[Congressional Record Volume 160, Number 114 (Monday, July 21, 2014)]
[Senate]
[Pages S4637-S4639]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                 BRING JOBS HOME ACT--MOTION TO PROCEED

  Mr. REID. Mr. President, I move to proceed to Calendar No. 453, the 
Bring Jobs Home Act.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The clerk will report the motion.
  The bill clerk read as follows:

       Motion to proceed to Calendar No. 453, S. 2569, a bill to 
     provide an incentive for businesses to bring jobs back to 
     America.


                                Schedule

  Mr. REID. Mr. President, following my remarks and those of the 
Republican leader, the Senate will be in a period of morning business 
until 5:30 p.m., with Senators permitted to speak therein for up to 10 
minutes each, with the time equally divided and controlled in the usual 
form.
  At 5:30 p.m. the Senate will proceed to executive session and vote on 
confirmation of the following nominations: Julie E. Carnes to be U.S. 
circuit judge for the Eleventh Circuit; Michael Lawson to be Ambassador 
on the Council of the International Civil Aviation Organization; and 
Eunice Reddick to be Ambassador to the Republic of Niger. We expect a 
rollcall vote on the Carnes nomination and voice votes on the Lawson 
and Reddick nominations.
  It is such a shame that we have had to go through this stalling on 
Michael Lawson for the International Civil Aviation Organization. A 
terrible tragedy has taken place in the world--the shooting down of the 
Malaysian airplane with 290 totally innocent people on board, killing 
every one of them. That is his job. We tried to get him confirmed last 
week. No, they could not do that. We have tried to get him confirmed 
for months. They have held him up every step of the way. It is untoward 
that this is happening. They are holding up these nominations out of 
spite. That is too bad. This is a perfect example.


                Measure Placed on the Calendar--S. 2631

  Mr. President, it is my understanding that S. 2631 is at the desk and 
due for a second reading.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The clerk will read the bill by 
title for the second time.
  The bill clerk read as follows:


[[Page S4638]]


       A bill (S. 2631) to prevent the expansion of the Deferred 
     Action for Childhood Arrivals Program unlawfully created on 
     August 15, 2012.

  Mr. REID. Mr. President, I would object to any further proceedings 
with respect to this bill.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Objection is heard. The bill will 
be placed on the calendar.


                             Border Crisis

  Mr. REID. Mr. President, we are facing a humanitarian crisis on our 
southern border. Thousands of migrants--the vast majority of them are 
children--fled to our border and other countries in the region to 
escape the growing violence in Central America. Most of these boys and 
girls come from three countries--Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala--
where crime and lawlessness have resulted in chaos and anarchy. 
Honduras is the murder capital of the world, with more murders per 
capita than any nation on the planet. El Salvador and Guatemala are 
right behind. These statistics are stunning. In fact, we know that 
virtually all the homicides in these countries take place in the same 
cities these kids are leaving. Migration has spiked in the neighboring 
countries, not just the United States, as people try to escape this 
untoward violence.
  Citizens of these three nations, though, are also imperiled by high 
rates of human trafficking, drug trafficking, sexual assaults, and 
widespread corruption. It is an understatement to say these are not 
safe places in which to live or to survive. Here is an article out of 
the New York Times, written by a woman by the name of Sonia Nazario, 
July 11--a new article. Here are just a few of the things she said:

       Cristian Reyes, an 11-year-old sixth grader in the 
     neighborhood of Neuva Suyapa, on the outskirts of [the 
     capital], tells me he has to get out of Honduras soon--``no 
     matter what.''

  He is an 11-year-old boy.

       In March, his father was robbed and murdered by gangs while 
     working as a security guard protecting a pastry truck. His 
     mother used the life insurance payout to hire smugglers to 
     take her to Florida. She promised to send for him quickly, 
     but she has not.
       Three people he knows were murdered this year. Four others 
     were gunned down on a nearby corner in the span of two weeks 
     at the beginning of this year. A girl his age resisted being 
     robbed of $5. She was clubbed over the head and dragged off 
     by two men who cut a hole in her throat, stuffed her panties 
     in it, and left her body in a ravine across the street from 
     Cristian's house.

  ``I'm going this year,'' he said.
  Think about what this woman wrote. Think about what this boy said. 
After hearing this, can anyone blame these boys and girls and their 
families for doing everything they can to stay alive? One of the 
easiest ways to stay alive, even though it is really hard, is to leave.
  One can imagine how bad things are in these squalid homes and 
neighborhoods if these children and their families are willing to trek 
across dangerous terrain with little food, little water, putting 
themselves at the mercy of bandits, thieves, coyotes, and cartels.
  These kids are so desperate that when they reach our border, they 
immediately surrender themselves to the first person they encounter. 
They are not sneaking over the border. They are getting there for 
safety. They are desperate.
  The truth is that we have taken steps to secure our border. So 
regardless of what the American people may hear from the Republicans, 
this is not an issue about bigger walls or more barbed wire or more 
drones or more helicopters or more personnel on the ground or National 
Guardsmen. We have doubled the number of Border Patrol agents. We have 
drones patrolling the air--I think there are six of them. We are 
catching undocumented immigrants and drug traffickers in record 
numbers.
  After visiting the Rio Grande Valley, one FOX News reporter--FOX--
said: ``There is some evidence that border security, as it stands now, 
is actually working pretty good, pretty well.'' This is FOX, not a 
friend of President Obama's. They never give him the benefit of the 
doubt. But they said it is working pretty well, pretty good.
  But if you do not want to take FOX News's word for it, just this past 
weekend two Democratic Senators and a Republican Senator went down to 
look around, to see the crisis firsthand. One Senator asked a senior 
Border Patrol official, ``Is it true that border security is better 
than ever?'' That is a quote. He responded, ``It is true.''
  How does this assessment compare to what we have heard from the 
Republican Congress? This morning the Republican leader disagreed with 
our border enforcement official, claiming that the current crisis 
further illustrates how insecure the border is.
  I repeat: These children are not sneaking over the border. They look 
to the border for safety. So whom would one believe--our Border Patrol 
officials out their on the frontlines, a FOX News reporter who was 
there on the frontlines, or the Republican leader? It is pretty clear 
where the weight of evidence is.
  Finally, our border security is working so much better, but our 
Border Patrol infrastructure is not equipped to care for tens of 
thousands of children. Barbed wire does not do that. High fences do not 
do that. Virtual fences do not do that. Drones do not do that. 
Helicopters do not do that. What we need now are resources to 
temporarily house and feed those children, administer deportation or 
asylum proceedings, and give border agents the necessary tools to keep 
our borders secure. They need to be temporarily taken care of until a 
decision is made on what should happen to them. It has to be done in a 
humane fashion.
  Our challenge is to treat these children as children should be 
treated, consistent with American values. The White House emergency 
supplemental request does just that. If the Departments of Homeland 
Security and Health and Human Services do not get these resources, they 
are going to run out of money in a few weeks--out of money.
  All we hear from the Republican Congress is blame. It is all the 
fault of Barack Obama. It is his fault. It is his fault these kids are 
coming. It is his fault the border, I guess, is secure. They are coming 
and turning themselves in.
  Congressional Republicans are suggesting that the thousands of young 
migrants have come to America as a result of President Obama's 2012 
deferred action plan. They are saying that is the reason for all of 
this trouble. But that is nonsense. This article I held up--a long 
article--does not mention a word from anybody she interviewed that they 
are coming because of deferred action. They are coming because of 
fathers being robbed and murdered by gangs while they are working as 
security officers and the other vile things that are happening to human 
beings.
  We need the resources to temporarily house and feed these children, 
to legally administer whatever proceedings are necessary, and give 
border agents the necessary tools to keep our borders secure. I repeat: 
If they do not get the resources, they are going to be out of money. 
Then what are we going to do? I guess the Republicans will blame Obama. 
It is our job--our job. He cannot do it alone.
  We have 45 obstinate Republicans who are not letting us get anything 
done about anything, certainly not anything dealing with immigration.
  Cristian, the boy from this New York Times article, as I said, does 
not mention DACA at all. He does not mention DREAMers. He talks about 
the violence he sees as a boy--with his eyes. These kids are fleeing 
Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala and are heading anywhere they can 
to escape the violence. They are not just fleeing to the United States; 
they are going anyplace they can. They are heading to Panama, 
Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Belize. In those countries I have just 
mentioned, asylum claims have spiked 712 percent over the past several 
years. Think of all the children who don't make it.

  This crisis--the humanitarian crisis on our border--has nothing to do 
with DREAMers--children who have lived most of their lives as Americans 
even though they were brought here illegally. Yet Republicans would 
have us believe the two are inseparably connected. This is clearly not 
true.
  The junior Senator from Texas is trying so hard to link these two 
groups of children. In fact, the junior Senator from Texas is saying 
that before he will agree to the White House supplemental request, 
which would give our Border Patrol the resources it needs to

[[Page S4639]]

care for these refugee children, President Obama must end the deferred 
action program.
  We just read some legislation on the floor a few moments ago. That is 
what it is--no money for these poor boys and girls until, I guess, you 
deport them--hundreds of thousands of people who are here because they 
deserve to be here.
  Republicans, in attacks such as this, are resorting to ransoming 
children to get their way, and that is shameful. The assistant 
Republican leader, the senior Senator from Texas, who has authored 
legislation to prevent any meaningful hearing process for migrant 
children, appears to support the junior Senator's plan. The bill put 
forward by the senior Senator from Texas implements a process that will 
send these children back to dangerous places without some minimal 
concern for their health and well-being. If people were treating 
animals the way these boys and girls are being treated, they wouldn't 
send an animal back to this, let alone a little boy or girl.
  Neither of the plans put forward by the junior or senior Senators 
from Texas address the underlying issues. And what is the real issue?
  The Presiding Officer has lived in South America. He is one of the 
few Senators who speaks fluent Spanish. He is a member of the Foreign 
Relations Committee.
  So what is the real issue?
  The Presiding Officer could tell us what the real issue is if he were 
able to speak now.
  Why are these children arriving at our southern border. As Nobel 
laureate Oscar Arias, who was President of Costa Rica and did a good 
job in an overwhelmingly bad situation, said yesterday in the 
Washington Post: ``The root cause is the violence and poverty that make 
these children's lives at home intolerable.''
  We hear that from the schoolboy's message to us. Deporting DREAMers 
already here or speeding up the process for sending children who need 
protection back to their crime-ravaged homes does not address the root 
cause.
  In fact, it will only break up families who are already here and 
ensure that we see these migrant children again in a few months if they 
survive, because they are not going to stay there. Many of them won't 
survive, but if they do, they will try to come back again until things 
become tolerable. Instead of playing a game of hot potato with 
thousands of innocent children, let's address the pressing needs we 
have now, which is to treat these kids humanely.
  I have had the good fortune of traveling in every country in South 
America except Belize and Uruguay. Cuba is sending huge numbers of 
physicians all over South and Central America; China has a lot of money 
and projects there.
  We--because of the stringency of what is happening with our 
appropriations bills--took months and months to get a Peace Corps 
Director. The Peace Corps helps, but without the Director it was kind 
of wobbly. The Agency for International Development has a good program, 
but it doesn't have much money at all. We do very little to help those 
countries.
  We have Venezuela. Chavez ships hundreds and hundreds of teachers and 
oil to those countries, and we do nothing. For a fraction of what we 
spend on our border, we could help those countries stabilize.
  We need to get resources to our Border Patrol agents and others who 
are caring for these children from Central America. We need judges to 
hear these kids' cases and decide whether they need protection or need 
to be sent back home.
  The world is watching how this great democracy of ours responds to 
this crisis. Congress must act now and give the administration the 
funding it needs to temporarily house and feed these boys and girls and 
reinforce the infrastructure to process thousands of asylum deportation 
claims.
  We had a big show not long ago where we provided $35 billion to help 
veterans. We have spent trillions of dollars in two wars--unpaid for, 
by the way. That is what President Bush wanted, and that is what he 
got. He squandered the surplus we had--a surplus of over 10 years when 
he took office that was trillions of dollars. But now we are being 
asked to spend a few dollars to take care of these people who have come 
back in need--as our veterans. Senator Sanders has been working for 
well more than 1 month to get them to try to agree to something, and it 
looks to me as if they are going to come back with nothing.
  The conference has not been completed. Why? Because they have to 
spend money on these people on whom they were glad to spend money to 
take them to war. But now they are back. They are missing limbs. They 
have many post-traumatic stress problems, a lot of medical issues, and 
no money is there.
  I am afraid that is where we are headed with this other situation. I 
am afraid we are headed to the place where either Republicans get to 
deport all these DREAMers--what the Texas Senators obviously want--or 
just give these kids no hearings at all and just shove them back. It is 
not fair.
  The American people want these kids to be treated fairly. If the kids 
don't belong here, let's have somebody decide they don't belong here 
and have somebody do what needs to be done. But to just ignore the 
issue and run out of money--what do we do?

  What we should do is legislate. We are not doing that.
  I have said on the floor a number of times--I repeat--for 5\1/2\ 
years Republicans have opposed everything that President Obama has 
wanted--everything. That is what they set out to do 3 days after he was 
elected, and they have stuck by that. Scores of ambassadors' positions 
are not filled, and legislation has gone wanting.
  They want to be able to show there is a Democrat in the White House 
and Democrats control the Senate, but the American people are not 
realizing a small minority can stop us from doing everything--and that 
is what they have done with the so-called filibuster, hundreds of them. 
I only hope this November people will respond, as I believe they will, 
and say: This is enough.


                       Reservation of Leader Time

  Would the Chair announce the business of the day.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Under the previous order, the 
leadership time is reserved.

                          ____________________