[Congressional Record Volume 164, Number 4 (Monday, January 8, 2018)]
[Senate]
[Pages S53-S59]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                                  DACA

  Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, I rise with my colleagues to offer 
remarks about the current status of the negotiations on the Deferred 
Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA Program, as it is known in the 
U.S. Senate.
  Unfortunately, this body still isn't closer to a legitimate and fair 
deal that accomplishes two goals: First of all, to promote and protect 
the interests of the American people in a lawful immigration system 
and, two, provide a fair and equitable solution on DACA.
  Back in December, I introduced a bill, along with Senators Cornyn, 
Tillis, Lankford, Perdue, and Cotton. The bill, with the acronym SECURE 
Act of 2017, was a product of months of discussion between this 
Senator, these other Senators I just named, and the White House. Our 
plan, simply put, has five pillars.
  First, based on the hard work and leadership of Senator Cornyn, our 
bill provided real, robust border security by mandating the 
construction of tactical and technological infrastructure at the 
border.
  Second, our bill took meaningful steps to end the lawlessness of 
dangerous criminal aliens by cracking down on sanctuary cities, ending 
the misguided catch-and-release policies of the previous 
administration, and, finally, taking steps to address intentional visa 
overstays.
  Third, our bill took steps to eliminate many of the ``pull'' factors 
that encourage people to immigrate illegally by permanently authorizing 
the E-Verify Program and by taking meaningful steps to reduce 
immigration court and asylum adjudication backlogs.
  Fourth, thanks to the leadership and advocacy of Senators Graham, 
Perdue, and Cotton, our bill eliminated the phenomenon known as chain 
migration and made a major downpayment toward transitioning to a merit-
based immigration system.
  Fifth, and finally, our bill provided a bipartisan solution to 
protect undocumented young people brought to the United States as 
children by adopting Senator Durbin's Bar Removal of Individuals who 
Dream and Grow our Economy--that has the acronym BRIDGE Act.
  Our plan was fair, serious, and bipartisan. Most importantly, it was 
and is pro-American. As I have continually said since the bill's 
introduction, this group of Senators is ready and willing to negotiate 
with our counterparts in good faith and to find an equitable solution 
to the DACA situation that incorporates our bill's five pillars of 
reform.
  I said negotiate. I had at least one Democratic Senator infer that I 
could not negotiate in good faith because I did not vote for the Gang 
of 8 immigration bill in 2013. So, sadly, our good-faith offers have 
consistently been rejected by Democratic leadership. Instead, they 
decide to engage in a game of brinksmanship.
  So I ask several questions: Why doesn't Democratic leadership 
negotiate with us? Because we refuse to simply pass what is referred to 
as the Dream Act, as is, with no proportional border security and 
interior enforcement majors. As the Democrats see it, it is take it or 
leave it, their way or the highway. This isn't good faith, this isn't 
negotiating, and that approach is doomed to failure.
  I have to ask: Why do my colleagues in the Democratic leadership 
refuse to even consider measures that would beef up border security and 
interior enforcement? Do they want people to continue to immigrate to 
this country illegally? Do they want sex offenders and human 
traffickers to continue to manipulate

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our porous border and enter our country unchecked? Do they want 
criminal illegal immigrants--people like Jose Zarate, who murdered Kate 
Steinle, or Eswin Mejia, who killed Sarah Root, to roam free in our 
country? Are they comfortable allowing criminal alien gangs like MS-13, 
whose motto happens to be ``kill, rape, and control,'' to continue to 
terrorize immigrant communities?
  I am assuming--in fact, I am hoping--the answer to all of these 
questions is a resounding no. If that is correct, then why does 
Democratic leadership refuse to discuss the border security and 
interior enforcement provisions in the SECURE Act?
  Despite the hysteria and the hyperbole you may hear from pro-amnesty, 
open-border immigrant advocates, the SECURE Act does not contain 
draconian enforcement measures. If anything, our bill contains the 
commonsense security and enforcement measures this body has been 
debating, discussing, and considering for years.
  Our bill adds new Border Patrol agents, U.S. attorneys, and judges to 
make it easier to apprehend, prosecute, and deport illegal entrants and 
criminal aliens. We authorize money for critically necessary port of 
entry and exit improvements so we can know who is here, how long they 
are here, and when they left--if they left.
  Our bill increases criminal penalties for human smugglers, these 
offenses that are committed by repeat offenders, often resulting in 
death, resulting in human trafficking, and including even sexual 
assault. We also increase penalties for criminal aliens who commit a 
crime of violence or a drug trafficking crime.
  Our bill makes clear that individuals who engage in acts of 
terrorism, criminal gang members, aggravated felons, and drunk drivers 
are not admissible to our country, and makes it clear that they can be 
put into expedited removal if they somehow make it into our country.
  Finally, our bill permanently authorizes the voluntary E-Verify 
Program, and it also provides incentives for employers to participate 
in that voluntary program. It doesn't make E-Verify mandatory. It just 
provides employers certainty by making the program permanent.
  I hope, as I described these things, they are seen as commonsense 
measures. Why would my colleagues on the other side ever want to oppose 
those provisions? It wasn't that long ago that many Democrats supported 
border security and interior enforcement. I would like to list some 
quotes from recent Democratic Presidents who supported some of these 
propositions.
  In his 1996 State of the Union Address, then-President Clinton 
championed his actions to crack down on illegal immigration. He proudly 
noted his administration was ``increasing border patrol by 50 percent . 
. . [and] increasing inspections to prevent the hiring of illegal 
immigrants.''
  In 2006, then-Senator, later President Obama spoke in favor of 
enhanced border security and enforcement measures. He acknowledged, 
even then, that ``we need tougher border security, stronger enforcement 
measures . . . [we] need more resources for Customs and Border Agents, 
and more detention beds.''
  When speaking in favor of the Secure Fence Act, Mr. Obama said: It 
would ``certainly do some good'' and would go a long way in 
``stem[ming] . . . the tide of illegal immigration in this country.''
  Do my colleagues no longer agree with former Presidents Clinton and 
Obama? Do they no longer believe we need to stem the tide of illegal 
immigration?
  My colleagues on the other side consistently talk about how DACA kids 
shouldn't be used as bargaining chips for any potential deal. What 
about the innocent American citizens they are using as bargaining 
chips? What about the thousands of victims every year of crimes 
committed by dangerous criminal aliens? Do the lives of these people 
not matter as well? Does the safety of these people, the happiness of 
these people, the well-being of these people deserve to be bargained 
away?
  This group of Senators whom I have named who are going to participate 
in this colloquy remain ready and willing to negotiate in good faith 
and to make tough sacrifices in order to find common ground on this 
issue. Our counterparts need to be willing to do the same. I am asking 
them, pleading with them, in all sincerity, to sit down and have an 
honest conversation.
  Let's strike a deal that is fair to all, including to law-abiding 
Americans. Any deal cooked up by this poor man's version of a Gang of 8 
that doesn't have real border security, doesn't have real interior 
enforcement measures, and doesn't have the other pillars of reform in 
the SECURE Act--well, it is pretty simple: That is no deal at all, and 
I will not support that.
  I yield the floor.
  I call on my colleague, the Senator from North Carolina, Mr. Tillis.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mrs. Ernst). The Senator from North Carolina.
  Mr. TILLIS. Madam President, before the chairman leaves the Chamber, 
I wish to thank him for his leadership as chairman of the Judiciary 
Committee. He has done an extraordinary job of bringing people together 
to really come up with a solution to this problem.
  This is a problem that has existed for years--almost two decades. The 
first DREAM Act was filed in 2001, I believe. It has been some 16 
years, and they have failed to produce a result. Now, think that 
through. That was through President Bush, and it was through President 
Obama. It was actually at a time when, in 2009, not a single Republican 
vote would have been necessary to pass the DREAM Act. Yet my colleagues 
on the other side of the aisle could not produce a result. So we know 
we need to do something different.
  There are things in the Dream Act that we need to file and put into a 
bill. In fact, it was instructed into a bill that I and Senator 
Lankford and Senator Hatch filed called the SUCCEED Act. It is a way to 
provide certainty for the DACA population, but it also needs to be 
paired up with reasonable border security provisions so that we get the 
broad base of support we need for enduring policy here.
  There are some people who are talking about withdrawing from 
negotiations and trying to threaten a government shutdown to get 
something slammed into a year-end spending bill. But if you really care 
about the long-term certainty that we want to provide these young 
people who qualified under the DACA Program, the last thing you should 
do is to play politics and get something half baked into a provision 
that will always be a target of the next year-end spending bill. Why 
don't we do something crazy and actually sit down, check our Members on 
the Republican side and the Democratic side who have extreme views on 
this issue at the door, and solve the problem.
  I have taken a lot of criticism after filing the SUCCEED Act because 
I had a lot of people who said that I was soft on immigration. Well, I 
respectfully disagree with some of my friends who are themselves 
Republicans and conservatives, because I don't think they have it 
right. I think that the young men and women who qualify under the DACA 
Program, who were brought to this country through the actions of their 
parents, through no fault of their own, deserve a respectful, 
compassionate, physically sustainable solution, and certainty. I have 
been working on it, and I have been taking the criticism ever since I 
filed the bill. I even had a congressional district in North Carolina 
censure me, saying, ``shame on you,'' for actually coming up with 
something that made sense.
  One thing that I said, though, when we filed that bill, is that what 
we did in the SUCCEED Act had to be paired with reasonable, sustainable 
border security measures and interior enforcement measures--things that 
are important if we want to make sure that a decade from now, 15 years 
from now we are not back here again worried about a new DACA population 
that has come across the borders.
  I have had some people insisting that having a secure border is not 
compassionate, that it is unfair, but I would actually submit to my 
colleagues that not having a secure border is irresponsible. Talking 
about not being compassionate, allowing things to occur with an 
unsecured border--to me, having a secure border is a hallmark of 
compassion. That is a little bit of what I want to talk about. So let's 
stipulate to that.
  Working with Senator Durbin--and, incidentally, Senator Durbin and I

[[Page S55]]

have been talking about this issue for about a year and a half--I knew 
that we were going to be here with the DACA Program and that we needed 
to work on it. So I reached out to Senator Durbin and said that I am 
willing to try to come up with something that makes sense, but we have 
to be willing to accept something different from all of the random 
ideas and come with a compromise. We made progress in terms of how to 
deal with the DACA population, but some of my colleagues on the other 
side of the aisle are unwilling to talk about the reality that we 
should also put into place, and pair with what we do for the DACA 
population, border security and interior enforcement that makes sense.
  Back in February I spent about a week down along the southern border. 
I was on patrol boats on the Rio Grande. I was riding horseback in 
certain areas of the border. I was out in the interior area where 
enforcement actions are taking place every night. I spent a lot of time 
down there. One thing that struck me was some of the briefings that we 
received from border security. I am going to get to what I consider to 
be the most heartbreaking last.
  We want to talk about what is going on. We have people come to this 
floor--my colleagues on the other side of the aisle--and say: We must 
do something to address the opioid epidemic in this country. I agree. 
That is why I voted for the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act. I 
spoke on the floor several times as a first step toward trying to get a 
handle on something that is poisoning almost 60,000 people a year--
killing them. They are dying from overdoses in this Nation. The reality 
is that the vast majority--and we will get to a slide in a minute--of 
those illicit drugs, including heroin and fentanyl and the other kinds 
of drugs that are extracted from opium and are killing people, are 
coming across the southern border. We simply don't have the resources 
at our land ports and in the areas where drug smugglers cross illegally 
to stop them. The consequence of that in a State like North Carolina is 
that more people are dying from drug overdoses today than are dying 
from automobile accidents--about 1,400 a year. It is even worse in a 
number of other States.
  We were at a land port in Laredo, and they were saying that on any 
given day, millions of doses are probably getting through because they 
are concealed. They are hidden in trucks. They don't have the capacity 
to inspect every vehicle. So they are coming across this border 
ostensibly legally--obviously, through the legal process of entry--but 
carrying illicit drugs, and we are only capturing a fraction of them. A 
part of what we are proposing in this bill is additional resources to 
interdict more of those drugs, to make it less likely that somebody 
could come across the border by use of a pickup truck or by using 
backpacks full of poison that will ultimately get into the blood 
streams of people who will ultimately die--many of them, tens of 
thousands a year. That is a case--a compassionate case--for border 
security.
  This is the number that I was talking about earlier: 15,469 deaths in 
2016 alone related to heroin. A lot of these are coming across the 
border. But only about 1.5 percent of all of the drugs that are 
estimated to come across the border are being seized today. How do you 
actually increase this seizure rate? You put the resources and 
authorities in place so that the Border Patrol and Customs and 
immigration resources down on the border can actually find them, and 
arrest, charge, convict, and incarcerate the people who are poisoning 
the men and women and boys and girls in this country.

  There is also another thing, and this is something that when I was 
down on the Texas border just stuck with me. I was on a 7,500-acre 
ranch, which is really, really small in Texas terms. I was talking with 
the ranch owner, who said that over the last 10 years, they had 
actually recovered 100 bodies on this ranch alone. If you do the math, 
that means they are finding a person who has died trying to come to 
this country illegally about every six weeks on this small ranch. Over 
the past 20 years, we have had about 10,000 people die crossing the 
border, and about 1,000 of them are children.
  If we had a secure border, at least we would have the knowledge and 
the situational awareness to know where these people are so that they 
don't languish somewhere in the middle of nowhere after they cross the 
border or after they have paid somebody $1,000, $5,000, or $10,000, in 
some cases, to carry them across the border. Then, they leave them. 
They take them across the border and then tell them that Houston is 
just a few miles away. Well, Houston is an hour-and-a-half plane ride 
away from where they cross the border.
  So we need border security for the protection of people who are 
making the poor decision to come across. If we have a secure border, it 
is much less likely that any of them will ever attempt to do it, except 
for the legal ones. Then there is the other thing that is happening on 
the other side of the border. The 10,000 people who have died over 20 
years are those whom we have identified--I am sure there are many more 
who we didn't--who were found on U.S. soil after crossing the border.
  One other thing I learned when I was down in Texas is about the 
criminal actions and the criminal gangs, basically--they call them 
plazas and cartels--that basically run every mile of the border. If you 
pass through one of those plazas and you don't pay the toll, you are 
likely going to die. In one case, there were 72 people who were 
murdered because the human smuggler failed to pay the plaza bosses the 
so-called toll when he was supposed to get them across the border. So 
they ordered the execution of men, women, and children just to send a 
message. This is one of the many examples that we have.
  So there is no question in my mind that of the 10,000 people who have 
died over the last 20 years on American soil, there were probably 
thousands or tens of thousands or more who have died in the hopes that 
they could get across the border.
  If we have a secure border and if we work on our immigration systems, 
we can get for those parents and people who want to come to this 
country legally an opportunity to get here without harming themselves 
or harming their children. If that is not a compassionate case for a 
secure border, I don't know what is.
  Now we are in the final stages of trying to negotiate a deal, and 
Chairman Grassley did a wonderful job of summarizing what we have 
proposed as a starting position for negotiation with our colleagues on 
the other side of the aisle. I hope they will be willing to come to the 
table and negotiate in good faith and recognize that their approach 
over the last 16 years has failed. They promised the Dreamers a 
solution, and they failed to deliver. They have failed to deliver under 
a Republican administration. They have failed to deliver under 
President Obama, when they had supermajorities. We are not going to let 
them fail this time.
  Giving the DACA population certainty, coming up with a solution that 
makes sense, getting a border that is secure, making sure that the 
poison that is coming across the border and killing tens of thousands 
of people a year is reduced, is, in my opinion, the scope that we need 
to negotiate to get to an agreement. If we have Senator Durbin, Senator 
Bennet, and others who have negotiated portions of the immigration 
issue open their eyes to the broader opportunity to come up with a 
balanced policy that addresses the concerns on both sides of the aisle, 
we can be the Congress and President Trump can be the President who 
actually solve this problem and, along the way, make it far less likely 
that it will be another problem for another Congress to solve 10 or 15 
years from now and that, then, may take 10 or 15 years to solve.
  This will have an enduring impact. This will have a compassionate 
impact. This will provide certainty to the DACA population. This will 
allow me to go home and say: I did something meaningful to secure the 
border and protect our Nation. But we have to have people come together 
and negotiate in good faith. It needs to start this week, and we need 
to continue it until we come to terms.
  People need to be willing to compromise and accept something less 
than perfect, because everybody's perfect conceptions of what we should 
do here have all one thing in common: They have all been resounding 
failures. They have been unkept promises.

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Along the way, our homeland is not as secure as it can be, and people 
are dying in the process. Hard-working people who are eligible for the 
DACA Program are uncertain about their future.
  So, again, I want to thank Chairman Grassley for his hard work and 
his leadership and willingness to engage. I want to thank the 
President. I was with the President for an hour and a half last week, 
along with Chairman Grassley and others. We are going to be meeting 
again in the White House tomorrow. Hopefully, we will be joined by our 
Democratic colleagues who have been invited to the meeting, and we will 
negotiate something that makes sense.
  Now is the time for us to deliver. The empty promises of the past are 
insufficient. We need to provide an enduring solution, and an enduring 
solution is a fair solution for the DACA population and a responsible 
solution for border security. If we do that, I think we will look at 
this as something meaningful--something the Presiding Officer and I did 
when we came in here in 2015.

  We got tax reform. That is meaningful.
  We have been promising immigration reform forever. This is not all of 
it. We have more work to do. But this is a big first step, and it 
requires bipartisanship, compromise, and a genuine commitment to 
negotiate.
  I hope my Democratic colleagues will take the invitation seriously, 
come to the table, negotiate an agreement we can all be proud of, and 
we can give the certainty that we should give to the DACA population.
  I thank the chairman for the opportunity to speak on this and for his 
continued leadership on this issue.
  Mr. GRASSLEY. Madam President, the Senator has been a leader on this 
with his separate piece of legislation for a long time.
  The next speaker is Senator Cotton; after that is Senator Lankford.
  In the meantime, I yield the floor to my colleagues as I have a 
meeting to go to.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Arkansas.
  Mr. COTTON. Madam President, I thank Chairman Grassley for his 
leadership on this issue and for offering the SECURE Act, which I and 
some of the other Senators have supported.
  I wish to continue this debate where Senator Tillis left off. We have 
heard a lot today about the so-called DACA Program, Deferred Action for 
Childhood Arrivals, and the negotiations in which we are currently 
engaged. Hopefully, those negotiations will reach a solution that will 
satisfy all the parties and give certain legal protections to the DACA 
population.
  We have heard a lot today about border security and the wall. I want 
to focus on one other element of a needed, negotiated solution, and 
that is chain migration--putting an end, once and for all, to chain 
migration. When you give legal status to an illegal immigrant, that is 
a permanent change in law; it will never be reversed. Therefore, you 
can't simply accept some window dressing at the border--1 year of 
funding for demonstration or pilot projects. You have to have a 
permanent change in return for a permanent change, and an end to chain 
migration will be one of the most important permanent changes to U.S. 
immigration law in 52 years.
  What is chain migration? Under the current law, which dates back to 
1965, if you are a citizen, you can bring any one of your relatives to 
this country, not just your spouse and your unmarried minor kids--your 
nuclear family--but also your adult kids and their spouses and their 
children and your adult brother and your adult sister and your parents 
and then their siblings and so on and so forth. That is why it is 
called chain migration. Each person is a potential link in a never-
ending chain. The vast majority of people who immigrate to our country 
legally every single year do so for the sole reason that they just 
happen to be related to someone who is already here.
  We have heard a lot of talk about the American dream in recent days--
that we are a nation of immigrants; it is part of our core, and that is 
absolutely right. We are a nation of immigrants. We are a nation where 
blood ties are not supposed to dictate the path of your life, where you 
can fulfill your dreams. But we have an immigration system that does 
the exact opposite--an immigration system that favors the ties of 
blood, the ties of kinship, the ties of clan, and the ties of tribe. 
What could be less American than that?
  As a result, we have also had a massive wave of low-skilled and 
unskilled immigrants, over the last 52 years. Today, of the million-
plus immigrants who come here every year, only 1 in 15 comes here 
because of education, job skills, or a job offer. That means we have 
thousands and thousands of workers, with absolutely no consideration 
for what it means for the workers who are already here--the workers who 
are American citizens, who are earning a wage. In many cases, the most 
recent immigrants are going to face competition from the next wave of 
unskilled immigrants, so we are putting downward pressure on their 
wages--the wages of people who work with their hands and work on their 
feet, who hold the kinds of jobs that require you to take a shower 
after you get off work, not before you go to work.
  Blue-collar workers have begun to see an increase in their wages over 
the last year for the first time in decades, and that is in no small 
part because of the administration's efforts to get immigration under 
control. But it is not enough to stop there.
  The real question is, who should our immigration system work for? It 
should work for the American people, the American worker. It should be 
crafted for their benefit, not for the benefit of foreigners. We should 
have an immigration system that fulfills the needs of our economy, that 
focuses on jobs and wages for American citizens here, whether your 
parents came over on the Mayflower or whether you just took the oath of 
citizenship last week. This is not some radical position. Liberal 
Democrats used to believe in that.
  I understand that in this debate most of the attention is focused on 
the population of about 690,000 illegal immigrants who came here, 
through no fault of their own, as young children 15, 20, 30 years ago. 
I think the concern for them is very understandable. President Trump 
has shown it. My colleagues have shown it today. I share it as well.
  President Obama did them a real disservice by unilaterally and 
unconstitutionally--therefore unsustainably--giving them legal status 
in this country to work. President Trump did the right thing by 
recognizing that President Obama lacked that authority and shouldn't 
have put them in that position. But nobody in the Senate--I think I can 
speak for my other 99 colleagues. Nobody is eager to see these people 
face deportation. Yet, at the same time, if we are going to give them 
legal status, we have to recognize that inevitably, as an operation of 
logic, there are two negative consequences that flow from that. You can 
say that you don't mind them, but you can't say that they don't exist.
  First, as you have heard from so many others, you are going to 
encourage parents from around the world who live in poverty, 
oppression, strife, and war to illegally immigrate to this country with 
their small children in hopes of giving their children American 
citizenship sometime in the future. That is dangerous, and, in my 
opinion, it is immoral to offer those kind of inducements.
  Second, as I have explained, you will create a whole new category of 
American citizens who can now get legal status for their extended 
families--to include the very parents who brought them here in 
violation of law in the first place. As part of this debate, we have 
often heard the old line that children ought not to pay for the crimes 
of the parents. Well, if that is the case, can't we at least agree that 
parents can pay for the crimes of the parents? They are the ones who 
created the situation in the first place.
  President Trump has said, as I have noted, that he wants to protect 
the DACA population. But at the same time, he has said repeatedly: We 
must build a wall and secure our border and end chain migration. I 
agree that we have to build a wall on our border.
  I have to say, it is a little amusing to see how our Democratic 
colleagues have changed their tune on this point. First, they were 
complaining for weeks that the President hadn't written a border 
security plan yet. They kept asking for a punch list. A punch list is 
what your contractor provides you when he is done building your home

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but not quite done with every single technical spec. The administration 
provided that to them just last week.
  Now they are complaining that it is too expensive: It is outrageous, 
in the words from the Senator from Illinois. I want to point out that 
although the President's proposal would cost $18 billion--it is over 10 
years, so $1.8 billion a year--the Senator from Illinois has proposed a 
naked amnesty bill that would cost $26 billion over 10 years. That is 
right; $18 billion is too much to secure our southern border to build a 
wall and provide more agents and buy more technology, but $26 billion 
to provide more welfare for illegal immigrants after they get amnesty 
is A-OK.
  I would also point out that a lot of Democrats supported the Secure 
Fence Act just over a decade ago--building over 700 miles the physical 
barrier on our southern border. Maybe I can propose new grounds for 
starting negotiations. How about we simply agree as a baseline that we 
will fully fund the hundreds of miles of physical barriers that the 
Senate minority leader voted for just 12 years ago?
  They also supported the so-called Gang of 8 bill 5 years ago, which 
also would have built hundreds of miles of physical barrier on our 
southern border. What has changed since then?
  All that being said, building a wall will help stop illegal 
immigration, but it will not fix all the problems to the law itself. 
That is why I have said, as the President has said, we also have to 
deal with that second consequence--ending chain migration.
  One trial balloon I have heard floated in recent days is that a 
negotiated piece of legislation could eliminate the immigration 
preference for the adult, unmarried kids of legal permanent residents, 
green card holders. That is perfectly fine. We should do that, for 
sure. But to act as if that alone would end chain migration is 
preposterous. It will delay a very small part of chain migration--only 
delay, only delay a very small part--about 26,000 of the more than 
300,000 people who come here a year through family preferences. It 
doesn't even touch the preference for the adult, unmarried children of 
citizens or parents or siblings of citizens and green card holders 
alike.
  In other words, once these young people in the DACA population become 
citizens, then they will be able to get legal status for their 
relatives, which means, far from stopping chain migration, it will 
actually accelerate the naturalization process and the chain we are 
trying to stop in the first place.
  The time has come to end this foolish, unwise, and, indeed, dangerous 
policy, as we saw just a few weeks ago in the most recent attempted 
terror attack in New York, which had at its initiating point someone 
who had come into this country because of chain migration. Not a single 
advanced, industrialized nation has such a lax immigration policy as we 
do when it comes to immigrant families--not Canada, not the United 
Kingdom, not France, not Germany, not New Zealand, not Japan.
  If we are actually going to fix this problem--if we are going to do 
right by the American worker, if we are going to promote the American 
dream and American ideals, then it is time for these mindless family 
preferences and chain migration to come to an end.
  I yield the floor, and I yield to my colleague from Oklahoma.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Oklahoma.
  Mr. LANKFORD. Madam President, it is an interesting conversation we 
can finally have about immigration. This has been that topic which has 
been discussed for a while but not settled.
  For 20 years, this body has talked about solving some of our 
immigration issues. National security immigration hasn't been a 
partisan issue until of late. Suddenly, when President Trump brings it 
up, we have a bunch of folks who used to be for border security but are 
now against border security because President Trump wants border 
security--with some of the exact same ideas that have been in the Gang 
of 8 bill or were in previous versions or were even talked about with a 
secure wall or fence before. Almost every Democrat in this body voted 
for the Secure Fence Act of 2006.
  It is interesting to me the number of people who contact us saying: 
We do not want to build a wall. I have said: What about the 650 miles 
of wall that already exists and was put in place after 2006, which, by 
the way, President Obama, when he was Senator Obama, wholeheartedly 
supported and voted for?
  This is suddenly a partisan issue. I am trying to help our entire 
body take a step back and say: Immigration should be a humanity issue 
and a legal issue, not a political issue.
  I had a conversation with a friend of mine this weekend. We have 
known each other for years. He is a pastor. We started talking about 
the immigration issue. In that dialogue, he said to me: In the church, 
we look at every individual as an individual created in the image of 
God, and the church has a ministry to be able to reach out, regardless 
of legal status.
  Then he said, right behind it: But, in government, we understand 
there is a different responsibility. The church engages with every 
person equally, but the government has the responsibility of looking at 
laws--what is legal and what is not legal--and helping abide by those 
laws and enforcing those laws.
  He is correct. There is an issue of humanity in this. These are 
people caught in a system, and oftentimes those children in the DACA 
Program are caught in a gap in which literally they have no home 
country. They were brought as infants or as young children with a 
parent who violated the law but did so with a child who came in and has 
now lived in the country, in some cases 20 years, and they know only 
this country. They are literally caught in the middle. While we have 
great compassion, we are walking this interesting balance between 
compassion for people, which we as a nation have, and also consistency 
with the law. The law applies to every person. Whether you are the 
President of the United States or an undocumented individual who has 
come in, the law applies to everyone.

  What do we do with this? The first thing I think we need to do is 
take a deep breath and pull the politics out of this and to say border 
security--in fact, security as a whole is not a controversial issue. I 
will tell you, as a U.S. Senator, I have the privilege occasionally of 
going to do interviews. Let me give you an example. CNN has a great 
studio in Washington, DC. When you go to the studio in Washington, DC, 
you go through the front door of a big building. There is a security 
person there, and they will check your ID before you go any farther. 
Not only will they check your ID, they make sure you are already 
preregistered to be there to visit with CNN because you can't just walk 
in. You have to notify them ahead of time you are coming, even if you 
are the person being interviewed. Then, there is a physical barrier 
between you and the elevators. Once the security guard clears you, you 
go through the physical barriers, but you can't go up the elevator 
because the security guard has to clear you to actually go up that 
elevator and punch in a certain code to go up to the floor. When you 
arrive at that floor, you are literally in nowhere land because 
everywhere around you are locked doors until someone comes in and 
clears you. You go to another security guard, and you sign in with that 
security guard, again check ID, and then you have an escort who takes 
you into the studio. That escort stays with you because as soon as your 
interview is done, they will smile at you and say: Your time is up. We 
are going to escort you out.
  It is a shame CNN has to do that, but they do because not everybody 
who walks through their doors means to do them no harm. There are some 
people who mean to do them harm, and it is right for them to keep that 
level of security.
  For that level of security that we talked about for CNN, all of us 
see that as rational--unfortunate but rational. I would say to us as a 
nation, why is that rational at CNN headquarters, and it is irrational 
for us to be able to do the same thing with our own borders? Not 
everyone who crosses our border is there to help us. We can all admit, 
there are some individuals--a few thankfully--who do mean to cross our 
borders and do us harm. We should be aware of that. We have half a 
million people a day who legally cross our border, our southern border, 
alone--half a million people a day who cross back and forth, who 
legally go through the system. They are doing commerce. They are 
visiting family. There are all

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kinds of individuals who move back and forth through our gates legally 
every single day. We should ask the question: Why are half a million 
people moving through legally but yet there are thousands and thousands 
who are moving through illegally? What is the difference, and should we 
ask questions of some of those people? Should there be a physical 
barrier in some spots?
  We have seen some places like in Yuma, AZ, when there wasn't a 
physical barrier and there is a large city right on the border and 
someone would cross the border quickly, commit a crime, and move right 
back across the border. When a physical barrier was put in place a 
decade ago in Yuma, AZ, the crime rate dropped dramatically in that 
area. The physical barrier helped and did reduce crime.
  I have had people say, if you build a 30-foot wall, there will be a 
31-foot ladder leaning against it. That is true, but it slows them down 
and gives enough time in remote areas or in heavily urbanized areas for 
people to be able to respond and be able to interdict those 
individuals. Walls don't stop people. They slow people down so you can 
actually do interdiction and ask: Why are you going over the wall 
rather than through the gates like half a million other people are 
doing today?
  Why is that happening? That is not unreasonable, but it has become 
heavily politicized. We need to step back and remove this from a 
conversation about Presidents and about political parties and move it 
back to some basic, commonsense things--things this Congress used to do 
with wide, bipartisan support--things like a physical barrier. There 
should be a wall in certain areas of the southern border that don't 
have a wall right now. There should be areas of technology in other 
areas. There should be an area to have watch towers with cameras that 
are there. We should add some additional personnel. We are talking 
about 3,000-plus miles on our northern border, 2,000 miles on our 
southern border. That is a lot of territory to be able to cover. Some 
of those areas don't even have broadband access to it, so just getting 
information to the agents who work there takes a very long time or is 
unreliable. We do need to have some technology improvements in some of 
those areas. Should every part of our border have a wall? No, I don't 
think so. It shouldn't all have a wall, but in heavily populated areas, 
it probably should because that provides greater security, quite 
frankly, on both sides of the border.
  Some of it is even more simple than that. There are areas where there 
are large amounts of cane that is growing up in the Rio Grande River, 
and the Border Patrol agents can't see on both sides of the river who 
is moving through because people can hide in the cane. Just eradicating 
the cane that is all through that area on the border, in the river 
area, would provide tremendous visibility. That would allow people to 
be able to see farther and, quite frankly, stop some of the drug 
movement and allow for more interdiction in those areas. It shouldn't 
be that controversial. That should be common sense--adding technology, 
adding sensors, adding greater visibility, adding a wall in areas where 
a wall is needed, and in other areas that don't need a wall, we don't.
  That is not just the issue. Some of the issue is fixing loopholes in 
the law that get exploited. There are some individuals who cross the 
border, and they know the rules. The coyotes in Central America who are 
actually humans smuggling them all the way through Mexico and getting 
them to the border have told them exactly what to say. When they 
encounter a Border Patrol agent, they say: Say these words, and you 
will get access to asylum, whether they are true or not.
  The way it typically starts is, they say those words the coyotes have 
told them to say, and they actually get a quick hearing and what is 
called a notice to appear for another hearing, which is usually 2 or 
2\1/2\ years later. They disappear somewhere into the American system, 
and we have no idea where they are. They are somewhere among 300-plus 
million Americans in some town, and we don't know where they are. The 
vast majority of them never show up for the court hearings, but they 
have a piece of paper that says ``notice to appear,'' which also means 
they are given legal protections until that court date, and they can 
move around the country.

  That is a loophole in our system. It should be fixed. Nowhere else 
would they do that. Why do we do that? We allow ourselves to be 
exploited. There are some words and phrases that we need to be able to 
clean up in the law and some things that need to be done. Again, that 
shouldn't be controversial. It should be security related. There should 
be some basic questions about how we are going to handle immigration.
  We allow 1 million people a year to become citizens of the United 
States legally--1 million people a year. Yet the American system is 
also ignoring hundreds of thousands of others who are coming into the 
system illegally and pretending it is not happening. It is. For 20 
years, this Congress has not paid attention to it.
  Say what you would like to about President Trump, but he is pushing 
this Congress to do something it has not done in two decades--deal with 
the issue of border security. This body will have to come to agreement 
on that. The House of Representatives will have to come to agreement on 
that, and the President will have to be able to sign it or it will be 
just another Executive action that will not last very long. If we are 
going to have lasting, real change in border security, it has to go 
through the legislative process.
  The President is pushing us to get that done before the first week of 
March. We had 6 months of time. Four months of that has already run 
out. It is time to get that document finished, to deal with the basic 
things the President has asked for--border security, a legal status for 
those individuals who are in the DACA Program whom the previous 
President just put into deferred action status--that we will not arrest 
them, but they are in some sort of legal limbo in between. President 
Trump wants to have a permanent answer for all of those families. 
Dealing with things on border security, not just the wall but the other 
exceptions to it. The President wants to deal with the visa lottery, 
which is a system where the names of 50,000 people somewhere in the 
world are just randomly drawn out of a hat to be able to become 
American citizens.
  Many of us said for a long time, that is a foolish way to do your 
immigration system. Our immigration system should be based on what we 
need in America--what jobs, what locations--rather than randomly 
pulling names of people around the world out of a hat. I understand 
there are millions and millions of people around the world who would 
love to be Americans, but in America, we want to be able to target 
those individuals who want to not just be Americans but want to be a 
part of us, not just culturally but economically, to be part of the 
fabric of whom we are, to make decisions for ourselves as a nation, and 
to do it not just in our own policy but also our own immigration 
policy. It is not too much to ask.
  There are basic things that should be done. Dealing with the DACA 
students who are literally caught in a place where they have no home is 
a compassionate thing to do, but along with our compassion, we also 
need to uphold the law. Those kids should not be held to account for 
what their parents did, but their parents should not have the same 
access to the American system of being naturalized as the kids do--only 
because the parents did intentionally violate the law. They chose to 
break the law and bring their child with them when they did it. The 
child didn't make that decision. Now they are growing up in a place 
where they have no country. They should have a shot at being in our 
Nation. I do not believe the parents of those kids--who broke the law--
should have that same access to our system. That may seem heartless, 
but I will tell you, that is the balance we have to have between 
compassion for people and upholding the law; that the law does apply to 
all people. Maybe there is a way to do some other work permits or some 
other things that could be there, but access to citizenship should be 
reserved for those individuals who are upholding the law, not violating 
it.
  There are some DACA kids who have done some remarkable stuff, some 
DACA kids who are pretty amazing individuals. I ask folks in Oklahoma 
when I am home, if I could identify for you 700,000 people somewhere 
around the world who speak English, who are excellent students, who 
have stood up

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every day in their school and pledged allegiance to the United States 
of America, who are in our military already, who are already working in 
our economy right now, are those the individuals you want to reach out 
to and be part of that 1 million people a year who become citizens? I 
have yet to have someone tell me: No, that is not whom we are looking 
for. Everyone says: That is exactly whom we are looking for.
  I get to smile at them and say: They are already here. They just 
happen to have grown up in this country already, but they have no home 
and would love to call this one their home.
  I would like to give them the opportunity to earn the ability to be 
naturalized--not automatic, to earn it--and go through the process, to 
get in line like every other person around the world, to get in line 
but not have to return to their home country because they don't know a 
home country, but get in line here to do it.
  There is a way to be able to do this. The President has been the 
first advocate for that. There is a way to be able to actually answer 
the problems we have dealt with for 20 years on border security so we 
don't continue to have another DACA Program in 5 years, in 10 years, 
and over and over again as we are right now. Let's solve it.
  Interestingly enough, in 2012, when President Obama announced the 
DACA Program, he made some pretty blunt, clear statements during that 
time period. One of them was, for individuals--this was in June of 
2012--who are already here, he set a date. He said: For those 
individuals, our Nation wants to provide an opportunity to not be 
arrested, and we will work on your status, but for any future 
individuals who cross our border, you will not have access to this 
program.
  That is President Obama who made that statement in 2012. While I have 
heard individuals say we should abide by the words of our Presidents, 
when President Obama made those statements to those kids in 2012, I 
would remind us as a nation, we should honor all of those statements, 
if we do any of those statements, including President Obama's 
statements saying that this will end, and people who are crossing our 
border will be returned to their home country.
  As he announced publicly, there is a right way to be able to do 
immigration. Let's do it the right way. We already receive 1 million a 
year. Let's do it the right way, and you will find a very welcoming 
United States of America.
  That is where I think we can go, and I hope in the days ahead we can 
finish out a negotiation and be able to resolve some basic things--not 
everything in immigration but at least the core issues of immigration 
and border security so we can resolve the issue not only for the kids 
in DACA but continue to be able to work on how we are securing our 
Nation for the future.
  With that, I yield the floor.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. HATCH. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.