[Congressional Record Volume 170, Number 3 (Monday, January 8, 2024)]
[Senate]
[Pages S7-S8]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                              Immigration

  Mr. DURBIN. Madam President, you know as well as I do what is 
happening in our home State of Illinois when it comes to the migrants 
that are being bussed from Texas, primarily, into our State--the impact 
it has had in the State and in the city of Chicago, in particular. 
These migrants are arriving in the city without any consultation or 
warning and are being dumped in places near the city, totally 
unprepared to face the cruelty of the winter that we are facing in 
Chicago.
  I am amazed at the number of people who have shown extraordinary 
caring and have stepped forward to try to help. I thank Catholic 
Charities, Salvation Army--there are so many groups. There is a New 
Life Center, Matthew DeMateo--extraordinary, just a miracle worker. He 
manages to find a way to put a roof over the heads of those migrants 
that come to our city and give them a fighting chance to have a decent 
life. So many more just like him prepare to step up and provide 
shelter, provide basic clothing, food, accessibility to schools, and 
more.
  I really want to commend the mayor as well. Brandon Johnson has taken 
an approach toward this which I think is humane and consistent with the 
traditions of America. He shows a caring heart time and again, and I 
respect him so much for it.
  Recently, the city of Chicago tried to put some order into this 
disorderly process, identifying times and places where the buses could 
stop so that people could be received properly, cared for, and go about 
their lives as best they could.
  But, unfortunately, there has only been one example of cooperation by 
the State of Texas. There are plenty of examples the other way--people 
who are sent to airports in Rockford where they are dumped out of 
airplanes on the tarmac with no place to turn; people who are put in 
suburban towns and rural areas, which even if they wanted to help, 
would be so limited to what they could do.
  We understand the politics of the situation better than most. We do 
politics for a living. But there are a lot of people who are helpless 
and victims of this situation who need to be taken into consideration.
  The city of Chicago gave the Texas Governor a safe, convenient, 
accessible option to drop the migrants off at a warm shelter for 
orderly processing, but only one bus from Texas has attempted to 
register with the city. The Texas Governor has chosen cruelty and chaos 
over orderly and humane processing.
  I don't understand the politics of that moment. These people are as 
vulnerable as any people on earth. They are doing the best they can for 
themselves, and they are in a situation where they need a helping hand 
in many instances.
  Last week, my colleagues in the Senate were working on a negotiated 
border compromise to deal with the policy and law on the border. I 
support that completely. I don't know what the final product will be, 
and I am hoping to support the bill. This process is long, long 
overdue.
  I made immigration one of the issues of concern for my services. I am 
the

[[Page S8]]

original author of the DREAM Act that was part of the Gang of 8 10 
years ago that passed legislation--bipartisan legislation--on the floor 
of the U.S. Senate. I believe that it is important--it is inevitable--
that we deal with this in a humane and thoughtful way.
  And let me say a word about what is going on at the border. I believe 
in the asylum process. If you are a student of history, you know that 
during World War II, the United States had a policy of turning away 
refugees.
  There is the well-publicized and notorious example of the SS St. 
Louis, a ship which came from Europe and tried to find a port to 
disembark in Havana and in Florida and failed. The passengers were 
returned to Europe--some 700 of them--many of whom died in the 
Holocaust. They were Jewish people looking for a safe place in the 
world where they could live, and we turned them away in World War II. 
That is a fact.
  But at the end of the war, we decided there would be a different 
approach in the future. We would have an orderly international process 
led by the United States when it came to refugees. And we established 
that and lived with it under Presidents of both political parties for 
decades.
  The situation we face at the border today defies what I just 
described to you: the desperate people, in numbers we can handle, 
coming into the United States through an asylum process. What we are 
facing now is just not comparable at all. The thousands and thousands 
of people who are turning up at our borders each day are unsustainable.
  There was a story in the New York Times this morning about the number 
of immigrants who are coming to our southern Mexican border from 
Africa--Africa. And they told a story about a group of people in 
Guinea, Africa, who found a way to travel from Guinea to Turkey, then 
to fly from Turkey to Colombia, then from Colombia to Honduras, and 
then to Nicaragua, where they were transported to the border.
  This defies a stereotype in our mind about where the refugees are 
coming from in Central America. In this last year, more than 10,000 
people from Uzbekistan showed up at our southern border in Mexico. How 
do you explain this?
  Well, one explanation is pretty obvious. We have a refugee crisis in 
this world, the likes of which we have never seen and in numbers from 
all over the world--hundreds of thousands of people who are desperately 
looking. Today, there are over 100 million displaced people worldwide, 
including over 30 million refugees. It is the largest refugee crisis in 
history. That is the starting point of this conversation.
  The second point is equally important. Many of these people have 
found their way to the United States through international groups, some 
of them for very sinister purposes, who are trying to make a lot of 
money on helpless people by promising them they could get into the 
United States and have a much better life. These people are being 
exploited in Africa, in Asia, and around the world, and we have to deal 
with this seriously. They are not the ordinary course of refugees 
coming to the United States. They are overwhelming numbers that have 
completely bankrupted our system in its response.
  I hope this bipartisan group finds a way to deal with it and to 
resolve it in a humane fashion; and I am open to any suggestion. In the 
meantime, I want to commend the people in my State--the mayor and 
others, who are stepping up to do their very best to be humane and 
American in their response. Many of us can trace our own immigrant 
roots back one generation or two. I am certainly one of those. My 
mother was an immigrant to this country. I have met with these 
immigrants from all over the world and all over the United States, and 
I have talked to them. And, although I say to them the situation at our 
border is not sustainable, it has to change, and we can't deal with the 
massive numbers that come our way, I look at each one of them and I see 
in their eyes the eyes of my own family making that decision to come 
here, desperately trying to get to the United States. It is a natural 
human instinct.
  But we need an orderly process. The bill that we passed, the 
Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act, established such a process. We 
took the 11 million people undocumented in the Nation, and we said to 
them: Step forward, identify yourself, register yourself, pay your 
taxes, and go on working. Realize at a future time, many, many years 
from now, you may be eligible for legal status and even citizenship. 
That was part of the promise. And we need to establish such an approach 
today to find a way to deal with those who are here and those who want 
to stay here and are of no danger to the United States.
  The fact is, we cannot absorb all the people in the world who want to 
come to the United States at this moment. It is just not practical. It 
is not humane even to think in those terms. But those who are here 
should be brought in and assimilated into this country. If they are 
here and are no danger to our country, they can be an important part of 
our future. We need them in so many different ways.
  The Presiding Officer and I know about the agricultural community in 
our own State who have come to us desperate. These are conservative 
individuals politically who see the reality that our workforce is not 
adequate for our economy and the birthrate is not sufficient for us to 
sustain a new population of workers.
  Let's find a thoughtful way to deal with this, stop overwhelming the 
border, and have an orderly process. That can be done, but it has to be 
done on a bipartisan basis.
  Some of the people involved in this process have said publicly they 
don't want to find a solution, that they have too good a political 
issue. I hope that they are wrong. I hope that we can find a solution 
on a bipartisan basis that serves our Nation and that serves the world.
  We need an orderly process. It took 3 to 5 years over in Europe for 
them to come up with their own process. We need to find our own way of 
doing so. I am willing to work with them as chairman of the Judiciary 
Committee and with my background on immigration issues, if there is 
anything I can add to the process.
  I hope that this week, we will receive a report from this bipartisan 
committee that moves us in a direction of an orderly process at our 
border while not being overwhelmed with numbers that are unsustainable.
  I yield the floor.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Wisconsin.