Speech #CREC-2017-09-06-pt1-PgS4988_t13

Some have served honorably with our Armed Forces and put their lives on the line to keep us all safe. We gain nothing and lose a great deal by separating these young people from their jobs, their homes, their spouses, and children and sending them to countries they hardly know. At no point in our debates over immigration have we found a good reason to spend our limited immigration enforcement resources on Dreamers. The premise of DACA was, and continues to be, that we need permanent, comprehensive immigration reform--but until then, Dreamers who contribute to our society should be allowed to come out of the shadows and lead healthy, productive lives. Rather than pursuing these young Americans, our immigration enforcement resources should focus on practical measures that make us safe, not wasteful and symbolic projects like a border wall. We should improve surveillance of the border and the apprehension of more illegal entrants. We should incentivize legal immigration and make it feasible for people to come here and pursue better opportunities. I am eager to work with my colleagues to craft a tough but fair, and comprehensive immigration reform package that incorporates good ideas from both sides of the aisle. Until then, however, we accomplish nothing by forcing hundreds of thousands of families to live in fear, and regret ever trusting our country enough to register for DACA in the first place. Too much of this debate is driven by President Trump's apparent refusal to accept basic truths about who his actions affect and what his decisions mean for our country. His administration's rhetoric suggests that deporting Dreamers will make us safer and somehow restore the rule of ``law and order,'' but these are the facts of the matter: first, today, unauthorized immigration continues to decline, as it has every year, since its peak in 2007. Second--and not without controversy--President Obama's administration deported a record 5 million undocumented immigrants, particularly violent felons. These were important steps, but we have learned that enforcement alone does not solve practical problems for people like Dreamers, and their families and employers. Moreover, deporting Dreamers does nothing to make us safer. Dreamers qualify for DACA precisely because they have not committed serious crimes, and conflating them with criminals only feeds the false premise that immigrants are prone to criminality when all of the evidence shows that the opposite is true. In fact, studies from the National Bureau of Economic Research and the conservative Cato Institute have concluded that immigrants tend to commit fewer crimes than do people born in the United States, and U.S. Census data shows that, among adult males, immigrants are one-half to one-fifth as likely to be incarcerated here. Just as insidious is the persistent myth that Dreamers are somehow harming our economy or taking jobs from American citizens. We can and should debate what kind of immigration reform would best support our economy, but there is no credible support for the argument that Dreamers harm our economy or that deporting them would create jobs for anyone. The fact is that, according to the Center for American Progress, ending DACA would result in an estimated loss of over $460 billion from our GDP over the next decade, including an annual loss of over $60 million per year in my home State of Rhode Island. We know from experience that deporting employed immigrants does not raise wages. In fact, many jobs lost tend to go unfilled. And, because of President Trump's actions, families of Dreamers will sit at their kitchen tables in the coming months and struggle needlessly with questions of how to feed their children and keep roofs over their heads now that the administration has forced mom or dad out of work, or out of the country.