host: our guest is eliseo medina. spent many years working with hugo chavez.ur phone lines are open. as always, that is the line for republicans. if you want to join us on facebook or twitter, send us your comments as well. harold joining us from mansfield, ohio. line for republicans. good morning. >> he leaves out one important thing i believe. the fact that they do not assimilate. they want to keep a spanish speaking in spanish advertising instead of going to english like every other citizen did in this country. we have people coming out of mexico and latin america. they do not want to do that. they want to speak spanish. that is right. i think what we ought to do is require if they want to be a citizen that they learn to speak english. guest: first of all, i am a perfect example of someone who came to this country. i spoke no english. i came from a different culture. i came to this culture and learned english. i learned to become part of the society. i love football. i love basketball and love this country. millions and millions of us do that. however, we a

talking about the lobbying efforts for immigration reform to the august congressional recess with eliseo medina. and then spotlight on magazines, bloomberg businessweek discussing a recent article about the $4.5 billion construction project for the new homeland security department headquarters. "washington journal" is live every morning at 7:00 eastern. institution, defense cuts coming in 2014, some of the most harmful to the military under sequestration. eventts were part of an on the effective budget cuts on military preparedness. you can see it in its entirety any time at c-span.org. here is a look. >> if you look at the 2014 would behe cuts that required by sequestration are so harsh for that year and there's no way to phase them in realistically. it is even a worse debacle than the sequestration and the pain that occurs in that year towards even what we're going through this summer. a compounds what we are going through the air force isn't flying, for example, when equipment cues are piling up and we're not fixing the stuff we need to keep safe for our forces. so i think congressman ultima

. >> host: our focus is immigration and our guest is eliseo medina who is the secretary-treasurer of service employees international union. thanks so much for being with us. >> guest: thank you so much for having me. >> host: as a look at the debate over immigration and it is front and center in the august recess as members of congress traveled to the respective states and congressional districts, what do you think the immigration bill needs to include? what would it look like? >> guest: i think what we need to do is have a bill that would solve this problem once and for all, and have the following component the number one, i think that it needs to allow the 11 million undocumented workers the opportunity to be able to legalize their status and give them a roadmap to have the achieve citizenship as they go through this process. secondly, i think we need a new way for the immigrants of the future to come to this country so they don't have to come through the desert, putting their lives in jeopardy. third, i think that we need to have a way of figuring out how having an efficient polic