Speech #CREC-2018-01-08-pt1-PgS53_t5

Madam President, I thank Chairman Grassley for his leadership on this issue and for offering the SECURE Act, which I and some of the other Senators have supported. I wish to continue this debate where Senator Tillis left off. We have heard a lot today about the so-called DACA Program, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, and the negotiations in which we are currently engaged. Hopefully, those negotiations will reach a solution that will satisfy all the parties and give certain legal protections to the DACA population. We have heard a lot today about border security and the wall. I want to focus on one other element of a needed, negotiated solution, and that is chain migration--putting an end, once and for all, to chain migration. When you give legal status to an illegal immigrant, that is a permanent change in law; it will never be reversed. Therefore, you can't simply accept some window dressing at the border--1 year of funding for demonstration or pilot projects. You have to have a permanent change in return for a permanent change, and an end to chain migration will be one of the most important permanent changes to U.S. immigration law in 52 years. What is chain migration? Under the current law, which dates back to 1965, if you are a citizen, you can bring any one of your relatives to this country, not just your spouse and your unmarried minor kids--your nuclear family--but also your adult kids and their spouses and their children and your adult brother and your adult sister and your parents and then their siblings and so on and so forth. That is why it is called chain migration. Each person is a potential link in a never- ending chain. The vast majority of people who immigrate to our country legally every single year do so for the sole reason that they just happen to be related to someone who is already here. We have heard a lot of talk about the American dream in recent days-- that we are a nation of immigrants; it is part of our core, and that is absolutely right. We are a nation of immigrants. We are a nation where blood ties are not supposed to dictate the path of your life, where you can fulfill your dreams. But we have an immigration system that does the exact opposite--an immigration system that favors the ties of blood, the ties of kinship, the ties of clan, and the ties of tribe. What could be less American than that? As a result, we have also had a massive wave of low-skilled and unskilled immigrants, over the last 52 years. Today, of the million- plus immigrants who come here every year, only 1 in 15 comes here because of education, job skills, or a job offer. That means we have thousands and thousands of workers, with absolutely no consideration for what it means for the workers who are already here--the workers who are American citizens, who are earning a wage. In many cases, the most recent immigrants are going to face competition from the next wave of unskilled immigrants, so we are putting downward pressure on their wages--the wages of people who work with their hands and work on their feet, who hold the kinds of jobs that require you to take a shower after you get off work, not before you go to work. Blue-collar workers have begun to see an increase in their wages over the last year for the first time in decades, and that is in no small part because of the administration's efforts to get immigration under control. But it is not enough to stop there. The real question is, who should our immigration system work for? It should work for the American people, the American worker. It should be crafted for their benefit, not for the benefit of foreigners. We should have an immigration system that fulfills the needs of our economy, that focuses on jobs and wages for American citizens here, whether your parents came over on the Mayflower or whether you just took the oath of citizenship last week. This is not some radical position. Liberal Democrats used to believe in that. I understand that in this debate most of the attention is focused on the population of about 690,000 illegal immigrants who came here, through no fault of their own, as young children 15, 20, 30 years ago. I think the concern for them is very understandable. President Trump has shown it.