[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 160 (2014), Part 8]
[Senate]
[Pages 11731-11734]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                             BORDER CRISIS

  Mr. CORNYN. Shifting to a different part of my State where they are 
experiencing another type of crisis, every day this week I have come to 
the floor and spoken on President Obama's refusal to travel to the 
southern border of Texas where a humanitarian crisis continues to 
unfold. Those aren't just my words; those are the President's words--a 
humanitarian crisis.
  As I have said before, the President has been in Dallas; he has been 
in Austin, where he spent the night last night; and he is there this 
morning speaking, reportedly, on the economy. Why he persists in his 
refusal to travel to the border really is beyond my imagination. I just 
don't understand it. The fact that the President has himself described 
it as a humanitarian crisis makes this even more strange.
  People can infer whatever they want to about his potential 
motivations. I don't know whether it means he doesn't really understand 
it, whether his handlers have kept him in the bubble so much that 
simply the facts are not getting through to him or whether he is 
surrounded by political advisers who say: This is going to be a 
political liability for you, Mr. President. Don't travel there. If you 
show up and have your picture taken with these children who are 
traveling by the tens of thousands unaccompanied from Central America 
to Mexico, you will own the problem. I don't know whether that is the 
advice he is getting. Surely it cannot be that he doesn't care.
  But I will tell you that many of my constituents--Republicans and 
Democrats alike--and many of my colleagues in the Congress are 
wondering: Why would the President show such little respect for what 
the communities along the border are experiencing as they try to deal 
with this humanitarian crisis? Why would the President show such little 
respect for the Border Patrol, FEMA, and other Federal actors that are 
trying to help these communities deal with this crisis? It just does 
not add up.
  Since the President so stubbornly refuses to visit the border even 
though he is in Texas and has been there for the last 2 days, people 
have asked me: Well, if the President showed up, what would he see?
  First of all, he would learn this crisis is in large part a product 
of the President's own policy judgments, particularly starting with the 
ICE memo in 2011, the so-called Morton memo No. 1, then the Morton memo 
No. 2, and then the deferred action Executive order saying that certain 
young people would never be returned to their country of origin but the 
President will act alone to defer action against them.
  Then there is the continued discussion the President has here in 
Washington that says he wants to go even further. So I think one of the 
things the President would learn is that people actually pay attention 
to what he is saying. The impression is that he is not going to 
faithfully execute the law.
  So the children continue to come, and they will continue to come 
until we fix the problem. The President has to be an important part of 
that solution.
  As I have said before, these young children traveled through some of 
the most dangerous territory on the planet, because the smuggling 
corridors are controlled by cartels such as the Zetas and these cartels 
are in the business of crime--smuggling people, drugs, weapons, you 
name it--smuggling women for sex slavery and human trafficking. They 
don't really care about the human element. They care about the money. 
Migrants who travel across Mexico from Central America are subjected to 
rape and kidnapping--where they are held for ransom so their relatives 
will pay off the cartels to let them go and continue their journey. We 
don't know how many of the children that start this long journey from 
Central America--some 1,200 miles from Guatemala City to McAllen, TX, 
alone--how many of them die in the process and never make it. So the 
52,000-plus so far who have been detained at our southwestern border 
since October are the ones who made the trip successfully. We don't 
know how many children and their parents have died in the process.
  I do know--having traveled to Brooks County, Texas--that I have seen 
some of the grave sites of unknown migrants who have actually died 
trying to get through--to get past the Border Patrol checkpoint at 
Falfurrias, for example. So I am sure, tragically, that many migrants 
don't make it and die in the process.
  There is a powerful incentive for people to travel to the United 
States. Obviously, we understand people who want opportunity, people 
who are trying to flee violence. But the President has effectively 
encouraged children and their parents to make this treacherous, life-
threatening journey by suggesting that he won't enforce the law. The

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President himself admits that even under his deferred action order--his 
Executive order that he issued in 2012--these children wouldn't be 
covered, but they come because they have the impression that they will 
be allowed to stay once they make it here.
  The New York Times recently reported the story of one 13-year-old 
Honduran boy who was detained in Mexico trying to reach the United 
States. The Times reported that this young boy said his mother believed 
the Obama administration had quietly changed its policy with regard to 
unaccompanied minors and that if he made it across, he would have a 
better shot at staying. And, in fact, that is proving to be true.
  So many of these children are now, because of a 2008 law, placed with 
relatives here in the United States who themselves may not be legally 
present. They are given a notice to appear for a subsequent court 
hearing and the overwhelming number of them never show up. Having done 
so, they have made it because we don't have the resources. We certainly 
don't have the laws on the books necessary to fill this hole that the 
cartels are exploiting and that is what we need to work on together as 
part of this supplemental appropriation to try to fix. We cannot just 
vote for more money when the cause of the problem that needs fixing 
remains unfixed.
  The cartels are happy to tell parents: Yes, send your kids to 
America, turn them over to us, write us a check for $5,000--or whatever 
the amount is--and maybe they will be able to escape Central America 
and make it to the United States. For every one of the parents who take 
the cartels up on that deal, for every one of the children subjected to 
this horrific journey from Central America to the southern part of the 
United States, the cartels are making money. So as long as the hole in 
the 2008 law remains unfilled--and the President certainly hasn't 
requested we fix it, but we need to do that--we will keep spending 
billions of dollars, and we will continue to see the surge of 
unaccompanied minors continue to go up.
  In 2011 there were about 6,000 unaccompanied minors detained at the 
southwestern border. But just since October there have been more than 
50,000. So something is going on here, and this 13-year-old Honduran 
boy interviewed for the New York Times story said: ``Well, my mom 
thought President Obama was changing his policies and I would be able 
to stay if I made it.''
  Since the President decided not to make the short trip from Austin or 
Dallas to McAllen, TX, I wanted to share a few stories about what I saw 
there when I visited. I had a chance to visit the McAllen Border Patrol 
station, one of the busiest and most crowded of the facilities which 
are trying to deal with this surge of unaccompanied minors. I met 
another 13-year-old boy who had just arrived from Central America. We 
asked him to come out of the detention cell that was so jam-packed with 
teenage boys that nobody even had space to lay down and sleep. I hate 
to think about how unhygienic those circumstances are. But this young 
13-year-old boy--we asked him, through a wonderful young woman who 
works with me in my Harlingen general office in South Texas who asked 
him in Spanish: ``Where are your parents?'' He said, ``They are both 
dead.'' It was heartbreaking. I think the President would benefit from 
seeing and talking to young victims of this trafficking like this 
Honduran boy.
  As I said, inside these facilities there are dozens of children 
packed into holding cells, with one toilet, that are meant for just a 
few people. There were young women only 15 years of age who were 
pregnant, some of whom already had babies that they were nursing. The 
babies were clothed only in diapers and sleeping on cement floors. 
Unless you see it for yourself, I don't think you get a full 
appreciation of the nature and scope of this process. That is something 
I think the President could benefit from.
  Conditions are so bad they are housing people in a garage at the 
Border Patrol facility. I don't have to tell the Presiding Officer, but 
it is hot in Texas in July, and you can imagine what the conditions are 
like in that garage. There must have been 100 people basically sitting 
or standing on that garage floor because they simply don't have the 
capacity to deal with them. They simply don't have the capacity to deal 
with them, and they certainly don't have the capacity to deal with the 
numbers that are coming through.
  I wish to do something that I wish the President of the United States 
would do in person by traveling to McAllen. I wish to thank the Border 
Patrol and the leadership of Chief Kevin Oaks, who has been doing a 
magnificent job under very difficult circumstances. I thank all of the 
Border Patrol--FEMA and other Federal employees--who are down there 
trying to help the local community and the State of Texas deal with 
this crisis.
  Chief Oaks has maybe one of the toughest jobs on the planet these 
days. He is in charge of Rio Grande Valley sector. It encompasses more 
than 1,700 square miles in 19 Texas counties. It shares 320 river miles 
with Mexico and 250 coastal miles. This is the sector through which 
this flood of humanity is coming. They have detained 418,000 people 
last year alone. That number is growing, and they are mainly coming 
through the Rio Grande sector--418,000 people from 100 different 
countries.
  If you go to Brooks County and look at some of the rescue beacons--
they have actually put out rescue beacons. If an immigrant is so sick 
or suffering from exposure or dehydrated, they can hit the rescue 
beacon and a light will go off and the Border Patrol will rescue them. 
If they are at risk of losing their lives, sure, they may not want to 
be caught, but they would rather be caught than die due to exposure. 
Those rescue beacons are not just written in Spanish and English, they 
are also written in Chinese.
  Yesterday I said I don't know a lot of Chinese speakers from Brooks 
County, TX. It is a small rural county. The reason that rescue beacon 
is written in Chinese, among other languages, is because people can 
come from all over the world through the southern border of Mexico into 
the United States. There were 418,000 people detained from more than 
100 countries. Admittedly, most were from Mexico and Central America, 
but they also come from nations that are state sponsors of 
international terrorism, which is why General Kelly, the head of 
Southern Command, said this is a national security threat.
  The President would learn more about this if he took the trouble to 
go to the border and talk to people such as Chief Oaks and learn of the 
challenges they dealing with day in and day out. They are doing the 
best they can, but they simply don't have the resources or the manpower 
to handle this influx, particularly of unaccompanied children.
  I am told that because the Border Patrol has to deal with these 
children and make sure they are taken care of--which they should be--
they are not interdicting illegal drugs coming across the border, and 
that should concern all of us.
  I ask unanimous consent for an additional 5 minutes.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Booker). Without objection, it is so 
ordered.
  Mr. CORNYN. I thank my colleague from Maine for his courtesy.
  This is something I hope my colleagues who have not spent as much 
time thinking about this--and that is logical because they don't come 
from a State contiguous to the Mexican border or Central America and 
South America, but they need to know the facts, that these areas are 
now controlled by cartels and transnational criminal organizations.
  One official from the mayor's office in Ciudad Hidalgo, Mexico, 
reported--when talking about the cartels that control the smuggling--
that in his city ``the Zetas control all trafficking, sending men to 
recruit women in Central America and sometimes even kidnapping migrant 
women riding the buses. They sell the women to truck drivers for a 
night and then throw them away like unwanted scraps.''
  The bottom line is there is nothing humane and nothing compassionate

[[Page 11733]]

about encouraging people to travel through cartel-dominated smuggling 
routes in hopes of reaching the United States only to find out our law 
does not permit them to stay. There is nothing humane about that. There 
is nothing compassionate about that. Yet that is the impression. Nobody 
should be traveling to America this way and especially not young 
children.
  This is something the President of the United States needs to see. If 
it is serious enough for him to call this a humanitarian crisis and ask 
Congress to appropriate more than $3 billion on an emergency basis to 
help pay for additional capacity, it is serious enough to warrant his 
personal attention. I just don't get it. I really don't.
  I had an occasion to work with President Obama when he was in the 
Senate. I see him less often now that he is over in that big house on 
Pennsylvania Avenue, but that doesn't strike me as who he is. I wonder 
what in the world could be going on. Is he too wrapped up with living 
in his bubble? I guess all Presidents have experienced that. He needs 
to break out of the bubble and find out what is actually happening on 
the ground. At the very least, I would think the President would want 
to take the opportunity to say thank you to Chief Oaks, the Border 
Patrol, FEMA, and other Federal agencies that are trying to help local 
communities.
  The invitation still stands. I think the President is still in Austin 
speaking at the Paramount Theater in my hometown where I live now, but 
he is talking about the economy instead of talking about this crisis. I 
bet the invitation still stands for him to take the short trip to 
McAllen and about an hour out of his day to say thank you to the Border 
Patrol and other Federal agencies and see for himself this unfolding--
and I would say escalating--humanitarian crisis.
  I thank the Chair and the Senator from Maine for his courtesy.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Maine.


                             Infrastructure

  Mr. KING. Mr. President, a few years ago Tom Brokaw wrote a brilliant 
and important book called ``The Greatest Generation,'' and he described 
our fathers and grandfathers and mothers and grandmothers and what they 
did for this country by coming through the searing fire of the Great 
Depression, fighting and winning World War II, and then rebuilding our 
economy in the 1950s. We owe that generation everything we have. That 
generation sacrificed--I have to repeat that word ``sacrificed''--on 
our behalf. We are literally standing on their shoulders. We are 
driving on the highways they built. We enjoy our freedoms because of 
their sacrifice in World War II and in Korea.
  If Tom Brokaw writes another book about us, I don't know what it will 
be called, but it will not have ``greatest'' in the title. Instead of a 
compliment, it would be more of an epithet. We are leaving our children 
a gigantic national debt, crumbling infrastructure, and a changing 
climate that threatens their well-being and future opportunities in 
this country.
  I rise to talk about one of those factors; that is, infrastructure. I 
had a great insight when I was the Governor of Maine because every year 
Governors go to New York to go through a ceremony of genuflecting and 
kissing the ring of the rating agencies in order to try to get our 
States a high bond rating so they will have a low interest rate on 
their loans. I was all prepared for my meeting with the rating 
agencies. I had all kinds of data about how prudent Maine was, how low 
our debt level was, how we paid it off in 10 years, and how low our 
debt level was per capita. I was in the middle of this presentation 
when one of the rating agency officials stopped me and said: Governor, 
just because you have low debt, if you are not fixing your 
infrastructure, that is debt just as if it is debt on the books, just 
as if it is dollars you owe because the infrastructure is eventually 
going to have to be fixed. Of course, when it is fixed, the later you 
do it, the more it is going to cost. That was an insight for me.
  We have this sort of mental bookkeeping where we have the dollars we 
owe, but we don't think about a bridge being fixed as a form of debt. 
Yet that is exactly what we have in this country. We are handing our 
children a gigantic debt on all fronts because we are unwilling to pay 
the bills.
  I had another exchange once with a fellow who was a clerk in a 
hardware store. This was in the early 2000s, and I said: What do you 
think of the tax cuts we recently passed? I was just making 
conversation.
  He said: There haven't been any tax cuts.
  I said: What are you talking about? You see it all over the news. 
There are all these tax cuts we just passed in Washington.
  He said: No. No, we haven't passed any tax cuts.
  I said: Don't you watch the news?
  He said: Look, if you pass tax cuts when you are in a deficit 
situation, all you are doing is borrowing more money and your kids are 
going to have to pay for it with interest, so you are merely shifting 
the taxes from us to them.
  I had never thought about it that way before. Of course, he was 
exactly right. If we cut taxes and cut expenditures at the same time, 
OK, that is legitimate public policy, but if we cut taxes and borrow 
the difference, we are just shifting the cost to the next generation, 
and that is what we are doing right now, today, and we are doing it on 
all fronts. We are doing it in our Federal debt and deficit posture, 
and we are doing it in our infrastructure posture.
  This is going to cost all of us. The subject I am addressing--which I 
neglected to clarify at the beginning--is the fact that the highway 
trust fund goes broke in just a few weeks.
  Funding from the Federal Government for highways for infrastructure 
around the country will decline precipitously starting in August, and 
around here we are about a patch, about something that will get us 
through 2 or 3 months or maybe 8 months, but nobody is talking about 
solving the problem. Everybody is talking about all of these convoluted 
ways to avoid the reality that we need to pay for what we do. We need 
to pay for our highways, for our roads, for our bridges, and right now 
we are not doing it.
  This is really going to hurt Maine. The estimates from our Department 
of Transportation is that it is going to cut our highway funding in our 
State by 17 percent--almost 20 percent. It is particularly going to 
hurt if we don't do something in the next month because we have a short 
construction season. If we lose our funding between August and October, 
we have effectively lost it for the next 8 or 9 months. It is going to 
impair projects that are ongoing, and it is going to essentially 
eliminate--across the country--new highway and infrastructure projects.
  By the way, if you are the head of the Department of Transportation 
and your funding is going to be cut, what are you going to do? You are 
going to maintain, not invest. Maintaining is the bare minimum, but it 
is not investing because investing is where we have our wherewithal to 
compete in a global economy.
  It is very revealing to me to compare the funding levels of our 
infrastructure, maintenance, and investment with other countries. That 
is a fair comparison. It sort of tells us how we are doing. It puts it 
in perspective. Right now our infrastructure investment is about 2.6 
percent of gross domestic product--2.6 percent of GDP. In Japan it is 5 
percent and in China it is 8.5 percent. It is more than three times the 
level in our principal future economic competitor. They are investing, 
and we are disinvesting because the infrastructure is crumbling faster 
than we are fixing it.
  The joke in Maine this winter was the potholes were so bad that 
instead of filling them, we were going to lower the roads. That is a 
joke, but it says something about the seriousness of this issue. Maine 
is no different than any other State. In fact, I would argue we have 
some of the best roads in the country, particularly given the farflung 
nature of our State, but this is going to hurt us. It is going to hurt 
every State in the country. Yet we are around here trying to avoid 
talking about paying for them.
  There are indirect and direct costs. Not fixing the highways is 
costing our

[[Page 11734]]

drivers more than an increase in the gas tax in terms of delay, in 
terms of maintenance of automobiles, in terms of bent wheels from 
potholes.
  I talked to some people from the United Parcel Service, UPS. As to 
their fleet nationwide, a 5-minute delay per vehicle--because of 
congestion, because of lack of infrastructure investment--costs that 
company $100 million a year--a 5-minute delay. Multiply that by 
everybody in the country and we are paying a high price.
  The point is, we are paying a high price, but it is hidden. We do not 
notice it. If we increase the gas tax, everybody is going to notice 
that. But that is called paying your bills.
  As a young man, I represented a client before the Maine legislature 
that was an engineering firm that was owed a bill by the State of 
Maine, and for some reason it had not been taken care of. I ended up 
appearing before the appropriations committee. This was 40 years ago. 
But I remember distinctly going before the committee and saying: Here 
is this bill and it has to be paid, and the members of the committee--
by the way, the senior members were all Republicans--they looked at 
each other and said: We have to pay our bills. That is called 
governing, and right now we are not paying our bills. It seems to me 
that is what we have to do.
  One interesting thing about the gas tax is--which, by the way, has 
not been increased since 1993, 21 years ago; it has fallen in value by 
something like 35 percent because of inflation over that period--but 
the interesting thing about the gas tax is, it is the only tax that is 
not effectively indexed. By that I mean the sales tax, which many 
States have--my State does--5 percent. You say: Well, that is fixed 
over time. It is not indexed. But it is because the value of goods to 
which the sales tax applies goes up over time. On a hundred-dollar 
tire, the sales tax, at 5 percent, is $5. But 5 years from now, that 
tire is probably going to cost $110, so it is going to be higher 
revenue. It is the same thing with the income tax. It may be at a flat 
level--22 percent or 15 percent or in Maine 5 or 6 percent--but incomes 
go up, so revenues go up proportionately to the changes in the economy.
  The gas tax is a fixed number--18.4 cents. That is what it has been 
since 1993. It does not change at all. Do you think, Mr. President, the 
cost of building a road is the same today as it was in 1993--21 years 
ago? The answer is no.
  We have to grapple with this. To me, what bothers me about this is it 
is part of a pattern. I started with Tom Brokaw and the ``greatest 
generation.'' If you think of the legacy that ``greatest generation'' 
left us--because they were willing to make sacrifices on our behalf--
and then you say: What is the legacy of our generation? it is debt and 
it is crumbling infrastructure and it is the crippling of our ability 
to compete in a globalized economy. Shame on us.
  I do not know exactly what the answer is. I do not know whether it is 
a gas tax, a mileage tax, a change of the tax to the wholesale level as 
opposed to the retail level. I do not know. But I do know that no 
matter what we do, and no matter how much we try to avoid it, we are 
going to have to pay our bills; and to not pay our bills, we have to 
realize, is simply passing those bills to our kids. That is unethical. 
It is immoral, it is wrong, and it is not what our parents and 
grandparents did for us.
  I think we owe the same level of consideration, the same level of 
sacrifice, the same level of realism, the same level of paying our 
bills to our children and grandchildren that we have been the 
beneficiaries of.
  So I hope, as this debate unfolds in the next several weeks, that we 
pay attention to the critical importance infrastructure plays in the 
competitiveness of our society and in the future of our children. The 
``greatest generation'' built the Interstate Highway System, and we 
cannot even keep it maintained. That is inexcusable. It is inexcusable, 
Mr. President, and I am sorry to be so preachy about this, but I think 
this is a really important issue, and I think it goes in some ways to 
the heart of our politics today where we are trying to do things and 
accomplish things but not pay for them. The point of my comments, 
though, is: They are going to be paid for; it is just going to be 
somebody else, that is, our children and grandchildren, who are going 
to be paying that bill. I think we ought to stand up and pay the bills 
ourselves and maintain the infrastructure this country needs to compete 
and give the same opportunity to our children and grandchildren we were 
given by the ``greatest generation.''
  Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Will the Senator from Maine withhold his 
suggestion?
  Mr. KING. I withhold my suggestion.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from North Carolina.

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