I support family reunification.

No. There are better ways to secure our southern border than by building a wall from coast to coast. Donald Trump wants to waste $18 billion of taxpayer money on a wall that most Americans oppose and that won’t secure the border as well as other more innovative, less expensive technology. What we need is better, newer more innovative technology to detect underground tunnels used to smuggle drugs and people, and more customs agents with better technology to screen cars and cargo driving through border crossings. 

San Diegans view the border as an opportunity, not a threat. It is an economic engine for San Diego and our country.

Yes. As a member of the Congressional Gun Violence Prevention Task Force, I have been a consistent, vocal advocate for Congressional action to address gun violence. In the wake of Sandy Hook, Aurora, Pulse nightclub, Las Vegas and now Parkland, Congressional action is long, long overdue. After each of these tragedies, Congressional Republicans hold a moment of silence in honor of those whose lives were senselessly cut short, and then send “thoughts and prayers,” and then do nothing to make it better. That needs to change. I am ready to make our background check system work better, and I’m ready to ban bump stocks, high-capacity magazines and weapons of war that have no place in our schools or in our communities. My priority now is to raise the volume on this issue — to make it so that Congressional Republicans can’t just move on — and to help all of those who have been calling for action from Congress to have their voices heard.

I have focused on pushing legislation to establish universal background checks because it has broad bipartisan support and, thus, the best chance of passage in the House. 

Yes. Pulling the U.S. out of NAFTA would rip the rug out from underneath our economy and devastate small business owners, workers, and families in San Diego and across the country. It would create new barriers that make it harder to sell American-made products and crops to our two largest customers. And it would raise the prices that working families pay for everything from cars to groceries.

All but ten states in the U.S. count on Mexico or Canada as their largest export markets. In San Diego, they are our two top customers, with $5.5 billion in annual exports to Mexico alone. San Diego’s economy has benefitted greatly from being a center for international trade and it has made our binational region a more attractive place to start a business and manufacture products. Pulling out of NAFTA could hurt this ecosystem and the 120,000 San Diegans whose jobs depend on trade.

NAFTA isn’t perfect. It makes sense to prioritize raising enforceable environmental and labor standards through trade agreements to further level the playing field for American workers.

As a member of the House Energy & Commerce Committee, which has jurisdiction over health care, I fought back attempts to strip access to health care away from millions of Americans.  I support the Affordable Care Act. And it was a huge undertaking. That means it was bound to need fixes over time and I’ve sought ways to repair and improve those elements that aren’t working the way they were intended.

Here are some reforms I’ve supported:

1. Congress should reauthorize and make permanent federal reinsurance programs, which protect insurers against the costliest medical claims. Without a sufficiently funded reinsurance program, insurers with sicker enrollees would have to charge higher premiums to all of their customers to stem their financial losses.

2. Congress should shield Cost-Sharing Reduction Subsidies (CSRs) from the uncertain appropriations process and commit to long-term funding. These subsidies reduce out-of-pocket health care costs for hardworking American families. If CSRs ended, insurance would become unaffordable for many, more insurers would hike premiums or leave the exchanges altogether, and the federal government would foot the bill for newly uninsured families flocking to the emergency room for basic care.

3. One of the most important ways to keep insurance available and premiums down is to get young, healthy people into the insurance pool. The ACA tries to do this with an “individual mandate” — everyone has to get insurance or pay a fine. As an alternative to the mandate, Congress could authorize an automatic enrollment system, where young individuals who do not purchase insurance would be automatically enrolled in an inexpensive health plan that covers basic primary care and catastrophic illness or injury.

Many individual insurance markets need help today, and the fixes are available and need not be partisan. This is what Congress should be doing.

Yes,  I support limiting the process to spouse and children only. 

Yes, to assist  with the enforcement of our current immigration laws   

 No, our Second Amendment is already being eroded. 

 Yes, if we can negotiate better terms for the United States of America. 

 I support commonsense legislation that  will offer a variety of products that will best suit the consumer. 

I support limiting family-based immigration to the immediate family only.  That is, only to spouses and minor children. We should encourage the core family to remain intact, but should not automatically extend this to aunts and uncles and other relatives.

As we secure the border, we need to address the issue of illegal immigrants that currently live in the US.  For those that are productive members of society, we should provide a simple and straightforward path to legal permanent residency.  This path would be open to those who have been here for some period of time, have a job or are going to school, have served in the military or with volunteer organizations, and most importantly those who are not criminals or associated with criminal activity.  Those who are not contributing to society or who are criminals should be deported when they are found.

Once we have a secure border and a path to permanent residency for upstanding people who are already here, I am generally in favor of a relatively lenient immigration policy.  Of course, we should conduct background checks and only let in those who are law abiding and are not associated with terrorist or other undesirable groups. We should also favor those who we think can assimilate into American culture. In addition, we should base our immigration decisions on individual merit, and do away with the current lottery system and quotas.  We should not provide welfare support to new immigrants for a number of years. We should not let people immigrate under the assumption that if they can’t make ends meet, our government to support them. We should not become a welfare state to the rest of the world.

It is important that we secure and protect our border, so that we can regain control of who comes into our country.  Without a secure border, immigrants, drug dealers, and other criminals would be free to enter the US illegally. For areas of the border where illegal crossings are easy, then we need to secure the border by building a wall.  

However, we don’t need to build a wall the entire length of the US / Mexico border.  We have natural barriers such as mountains and deserts where it is not practical and not economic to build an actual physical wall.  Instead, it is much more efficient to secure the border through other means, such as electronic surveillance.

Experts estimate that out of the entire length of border, which is 1,984 miles, it be practical and effective to build a wall across approximately 500 miles, with the remaining miles to be monitored with electronic technology and border patrols.

I support the Second Amendment and I am an advocate for sensible gun regulations. Law-abiding citizens who pass a background check should be able to purchase guns, including hand guns, and should be able to carry them on their person.  

The US Supreme Court has ruled that the Second Amendment to the US Constitution provides an individual right for people to own a firearm. However, the court ruled that this does not mean someone can carry any type of gun, anywhere, and at any time.

We should continue to ban fully-automatic weapons, but I am against banning all semi-automatic weapons.  Most handguns today are semi-automatic, and attempting to ban them will make criminals out of millions of law-abiding people.

I am not in favor of arming teachers in schools, although individual school districts may decide to have armed guards at schools.  That decision is up to the local school board and local government.

The terrible mass shootings that have happened in our country are conducted by people with mental illness.  We should address the problem of mental illness in our country to minimize the occurrence of these senseless tragedies.  

Finally, I would allow the individual states to determine their own gun laws consistent with the will of their citizens.  The people of California may decided to have different gun laws that the people of Texas. That decision is up to the individual states.  The role of the federal government should be limited to ensuring that our constitutional right to bear arms is protected and upheld.

Free and fair trade is a benefit to the American economy and to American consumers.  Our trade policy should encourage the removal of tariffs that inhibit the free flow of goods and services across our border.  For these reasons, we should remain in NAFTA while working with our Canadian and Mexican neighbors to even further reduce destructive tariffs and other barriers to trade.

International trade is one of the most misunderstood areas of our economy.  Even the language that is used often presents international trade as a “zero-sum game”, suggesting that any “gain” realized by a trading partner (such as China or Mexico) must be associated with a “loss” to America.  Phrases such as “trade deficit” and “trade war” further this misunderstanding, when in fact, international trade makes America and Americans wealthier. This is especially true when a foreign country decides to subsidize one of its industries to sell more goods in America.

As a simple example, consider what happens when the Japanese government decides to tax its citizens so that Japanese car makers such as Honda and Toyota can reduce the cost of cars that they export to America by, say as an example, an average of $1,000 per car.  Americans win in this deal because they get access to these cars at a lower cost, with the savings provided by the Japanese taxpayer. To make this easier to understand, imagine if the Japanese government provided a subsidy of even more than $1,000 per car. Imagine if they cut the cost of new cars in half, or even offered them free to Americans!  Does anyone really believe that if the Japanese were to offer us cars for free that we, as Americans, are actually worse off? We should be thanking the citizens of other countries for giving us money in the form of lower prices when their governments decide to subsidize an industry in order to help them export goods to America.

The opposite is true when America creates tariffs on imported goods.  Tariffs are a tax on American consumers that is used to support a politically-favored industry.  The net effect is a lower standard of living in America. That is why I am against President Trump’s tariffs on imported steel and aluminum.  The effect of this is that every American will pay a few hundred dollars more for a car. That may get lost when we are paying $20,000 or more for a new car, but it exists in any case.  Some of this extra tax will help the US Steel industry, but the rest is just a loss born by consumers. The fact that the costs of tariffs are dispersed (we all pay a bit more for our cars) but the benefits are concentrated (the steel companies get the benefit) is what makes tariffs so attractive for politicians.  They can take credit for saving jobs in the steel industry, when in fact is it us as consumers and customers who are subsidizing these companies.

The United States has some of the best health care in the world, but due to a bad market design for both health insurance and medical care we spend too much money on healthcare and receive poor overall service.

To begin, we need to separate health insurance from health care services.  Health insurance is designed to spread the risk of poor health before anyone gets sick.  Each of us spends a smaller amount of money on insurance when we are healthy, so that if some of us get sick we can afford the appropriate medical treatment.  We are familiar with this in other insurance markets, such as fire insurance on our home, or car insurance in case of an accident.

However, people with pre-existing medical conditions are already sick and their care needs to be paid for.  This is not an insurance issue anymore, it is simply a question of who pays for the necessary medical care. Just like you can’t buy fire insurance after your house has burned down, you can’t buy medical insurance after you get sick.

The only realistic solution is to take people with pre-existing medical conditions out of the insurance pool altogether and pay for their care directly.  There are different ways we can do that, but it will surely require some funding from the government.

By removing pre-existing conditions from the insurance market, medical insurance will become much more affordable.  In addition, if we make medical insurance more of an individual market than a corporate market, then individuals will be able to retain their health insurance even when they change employers or lose their job.  We can use the tax laws to encourage the purchase of individual insurance policies that are portable.

Look at changes to retirement savings as an analogy.  Most of our country has moved from pensions that were tied to remaining with a company until retirement, to today where we have portable retirement plans like 401(k) accounts that are owned by the individual.  In a similar way we need to make health insurance portable. No one should lose their insurance coverage because they change jobs.

We also need to fix medicare.  Medicare is broken for a number of reasons, but the main issue is that it is unsustainable.  The average couple pays about $150,000 in their lifetime in Medicare premiums and taxes, but collects about $450,000 in lifetime benefits.  “Medicare for All” means bankruptcy for all.

We have largely removed the consumer from the health care purchasing decision.  Even before Obamacare, consumers only paid for 13% of total healthcare costs, with the government directly paying for more than 50%.  When consumers are insulated from price, prices will rise. That is the problem with all third-party payment systems such as government payments.  

The solution lies in recognizing these truths and moving to a system with true market-based reforms.  A number of ideas are out there; we just need to do what is right and make them happen.

As one who has been through the immiigration system with my wife (from Malaysia), when family members are sponsored, the sponsor is required to agree that the sponsored member will not becoime a public charge.  If this requirement were honestly enforced, I could support allowing immigrants to bring in family members.  It is not enforced, and as such I believe we have to limit this.

As long as our legal immigration system continues to be the dysfunctional mess that it is, we need the wall.  If we take the administrative portfolio of immigration away from government and get the line moving, there will be no need for human traffickers, and therefore no need for the wall.

We do not need more restrictions.  We need better technology to allow states to share data about people who are not allowed to buy a gun.

Yes, we should leave NAFTA.  The Chinese are gaming the "country of origin" designation to the detriment of U.S. manufacturing.  We should have a credible plan to leave NAFTA if it cannot be renegotiated to require genuine reciprocal access to markets.

We need to expand access to group policies to include trade associations, credit unions, and religious organizations.  We need to expand access to HSAs as a means to pay the premiums for these group policies.  If we grant a tax credit to employers for matching employee contributions to their HSA, and make it possible to get a group policy outside of employement then millions of part time workers will be able to get a policy they can afford - and afford to use.

I would support immigrants already residing here being able to bring in first degree relatives, that is parents,siblings and children, after appropriate background screening.

Ensuring border security is very important, and in some areas expanding/enhancing the existing wall is the best approach.  At the same time, building an 1.800 mile long border wall is not a realistic approach.  Using increased staff and technology such as infrared surveillance is a better alternative in some areas.

I believe in the Constitution and I support the Second Amendment.  At the same time, I support universal background checks.  I believe that those people on terrorist watch lists should not be able to purchase guns.  I would support the banning of bump stocks or other devices that convert semiautomatic guns to automatic weapons.  After the recent Las Vegas and Parkland shootings, I also believe that, as a country, we must reassess why private citizens should have the right to military weapons such as assault rifles.  

As a Republican, I support free trade, and I believe that trade agreements such as NAFTA on the whole are mutually beneficial to the countries who participate.  Canada and Mexico have been important neighbors and allies, as well as trading partners, for a number of years.  While we must ensure that it is fair, I would support remaining in NAFTA, subject to renegotiation as needed.

I support provisions in the Affordable Care Act that ensure coverage for preexisting conditions and allow young people to remain on their parent's insurance until the age of 25.  I support the expansion of Medicaid as pursued by many states to help provide an adequate safety net.  I would oppose converting Medicare to a voucher system; asking our Seniors to use a voucher to obtain insurance on the open market is unfair and inappropriate.  I would provide additional tax incentives for individuals to carry health insurance and for employers to provide it for their workers.  I would also oppose privatization of the VA health care system; I believe that our Veterans would be better served by streamlining the procedures/bureaucracy already in place there.