Leadership Quote by Jose Serrano

Serrano’s line is the kind of procedural-sounding sentence that’s actually a moral argument in disguise. By insisting immigration be “legal” and “orderly,” he borrows the vocabulary of enforcement to disarm the reflexive “tough on borders” critique. It’s a strategic reframing: if you want legality, then build a system that can realistically deliver it. Otherwise “illegal” becomes less a category of behavior than a label we slap onto people when the front door is deliberately bolted.

The key move is in “eliminate this issue.” He’s not claiming migration ends; he’s claiming the crisis narrative can be engineered away. The subtext is institutional: backlogs, limited visas, and incoherent pathways create the very shadow economy politicians then campaign against. Serrano’s logic treats illegality as a policy outcome, not a personal failing. That implicitly challenges the popular “bad actors vs. good citizens” storyline, replacing it with a systems failure story.

Then comes the quiet rebuke: “not further criminalize it.” That “further” matters. It points to an escalation already underway - more detention, more prosecutions, more border policing - and suggests diminishing returns. Criminalization doesn’t solve a labor market’s demand, family reunification pressures, or humanitarian flight; it just increases the penalties for the same movement, handing more power to smugglers and more fear to ordinary workers.

Contextually, Serrano (a Puerto Rican-born New York congressman associated with progressive immigration stances) speaks from an urban, immigrant-anchored coalition where lived reality collides with Washington theater. The sentence works because it sounds pragmatic while smuggling in a premise: order is something you build, not something you shout.