[Congressional Record Volume 160, Number 140 (Monday, November 17, 2014)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6006-S6007]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              IMMIGRATION

  Mr. CORNYN. Only a few years ago a prominent Democrat firmly and 
unequivocally rejected the idea that the President of the United States 
could singlehandedly enact an amnesty for millions of immigrants who 
entered the country without legal authorization. In 2011, for example, 
this same person reminded us that ``there are laws on the books that 
Congress has passed'' and that therefore it should not be permissible 
for the President to ``suspend deportations through executive order.'' 
Then in 2013 this same individual noted that granting a unilateral 
amnesty for adults who came to the United States illegally was ``not an 
option'' because it would amount to ``ignoring the law.'' A few months 
later this same individual was speaking at an immigration event and was 
interrupted by a heckler who urged him to stop the deportations by 
Executive fiat. In response, he said:

       If in fact I could solve all of these problems without 
     passing laws in Congress, then I would do so. But we are also 
     a nation of laws. That is part of our tradition.

  Of course, you might have guessed who that person was. It was 
President Barack Obama on numerous different occasions in the past few 
years saying he did not have the authority to issue a unilateral 
Executive order granting, in effect, a right to waive the law with 
regard to illegal immigration. I have to say that our President has a 
preternatural ability to say one thing and then do another--the 
opposite.
  Now the President is threatening to authorize exactly the type of 
action he previously said he did not have the authority to order, and 
he is threatening to do so even after his go-it-alone approach on 
immigration and so many other issues was so roundly repudiated in this 
most recent election on November 4. In other words, he is showing 
contempt for the Constitution, for the voters, and basically anyone who 
disagrees with him. It is the classic ``my way or the highway'' 
approach.
  According to press reports, he will act as early as this week and he 
will unilaterally grant work permits. Under what authority--I have no 
idea how he can legislate authority to grant work permits for people 
who illegally entered the country, but he said, apparently, he is going 
to try. These are the kinds of maneuvers we would expect to see from 
tin-pot dictators and banana republics, not from the Commander in Chief 
and the Chief Executive of the world's greatest democracy.
  Apparently the President now thinks that he and, I assume by 
precedent, any future President can simply ignore the laws that he 
finds inconvenient, that ``if Congress hasn't passed the law, that is a 
good enough excuse for me to go it alone and do it my way,'' go around 
it, go against the will of Congress and the American people. This is a 
dangerous precedent, I hope the President recognizes. If after the next 
election a President of the other party--my party--is elected, won't 
this be viewed as a precedent which has been established by this 
President which could be used on everything from taxes, to regulation, 
to ObamaCare--you name it. But that is not how our Constitution is 
written. That is not what the separation of powers doctrine--which is 
an essential element of our Constitution--provides. Even the Washington 
Post--not known as being a bastion of conservative thought--has said 
that failing to get his way in Congress does not ``grant the president 
license to tear up the Constitution.''
  Unfortunately, the President has shown that he has very little 
patience with constitutional safeguards, especially when they hamper 
his agenda or complicate his political needs. After all, this is the 
same President who has unilaterally rewritten ObamaCare by granting 
extensions, waivers, and the like and who has unilaterally gutted 
welfare reform and who has made blatantly unconstitutional appointments 
to the Federal bureaucracy and to the Federal judiciary, only to be 
corrected by the courts.
  For that matter, the President has already made a number of 
unilateral changes in U.S. immigration policy with disastrous results. 
We have seen literally thousands of convicted criminals released from 
U.S. custody, including those with violent records. And, of course, it 
wasn't that long ago that we saw what had been called a genuine 
humanitarian crisis unfold along the southern border in my State as 
tens of thousands of Central American children made a treacherous 
journey in order to cross illegally into the United States and take 
advantage of a loophole in a 2008 law that we tried to correct but 
couldn't even get a vote on it in the Senate.
  At the height of the crisis in early June, the New York Times told 
the story of a 13-year-old Honduran boy who was detained in Mexico 
while trying to reach the U.S. border, and his story was pretty typical 
of what we heard from many people. The Department of Homeland Security 
conducted interviews with many of the immigrants who came across at 
that time. ``Like so many others across Central America,'' the Times 
reported, this boy ``said his mother believed that the Obama 
administration had quietly changed its policy regarding unaccompanied 
minors and that if he made it across, he would have a better shot at 
staying.''
  In other words, the impression that we are not going to enforce our 
law is a magnet.
  I have no idea how this unilateral action by the President will be 
interpreted--granting legal status presumably to millions of people by 
the swipe of his pen. Will that be viewed as a green light for people 
who want to come to the United States from all around the world, 
saying: Well, if I can just get to the United States, President Obama 
will let me stay too.

[[Page S6007]]

  About 1 week later the Washington Post confirmed that the influx of 
unaccompanied Central American children is ``being driven in large part 
by the perception they will be allowed to stay under the Obama 
administration's immigration policies.''
  I mention these stories because they highlight the all-to-predictable 
consequences of failing to enforce U.S. immigration law.
  So much of law enforcement is the deterrent value--in other words, 
stopping people from breaking the law in the first instance, not just 
catching them after they actually break it. And sending the message 
``Get here if you can, and you might too be one of the ones who win the 
lucky immigration lottery and get to stay in the United States'' is a 
huge magnet for illegal immigration and it undermines--indeed, it guts 
the deterrent value of enforcing the law. And for what? The President 
reportedly, unless he rethinks this misguided strategy, will provide 
some form of temporary relief that will not even be able to be 
implemented before he leaves office in 2 years, with uncertainty for 
these immigrants and their families as to what is going to happen 
beyond.
  How he is drawing the line is beyond me. I read that apparently the 
reports that have been dribbled out in the press--and, of course, this 
town is famous for intentional leaks to sort of issue trial balloons to 
see how people are going to react. Well, if the trial balloons are 
correct, if the stories are correct, the President's order will cover 
roughly 40 percent of the people here in violation of our immigration 
laws--40 percent. So why did he decide to stop at 40 percent and not do 
60 percent or 80 percent or 100 percent? What about the people who have 
been waiting patiently in line, complying with our immigration laws? To 
have these other millions of people jump ahead of them and be given 
some form of legal status is not fair to them, and it certainly doesn't 
encourage people's compliance with the rules or the law.
  Then we have to look at who benefits the most. And I am not talking 
about the immigrants; I am talking about the criminal organizations. 
This is part of how they operate and their business model. Such 
criminal organizations will be the biggest beneficiaries of the 
President's Executive order, which would make it even harder for our 
friends in Mexico to reduce violence and uphold the rule of law. It 
would be like a pipeline of additional money and resources into the 
cartels. And the cartels don't care whether they traffic in children, 
whether they traffic in drugs or weapons. That is how they make money. 
That is why they exist. That is what they do. And this ill-advised 
action by the President would do nothing but ensure that a pipeline of 
money will continue to flow into these criminal organizations.
  Time magazine reported:

       Cartels control most of Mexico's smuggling networks through 
     which victims are moved, while they also take money from 
     pimps and brothels operating in their territories.

  Yet, again, President Obama just doesn't seem to care.
  He also doesn't seem to care that his Executive action would harm our 
opportunity to reform our broken legal immigration system. Republicans 
and Democrats alike have ideas for how to reform our immigration 
system, and many of them have bipartisan support. We do know that a 
comprehensive bill--we have tried to pass one of those for 10 years, 
and it hasn't worked, so it makes sense to me to try to break it down 
into smaller pieces and try to build consensus for those, get them 
across the floor of the House and the Senate and on the President's 
desk--even on a controversial subject such as immigration. Yet the 
President has now appeared to decide to trample the normal legislative 
process and to do immigration policy by fiat.
  What about the 60 percent who won't be covered by his Executive 
order? They don't get any relief under his Executive order. They are 
going to need to look to Congress to know what the rules are.
  So in the President's desperate attempt to placate some very vocal 
activist groups and to make up for years of hollow promises, he has 
decided to flout the rule of law and end up making real immigration 
reform that much harder to pass.
  I saw a Congressman from South Carolina, Trey Gowdy, who said: During 
the first 2 years the President had 60 Democrats in the Senate and 
controlled the House of Representatives. If immigration reform was such 
a priority for the President, why didn't he do that?
  Well, don't just take my word for it that this will make our job much 
more difficult.
  The junior Senator from Maine, an Independent but a Member of the 
Democratic caucus, said of the President's Executive amnesty: I think 
it will create a backlash in the country that could actually set the 
cause back and inflame our politics in a way that I don't think will be 
conducive to solving the problem.
  I mentioned a moment ago that the results of this anticipated action 
are all too predictable. So I would ask the President: Why in the world 
would you want to encourage children to make one of the most dangerous 
journeys from Central America through Mexico and be subject to the 
tender mercies of these cartels, which care nothing about them? Why on 
Earth would you want to establish yet another big incentive for people 
to enter our country illegally? And why on Earth would you want to help 
contribute to yet another humanitarian crisis on the Texas-Mexico 
border?
  I would urge the President, in the strongest of terms, to respect the 
rule of law and the democratic process and to give the new Congress 
that will convene in January a chance to do our job. I don't 
underestimate the difficulty of dealing with our broken immigration 
system, but I don't think we have a choice. We do not have a choice. We 
must. And it will not be something I will like 100 percent; it won't be 
something any Senator or Congressman will like 100 percent. But that 
shouldn't cause us to shrink from our duty.
  If the President is actually interested in having his last 2 years in 
office be more productive than simply a lameduck session, he needs to 
work with the Congress rather than go around Congress. I urge him to 
put the Constitution ahead of his campaign promises and to consider the 
likely human cost in Mexico and elsewhere of such a lawless policy 
change.
  Madam President, I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a 
quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Ms. Hirono). The clerk will call the roll.
  The bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Ms. MIKULSKI. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Ms. MIKULSKI. Madam President, a parliamentary inquiry: What is the 
pending business?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senate is in morning business.
  Ms. MIKULSKI. Madam President, I wish to speak on a legislative 
matter on which we will be voting later on this evening. I yield myself 
10 minutes.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator is recognized.

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