[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 161 (2015), Part 4]
[House]
[Pages 5367-5368]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                       MIGRANTS ARE HUMAN BEINGS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Illinois (Mr. Gutierrez) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. GUTIERREZ. Mr. Speaker, this past weekend, we witnessed the most 
gruesome example of a story that is becoming ever more common. Hundreds 
of migrants are missing and feared dead--700 or more--because the 
smuggling boat they were packed onto capsized in the Mediterranean 
Ocean off the coast of Libya. It was on the front page of every paper 
around the world. An estimated 3,500 people died in 2014 while making 
the journey from North Africa to the southern coast of Europe.
  Right now, along our southern border, illegal immigration is at 
historically low levels, but we, too, have a border that is known for 
smuggling, tragic losses of life, and smugglers no less brazen and no 
less indifferent to the lives of their human cargo than those off the 
Libyan coast.
  With few legal options and with great opportunity for work and 
freedom on the other side, migrants throughout the world are risking 
their lives in the hopes of surviving the journey to live a better 
life.
  During the peak of illegal immigration to this country a decade or so 
ago, one person died every single day, on average, when trying to come 
to the U.S. They died of dehydration in the desert or died in trucks or 
in boxcars in botched smuggling operations or perished as stowaways, 
and those are the ones we know about.
  Now we hear about ``La Bestia,'' or ``The Beast,'' which is the train 
carrying migrants from southern Mexico to the border of our country. 
Think about hundreds of people, most of them children and teenagers, 
clinging to the outside of a moving train while they are preyed upon by 
smugglers, sexual predators, and every kind of deviant.
  The migrants who are fleeing violence and poverty and gang- and drug 
lord-infested communities in Central America, like those fleeing 
African and Asian countries, are willing to literally risk life and 
limb for the slim chance of a better life on this side.
  Europe is responding to the migrant crisis by committing to more 
rescue operations. The rightwing, anti-immigration parties across 
Europe see the crisis as validation for their call to build a big wall 
around ``fortress Europe.'' There are a few people here in this 
Congress, in this building, who want to build a wall just like theirs.
  Most people in Europe understand that building civil society and 
stable economies in the Southern Hemisphere is the best way to entice 
people to stay home. Foreign aid and international economic development 
are not dirty words in Europe the way they are here.
  In the U.S., the policies set in Washington directly relate to the 
instability of neighboring countries in Central America, the Caribbean, 
and Latin America. Trade policies initiated here in this country have 
had devastating consequences in rural areas across our hemisphere, 
driving people from the land and driving people into drug cultivation. 
It is our insatiable appetite here in the United States for illegal

[[Page 5368]]

drugs, funded with our dollar bills and enforced with U.S. guns, that 
creates and maintains a lot of the instability and chaos that drives 
people from their homes to America. Yet almost every budget that is 
considered in this Congress cuts mental health and drug counseling, 
addiction treatment and prevention, and does little to address our role 
in fueling instability.
  With specific regard to immigration and asylum, in this Congress, we 
are debating laws to make it harder for children to apply for asylum 
and laws to make it easier to deport children or to put families into 
lengthy and expensive detention.
  To add insult to injury, the Judiciary Committee just approved a 
measure to allow those who want to homeschool their children but who 
are prevented from doing so by their own government to be considered as 
a special class of oppressed victims to be considered eligible to apply 
for political asylum in the U.S. For the people from Germany and Sweden 
who want to homeschool their children, that is the kind of oppression 
that Congress responds to--people from Central America whose 
governments are unwilling or unable to protect children from murder and 
sexual assault, not so much.
  The reality is that we need to do more to engage and strengthen our 
neighbors; we need to do much more to make sure that the actions, 
trade, and consumption of our people are helping, not hurting; and we 
need to do much more to make sure that we have secure borders by also 
remembering to put doors on those borders so that people can come with 
visas in a controlled way and not risking their lives with smugglers.
  First and foremost, we must remember the message that Pope Francis 
reminded us of when he said of those who drowned in the ocean: ``They 
are men and women like us, our brothers seeking a better life, 
starving, persecuted, wounded, exploited, victims of war. They were 
looking for a better life.''
  Let us not forget that migrants are human beings.

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