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We have to be realistic: we are not going to be able to deport 11 million people - most are hard-working people.

Nearly 11 million undocumented immigrants currently live within our borders. That's 11 million people living in the shadows whom we know next to nothing about.

Are we going to go out and arrest and detain and deport 11 million people? Nobody would argue that that is what we are going to do, because we have never demonstrated the political will to do that, nor have we ever committed the requisite resources to do that.

Do you know how much land is under ice, rock and snow? Do you know why 90 percent of us live within 100 kilometres of the U.S. border? We have this idea we're a vast country. But the reality is that a lot of it, a huge amount, is uninhabitable.

We're at a point right now in our development in this country - setting the immigration issue aside - that you can't ignore the sheer population of us in metropolitan areas all across the country, of how significant Latino-ness is in the United States.

I'll never understand how destroying families through deportation benefits our society. How we treat the undocumented says a great deal about us as a people and whether or not we'll continue to fulfill the fundamental American promise of equality and opportunity for all.

This type of mass influx is simply too much to handle. What we've had since the disaster of the 1965 Immigration Act will take 100 years or more to absorb.

Immigration is a good thing. We should make that as easy as possible.

You look at the Pew Hispanic Center study on the number of illegal aliens in America and the number of jobs they have, that's 7.4 million, illegal aliens in America. A quick way to create jobs in America is to remove those illegal aliens from our community. That frees up 7.4 million jobs that American can seek.

Well, I'm not saying that we're solving every problem or arresting every person that ought to be arrested and deported, but we're doing a better job than has been done in the past.