Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-N.Y.), a lawmaker routinely described in establishment media as a moderate, told an audience that legalizing millions of undocumented immigrants is his top priority in public life — remarks that the Republican National Committee quickly amplified.
“My biggest desire, my biggest goal of what I want to accomplish in politics right now, is I want to legalize seven or eight or nine or 10 million people in our country, so they will not be subject to deportation,” Suozzi said, according to the RNC, which spotlighted the speech. Breitbart News first reported the comments.
The number is not trivial. It approaches the roughly 10 million inadmissible migrants who entered the country under former President Joe Biden, a figure Breitbart cited in its reporting. Suozzi’s framing — ending the threat of removal for a population the size of a mid-sized nation — puts him at odds with a president elected on an explicit promise of mass deportation.
An emotional, personal pitch for migrants
Suozzi hasn’t hidden the personal roots of his position. In an August 2025 essay, he traced his family’s history through Ellis Island, describing how his grandparents arrived from Italy with nothing and how their descendants reached the halls of Congress.
“Immigration is personal for me,” he wrote. “I look at America through the lens of the immigrant story — the story of my family, and the story of the American dream.”
He noted his father arrived as an infant, his grandfather’s son went to law school on the GI bill after World War II and rose to become a mayor and state Supreme Court justice, and that grandson now sits in the U.S. House.
Critics of current immigration policy argue that this kind of personal identification helps explain why so many Democrats — particularly those representing districts with large foreign-born populations — reflexively side with migrants over native-born constituents in policy fights. Breitbart framed Suozzi’s position as driven less by pragmatism than by ideological sympathy for foreigners and pressure from progressive economic planners and profit-seeking business interests.
The wage question
Where Suozzi’s comments become economically pointed is on the question of wages. In January 2026, he complained that President Donald Trump’s deportation drive and low-migration posture had tightened the labor market.
“We have to look at all the different factors, even the immigration policy, where we have a million and a half less people in the workforce right now, it’s causing more overtime and having to hire people at higher wages,” Suozzi said, according to Breitbart. “These are all upward pressure[s] on people’s prices.”
That framing is a reversal of the traditional political logic in which rising paychecks are a win for working families. In the progressive economic model, however, wage growth can be a problem: it reduces voter appetite for redistribution and economic planning. For establishment Republicans, Breitbart noted, rising wages are uncomfortable for a different reason — they cut into corporate profits and stock prices, angering donors.
Suozzi has also warned that deportations are happening “at the exact moment the country can least afford to lose workers” and argued that “without immigration, our workforce shrinks, and we are pushing out the people who could help fill the gap.”
The Dignity Act and the broader fight
Suozzi has pointed to the bipartisan Dignity Act as his preferred vehicle, saying he has worked closely with nearly 40 colleagues on a bill that would secure the border while offering a lawful path to stay for people already here, working and following the rules. He acknowledged such efforts struggle in a Congress locked into partisan trench warfare.
The bill’s chief advocate, Rep. Marcia Salazar (R-Fla.), has described it as providing a large inflow of cheap labor for employers, a characterization that cuts against the idea that the measure is purely humanitarian.
Suozzi’s immigration posture, Breitbart argued, tracks closely with the policies of the Biden administration. In September 2024, then-Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas described using migration to grow gross domestic product, citing Canada’s market-driven visa system as a model and lamenting that U.S. labor visas remain capped at levels set in 1996.
“The country is suffering as a result of it,” Mayorkas said at the time. Canada’s high-migration approach under former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Breitbart noted, has since been blamed for wrecking living standards there.
Under Biden, the inflow of roughly 10 million inadmissible migrants suppressed wages, spiked housing costs, inflated the stock market, and reduced births, according to Breitbart’s account — dynamics that helped propel Trump back to the White House on a deportation mandate.
A Republican echo
The sympathy for migrants over citizens is not confined to one party. Retiring Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) published a September 25 op-ed in The Washington Post lamenting the deportation of an undocumented woman he had tried to help.
“I tried to help her,” Bacon wrote. “My office exhausted every avenue available to us to prevent her departure. None of it was enough.”
Bacon had detailed the case in the Omaha World-Herald and spoken personally with the Homeland Security secretary about it, according to his account.
For now, Suozzi’s remarks give Republicans a fresh piece of evidence in their argument that Democrats’ professed moderation on immigration is a media construct. Whether his colleagues in swing districts embrace his goal — or distance themselves from it — will test how far the party is willing to go as the deportation debate intensifies.
Source: www.breitbart.com — https://www.breitbart.com/immigration/2026/09/25/democrat-moderate-my-biggest-desire-biggest-goal-is-mass-amnesty/