Madam President. the Senate Judiciary Committee passed a strong bipartisan. comprehensive reform bill last week. and Members on this side of the aisle believe it deserves an upordown vote on its own terms. Unfortunately. we have gotten bogged down instead on procedural issues. But the vote we cast this morning for or against cloture is not just a procedural vote: the vote we cast today is a vote on how to reconcile Americas history and its heritage as a nation of immigrants with todays crisis of undocumented immigration. It has been said many timesand it bears repeatingall in this room are descended from immigrants. Immigrants signed the Declaration of Independence and they wrote the Constitution of these United States. Immigrants settled our frontiers. they built our great cities. and they fueled our industrial revolution. Our history is a nation of immigrants. but that history has a dark side as well. Millions of Africans were brought here in chains. immigrants in a technical sense. but forced for generations to labor as slaves. our great national shame. Millions of other immigrants fared only slightly better: the Chinese coolies. who worked 18 to 20 hours a day to build our railroads under deplorable conditions. the Mexican braceros. who were actively recruited by the United States Government to labor in our fields but were systematically denied fair payment for their work. and today the undocumented immigrants who are exploited at the workplace and live with their families in constant fear of detection and deportation. For decades. this country has turned a blind eye to the plight of the stranger in our midst and looked away in indifference from this grotesque system. But a nation of immigrants rejects its history and its heritage when millions of immigrants are confined forever to secondclass status. All Americans are debased by such a twotier system. The vote we cast today is on whether the time has come to right these historic wrongs. and we will have that opportunity to do so with the underlying bill.
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