thank you, mr. cardenas. mr. cardenas: thank you, congressman cartwright. i think it's very important for us to understand once again that tonight we're covering many aspects of why comprehensive immigration reform is good for this country and it's really important for us to understand and what i urge every viewer to do is to ask your local chamber of commerce how they feel about whether or not comprehensive immigration reform is overdue and whether or not we should pass such a bill. also ask your local law enforcement agencies, for example, 37 out of the 50 states attorneys generals in this country have all signed a letter saying congress, please pass a comprehensive immigration reform bill and please ask anybody from whatever religion you may be closest to or be part of and ask that pastor, ask that individual that you look to for that spiritual guidance to answer the question as to whether or not comprehensive immigration reform is something they believe should happen in this country. i think the answers will overwhelmingly be yes, yes, yes. next i'd lik

mr. cardenas? any thoughts you might have? >> i'll give you one example of the collaboration and how we're going to be able to help. i don't -- in the not very distant future i can see a first responder from are a municipality going out taking a picture with his phone, sending it to us. it'll be able to tell us what equipment was at that location the picture was taken from and then take action on that. the collaboration between the utility and the way it formats its information and its ability to speak and connect with that device will be critical as we move forward into the future where whether it be crowd sourcing or just the use of these devices to locate and identify equipment that's been damaged is going to continue to be critical. that i'm hoping i'll be able to see in the next 9-12 months. >> thank you. thank you very much. mr. payne? >> madam chair, i ask unanimous concept to submit testimony from humanity road and the business emergency operations center alliance of phenomenal to the record -- of new jersey to the rec

mr. cardenas? >> i'll give you one example of the collaboration and how we're going to be able to help. in ther in very distant future i can see a fir responder from a municipality going out with a phone, taking a picture, sending that to us. it can tell us what equipment is at that location the picture was taken from, and then take action on that. the collaboration between the utility and the way it formats its information, the ability to speak and connect with that device, will be critical as we move forward into the future where, whether be crowd sourcing or just they of these devices to locate and identify equipment damaged is going to continue to be critical. that i'm hoping i'll be able to see in the next nine to 12 months. >> thank you. thank you very much. mr. payne? >> madam chair, i ask unanimous consent to commit testimony from humanity road and the business emergency operations center alliance of new jersey for the record. >> thank you. without objection, that will be admitted. at this

mr. cardenas: thank you, mr. chairman. my amendment increases authorized funding for english learners. services to this growing but completely underserved population are important to me and families throughout my district and throughout this country. but it should be important to all of us. la teenas as a percent of the labor force will grow 40% in the next 10 years. i want to show numbers showing neglect of these students. only 70% in the fourth grade and 3% of those in the eighth grade were at or above proficient in english. they saw five times as many fourth graders and 11 times as many eighth graders at or above proficient in english. all those should reach those levels and greater. mr. chairman, english language learners is the fastest growing segment of the school population. many are native born u.s. citizens. half are second or third .enerational citizens this could prevent 25% of english language learners from dropping out, ensuring a fair shot at their participation in this economy of ours. instead, our system ha

ardard with that, i -- mr. cardenas: with that, i yield time to mr. garcia of florida. i'd like to thank the gentleman from california. madam speaker, it's been 20 days since the senate passed overwhelmingly bipartisan immigration reform bill. in the house judiciary committee, we have been considering -- we have considered four controversial bills, none of which address the 11 million people that are already here. in south florida, for example, there are thousands of ven wail d families stuck in an immigration system with illegal or undocumented status. they have fleed and purchased homes and invested millions in our committee. earlier this year, i introduced a bill, which would allow any .esident of venezuela this is similar to what congress passed in 1997 with the nicaragua adjustment act and the central america relief act. we have yet to consider any sort of legalization path, the house judiciary committee has yet to consider this bill as an amendment or to debate on how best to bring people out of the shadows and the people of venezuela aren't alone. the young peopl

thank you again for the opportunity to share our experience. >> thank you, mr. cardenas. before i begin to ask questions and before the rest of the penalty against us questions, i would like to mention that in the spirit of this hearing last week i as well as the members of my team and staff from homeland security participated in last friday's weekly smem, social media emergency management chat, on twitter. and solicited questions from those participants on a weekly basis, folks participate in this manner. and i appreciate all the wonderful insights. i'm not sure if this has been done in congress before to solicit these types of questions but since this is the people's house i'm happy to be submitting some of these questions that came from this chat last friday. i should also note that during that chat i was asked to express their appreciation for the work that your companies and your association are doing to support emergency managers. they truly appreciate it and they wanted to make sure that we think the private sector for all of the work they're doing to support their

mr. cardenas: thank you, mr. chair. i rise today in support of congressman pocan's amendment, increasing the navy research testing development and evaluation account by $10 million. this would support research improving the safety of advanced batteries, specifically lithium ion batteries. this amendment does not add new funding to the bill. mr. chairman, lithium ion is the present and future of our energy storage technology. this technology is critical to u.s. military personnel for communications, navigation and vehicles in land, sea, air and space. it is also important to many other sectors of the economy, including the utility companies, transportation, aviation, aerospace and medical devices. as we have seen with recent airliner incidents, we can do more to address the safety of these batteries. without improving that safety, we cannot fully realize the potential of lithium ion technology without realizing that potential, we cannot improve our production capability here in the united states of america. the global ma

as i talked about the emergency technology and knowing what is coming, we can't evenly imagine, as mr. cardenas just shared with us, the possibilities of what your companies and the innovators and engineers and inventors in your companies are creating, we ask that you continue to share those with government, with the public sector, with the volunteers. it's amazing to me that 14,000 volunteers come together quickly, but that we already had a team of veterans in place to help mobilize and that were trained, and so it's a wonderful marriage of the government and the military and our veterans and that point, mirroring up with volunteers to aid in recovery and save a lot of lives and save homes and save property, most importantly, save lives, and that's what i think your testimony here today has also shown. i think we absolutely have some challenges that everyone needs to be mindful of, and some of those challenges -- sadly, the few bad actors that come up, the privacy issues weed in to be mindful of, but i do think -- and the connectivity. without power, number of this works, and we do n