[Congressional Record Volume 164, Number 23 (Tuesday, February 6, 2018)]
[Senate]
[Pages S622-S624]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              IMMIGRATION

  Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I said I wanted to talk about the issue 
our Democratic colleagues shut down the government over last month, and 
that issue is immigration and the path forward on DACA. DACA, again, is 
Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals. This is something President 
Obama did unilaterally, circumventing Congress, assuring that in a new 
administration, it would be called into question, not only in the 
courts but also by the new administration.
  President Trump, recognizing that the courts had effectively said 
what President Obama tried to do was illegal, basically continued it 
for a time to give Congress a chance to try to respond, and he has 
given us a deadline of March 5. I heard my friend from Illinois blame 
President Trump for trying to fix a problem that was caused by an 
overreach by the previous administration. Don't take my word for it, 
take the courts which struck down the DACA Program.
  President Trump has continued it long enough to give Congress a 
chance to fix it. That is the appropriate response. It is not helpful 
just to engage in the blame game. We actually need to step up and not 
just give speeches on the floor of the Senate; we need to actually 
enter into a good-faith negotiation.
  To date, President Trump has issued a reasonable framework that will 
not only give protection to those who were brought here illegally by 
their parents as children but also fixes other gaps in our broken 
immigration system--border security, the diversity lottery visa, and 
ensures that people who are waiting in line patiently can be unified 
with their family by narrowing the scope of family-based immigration in 
the future. That is prospective only. One proposal has been to plow 
those additional green cards into accelerating the passage of people 
who are patiently waiting in line--some as many as 10 and 20 years.
  President Trump has done something President Obama never did. He has 
offered 1.8 million young adults who are currently DACA recipients and 
DACA-eligible an opportunity to get on a pathway to American 
citizenship. That is three times more than the young adults who were 
addressed by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Program that 
President Obama did unilaterally. That is an incredibly generous offer.
  What has the President requested in return or in addition? He said: 
Secondly, I want to secure our borders, and I want to address legal 
loopholes in the current law. That is important because we have to 
protect our citizens and regain the public trust. One of the very 
reasons this President was elected is because people are angry that the 
Federal Government has failed them when it comes to securing our 
borders and enforcing our laws. I believe the second pillar of what 
President Trump has talked about, border security, is really a system 
of physical infrastructure--fence, walls, barriers--but also technology 
and personnel; that those

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are the three essential ingredients in border security. We have to 
ensure that people don't flout the law and enter the country illegally. 
We all know a porous border is an opportunity for drug traffickers, 
human traffickers, and other criminals to exploit our porous border. As 
I said, it is not one-dimensional, it is not just about a wall or a 
fence or a barrier, it is about technology, personnel, and physical 
infrastructure as well, and the President has acknowledged as much.
  I have heard our colleagues across the aisle bridle at what the 
President has requested in terms of not only a plan for border security 
but also for the funding. He said he wants $25 billion to make sure the 
Federal Government finally steps up and lives up to its responsibility 
on the border. It wasn't that long ago when the Gang of 8--Senator 
Durbin my friend from Illinois was one of the gang members--proposed 
and the Senate passed a bill by 68 votes that provided $50 billion for 
border security. It had other problems, but they were more than 
generous in providing for border security. Today they chafe and resist 
and refuse basically to negotiate on this item, when they voted for 
double that amount in the so-called Gang of 8 bill just a few years 
ago.
  The President's third pillar relates to what is known as the 
diversity lottery visa. Many, including the President, have questioned 
whether it makes sense to just give out 50,000 green cards a year based 
on a lottery--a game of chance. They have suggested and the President 
has proposed that we use those green cards to reward skill and merit.
  We ought to look at immigration as a way for us to attract the best 
and brightest, the people who have skills, talents, education, 
something to offer their new country when they come here. We don't have 
to end the diversity part, but we can add to it the skills that would 
help make our country better and allow these new citizens to contribute 
in a substantial way to their adopted country.
  The fourth pillar addresses family unification. I say ``family 
unification'' because I think the recently adopted alternative term of 
``chain migration'' has become a pejorative and oversimplifies a very 
complex area of the law. What the President has proposed is, in the 
future, we allow people to immigrate to the country based on family 
relationships, and we confine that to the nuclear family--mom, dad, and 
the kids. One suggestion has been that the green cards we would save by 
not allowing collateral family members to come in--married adult 
children, aunts, uncles, cousins, and the like, based strictly on the 
family relationship--we could plow those green cards back into the 
backlog because there are people who have been playing by the rules and 
waiting patiently in line, some for 10 or 20 years because of the caps 
we put on country immigration. Why doesn't it make sense to let them 
reunite with their family members even faster so they don't have to 
wait so long? I think that makes an awful lot of sense. During the time 
that backlog clears, there really wouldn't be any reduction in legal 
immigration.
  I don't know what the right number is for legal immigration. We 
naturalize roughly about 1 million people a year. I support legal 
immigration. I think it makes our country better, but I am not sure 
exactly what the right number is, and I am not sure exactly what the 
right formula is. A number of countries, such as Australia and Canada, 
look at the skills and merit-based system, in addition to family 
relationships. I think that makes a lot of sense to me.
  While we are continuing to have this discussion about what should be 
the long-term rate of legal immigration, it makes sense to plow these 
additional green cards--that will not be used prospectively by 
collateral family members based strictly on that family relationship--
back into the backlog and unify the families who have been waiting for 
their loved one who has been waiting in line, waiting to immigrate 
legally into the United States.
  One thing I really appreciate about the President's proposal is, it 
addresses shortcomings of the so-called Gang of 8 bill that was 
considered back in 2013. This is where I differ again from my colleague 
from Illinois. He celebrates the fact that they were able to get 68 
votes in the Senate, but it didn't pass the House, and it never got to 
the President. I am not sure that is a cause for celebration. What I 
would actually like to see is us take the President's four pillars and 
actually get a Presidential signature on a law that passes not only the 
Senate but the House and that the President will sign. I thought that 
was the goal, not just to go through some futile gesture or to pass one 
branch of the legislature only to fail in the House.
  The reason the Gang of 8 bill failed in the House was because it had 
some serious problems. It had no real objective metrics to determine 
where technology and infrastructure would be the most effective. It 
didn't allow the Department of Homeland Security to achieve 24/7 
situational awareness and 100 percent operational control of the 
border. It didn't adequately address the personnel and infrastructure 
improvements we know are desperately needed at our northern borders and 
our ports of entry.
  Finally, even though the Gang of 8 bill contains some provisions to 
address criminal gangs, drunk drivers, and aggravated felons, it also 
had generous waivers and still allowed some criminals to qualify for 
legal status. That didn't make any sense to me then, and it makes no 
sense to me now. Why would we allow people with criminal records to 
immigrate into the United States?
  Worse, the Gang of 8 bill didn't end catch-and-release of criminal 
aliens, and it did nothing to deter the influx of people who are 
exploiting a loophole in the law relating to unaccompanied minors. By 
way of contrast, the new White House proposal addresses these concerns 
in ways the flawed Gang of 8 bill did not, and I predict, if we embrace 
the President's four pillars and pass a bill that reflects those 
requirements, the House of Representatives could pass it, and the 
President would sign it, which would actually then provide a pathway to 
citizenship for 1.8 million young people.
  I don't know how some of our friends can look these young people in 
the face and say: We had the chance. You had the opportunity to receive 
one of the greatest gifts a human being could possibly accept, and that 
is a pathway to American citizenship, but we turned it down. Perhaps, 
we miscalculated, and we figured that, maybe, we can get it through the 
Senate but we can't get it through the House and we can't get a 
Presidential signature. So we ended up emptyhanded, and you remain in 
the same box you were in in the first place. How is that helping these 
young people? It is not.

  Well, the White House proposal closes loopholes in the current law 
that are being exploited by criminal gangs and human traffickers. Let 
me explain. Under the current law, if somebody is under 18 years of age 
and shows up at the border, the Border Patrol processes them, and then 
they are given to Health and Human Services. If they make a claim of 
some immigration benefit, they are given a notice to appear before an 
immigration judge, but the backlog there is so great that it could be 
years down the road, and then they are placed with a sponsor.
  Here is the problem. First of all, there is no adequate monitoring of 
these individuals to make sure they actually show up for their court 
hearing. Current law allows them to be placed with a sponsor that is 
not legally present in the country in the first place. There are no 
criminal background checks. So we don't know whether these 
unaccompanied children are being placed with people who would abuse 
them, traffic them, or recruit them into criminal gangs.
  In 2017 alone, the Department of Homeland Security apprehended 41,000 
unaccompanied minors across the southern border, and 37 percent were 
between the ages of 15 and 16, and another 32 percent were 17 years 
old. So we are not talking about young children. We are talking about, 
by and large, grown young men. As I mentioned earlier, this number has 
increased significantly, with more than 11,000 unaccompanied minors 
being apprehended in the last 4 months alone.
  They have figured this out. The transnational criminal organizations 
that traffic in human beings, drugs, weapons, and anything else that is 
worth a buck have figured this out. They have a loophole in the U.S. 
law that allows them to charge a fee to

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bring in these young men, who may or may not be a member of MS-13, one 
of the most violent criminal gangs in Central America. Now they are 
unfortunately in the United States, and there is no way for the U.S. 
Government to keep them out even if they are gang members, under 
current law.
  Well, I don't know how our colleagues who refuse to take up this 
issue and address it justify it. I just can't understand it. In my 
opinion, we have a real problem that our colleagues either don't want 
to fix or they are deliberately ignoring. We can't solve these problems 
by just putting our head in the sand and hoping that the problem goes 
away. It will not. This is just one example of a loophole, which a 
border security bill that I introduced months ago, called the Building 
America's Trust Act, would fix.
  So if our colleagues are serious about coming up with a solution to 
our immigration problems and providing a lifeline to these young adults 
who are DACA recipients and, indeed, everyone who is DACA-eligible, 
they need to work with us. They need to recognize the reality that 
President Trump has laid out a pathway for that to happen, but they 
can't just cherry-pick and pick the parts they like and ignore the rest 
and expect that we are going to get an outcome.
  Again, the basic failure in the Gang of 8 bill was that they got 68 
votes in the Senate, including $50 billion for border security, but 
they couldn't get it through the House and couldn't get it to the 
President for signature. I don't know how to sugar-coat it, but that is 
failure. That is not success. Success is to get a bill through both 
Houses and to get the President to sign it. President Trump has given 
all of us a map, a pathway for how to do that. To my knowledge, there 
has never been a counteroffer that addresses the four pillars that the 
President has proposed.
  Again, I think the people with the most to lose out of this 
proposition, in addition to the great American people, are these young 
adults who would benefit from the stability and predictability and a 
path forward and would receive a gift, as I said, that would be the 
greatest gift that any human being could possibly aspire to, which is 
the gift of American citizenship, eventually. But it is going to be 
squandered. The President's generous offer will be squandered because 
our colleagues don't like his proposal, but they are unwilling to come 
up with a counteroffer so that we can actually have a negotiation. The 
President, I am sure, would welcome that counteroffer, and we would 
too.
  We welcome an opportunity to actually get a result here, to make a 
law and not just go through a political exercise that is destined to 
end in failure and then become a political issue in the next election. 
That is not what we should be about here.
  So I hope that reality will set in. President Trump has offered a 
proposal. Our colleagues on the other side, who don't like the 
proposal, have not offered a counteroffer that meets the four pillars. 
They don't even want to pay attention to the last two--the diversity 
visa issue or the so-called family unification, sometimes called chain 
migration. They want to act like that doesn't exist, and I just don't 
get it.
  I come from a State of 28 million people, with 38 percent, roughly, 
of Hispanic origin. We have a 1,200-mile common border with Mexico. 
Texas taxpayers pay for the border security that the Federal Government 
fails to fund and facilitate. I want to see a solution. I am happy to 
vote in favor of a pathway to citizenship for 1.8 million people, but I 
can't go back home and look my constituents in the face unless I tell 
them that this is the last time we are going to have to do this because 
we fixed the underlying problem--border insecurity, gaps that are 
exploited by criminal gang members and the transnational criminal 
organizations that traffic in them, and these other issues that the 
President has put on the table.
  So I hope reality does set in because I really would like to get a 
bill that we could pass in the House and the Senate and get to the 
President for his signature and move on to these other important 
issues: How do we fund our military? How do we fund the community 
health centers? How do we provide some predictability to the rest of 
America that is being held hostage to this issue?
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Young). The Senator from West Virginia.

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