renegotiated rate and they couldn't.

why am i going to give the bank for money, this $800 billion? they are not going to do anything to help the homeowner who wants to be responsible. are going to we get repaid? we ultimately did recoup that was nout in 2008, there guarantee, no mandate they had to pay back. banks are always going to make money. i wanted to see two provisions, one to help the homeowner and a guarantee that banks would pay back every sense of the $800 cent.n -- everty in terms of going to the moon the president is doing everything he can to get us to renewable energy. solarth him going toward wind and all of the different energy sources that are clean. you can see what happens when

you rely on petroleum. when iraq goes haywire, our prices at the pump go haywire. we should not be dependent nor do i think we should have to shaleo extract, suck the and let them use a pipeline going through america to go to the shipping ports in louisiana so they can ship the oil to china and other countries abroad never leaving a bit of oil for the u.s. to use. they want to use american soil for the pipe so if some terrorist hits it, we suffer the consequence but all of the oil gets sold abroad with not a bit of it for the u.s. toon't think we need to go the moon to be innovative in what we do. i think the president is trying in that regard so, hunter, i would disagree. the bailout was not the best way

to do things, but i will admit even though i voted against it that it did help stop the hemorrhaging. in jobto see peaks creation as big as the valleys. that would be a true, robust recovery. they cannot just be modest income jobs. there is more money parked on the sideline by corporate america today, over $1 trillion, in cash that they are waiting to see where to put it, where to invest. we could jumpstart the middle class if we did this the right way. let's go to the next question. liz, you are on. >> i would like to point out that of those negative job losses, most of the increases

are minimum wage. >> you are not seeing the recovery where the guy who lost a job is getting a job back who paid the same as the job he lost. it's tough. problems in 2008 and subsequent were caused by wall street and the banks. where do you stand on putting forward a policy to nationalize banks that take money from the government in the future because they are too big to fail? how about setting up public banks like in north dakota? how about supporting elizabeth warren's suggestion on allowing the post office to be a bank for basic inking services? this will really help the consumer. on allowing the post office to be a bank for basic services? say, theeep trying to engine of our economy has been, is, and will be for quite some

time the middle of america. rich folks could only buy so many outs, right -- so many yachts, right? it is middle class america that buys the new close washer. -- new clothes washer. son, daughter, i will give you the seven or eight-year-old car and i will get myself that little brand-new vehicle. those are things that turn the economy. while the middle class has some disposable income, it does not have enough that it could just the hogwild. demographics, rich or poor, they could only stimulate the economy so much. middle class, you get them going, we are in good shape.

in the 1950's when all of those servicemen and women came back up to world war ii, they needed something to do. we did the g.i. bill and we got them educated. then when eisenhower was president he said we would never face a situation where we were not prepared. we're going to build a highway system connect the nest every couldf the country so we never be caught offguard. guess what? construction workers went to work. he was busy with highway 5, 99. he had worked all the time except for when it rained. he was not making a whole lot as a laborer. yet a sixth-grade education and he got paid about $14 per hour with benefits stable enough for nine months that he could take care of us.

as i said, i got to go to college because of that. how many road construction sendrs do you know could their kids to stanford university? that's the difficulty. we have to get to the point where we honor the middle class. we look at them for what they are, the jewel. it is the largest segment of america. if we make them feel like they can afford to get that close washer,- clothes interest rates will go up and that's ok because i can afford to get the car now that i need. keeps the economy going. in terms of how you handle the be a littlet to realistic. i'm not happy with the big tanks. i told you i voted against the bailout. even though people would say to are endangering the economy, the banks always

get what it needs at the end of the day. the odds are always stacked against you if you go to court against the lender. the creditor has you by the neck. don't have anks right to control our lives but they're very important because we see what happens when they would not lend. when they are afraid of the when the banks get a cold, we get the flu. we don't need banks that get so big and so loose with their cash -- not their cash, your cash -- that we cannot control. do not to make sure they go hog wild. they were essentially in vegas on wall street with your money. they should not get to do that. if we could put restraints on even the banks did not know how much value they had and some of the stocks they had purchased. they were betting against

themselves, these hedge bets. money down and had spent some of their investments were going to lose. if they did lose on the investments, they are ok because they had to do against the loss. it's crazy. i agree we need to do something with is why we have credit unions. it's why we started savings and loans. we have to have a financial system that works for everyone especially small businesses. without the line of credit emma it makes it very tough. let me go on to the next question. luis, and i'm being told we are pretty much out of time. 10 or 15 minutes away. i will pick a few more names before i go to you, luis. where are you? p but i'mre with a grou also a constituent of yours. i live in mount washington. i have a short time and followed

.y a question our group, we continue to advocate for comprehensive immigration reform but we also understand in light of the fact that it is a civil system that some of the reform can come in changes in policies and procedures. be aration should not punitive decision but one that makes it possible for all people to comply with the law. what i want to ask you is we would like to get more detail, if possible, about what may be coming in terms of administrative relief. i've said this before and you're probably read, seen, and heard about this on the whole immigration issue. know, it's more a political issue more than it is a substantive, mechanical issue

how you solve it. senate four hundred days ago, more than one year ago, back in june of last year, passed a bill that dealt with every aspect of immigration under the law. they went through and looked at this. and it wasd tweaks comprehensive. it dealt with the whole issue of border security trying to up date, innovate, new ways of doing things are you would not just have to put a whole bunch of bodies on the border trying to do it that way. we have technology to help us address some of these issues. it dealt with the issues of the says whether for family unification or work purposes and the system to be smarter going forward depending on our needs as a nation.

ked the whole system about dealing with people in the work lace. what drives this is at the end of the day, these folks are getting jobs. why are they getting jobs when they don't have the right to work? who aree employers hiring them. the legislation dealt with the work lace so you would only match people who have the right to work in the country with people who are going to check to make sure when they hire you they are doing it the right way. it dealt with all of those things. that was the bill. remarkably it got 68 votes out of 100 in the senate. it was a bipartisan bill and it passed. languisheds, it has in the house because house republican leadership will not allow us to have a vote on the bill. and authoredoposed a bill that is almost exactly like the senate well although we tweaked it.

we cannot get a vote on that though. we need 208 team -- 218 to pass. we have about 200 now. with 18 more members, we could pass that bill. we've been told by the congressional, the cbo, the nonpartisan neutral referee telling us what bills cost or save to have a sense of what we're doing, it would save us trillion because it would essentially get rid of some much of the underground economy that so many of these folks live in in the shadows. it would put them in the overt, the public, economy because they could no longer pay them with cash and therefore not pay taxes that go along with it as well. we cannot get a vote on that hill.

the president has taken some steps of administrative leave where he can. the president does not pass laws. the constitution says only congress can pass laws. the president has the right to use his discretion on how we execute the laws which is why there is now this lawsuit against the president which is a crazy thing but the house has now sued the president for trying to enforce the laws. i have limited resources on immigration. we have border per troll that is four times what it was when i came to congress in the 1990's and doubling in the last 10 years and size. honestly, they've done a pretty good job in the recession help as well to stem the flow of people coming in the