Speech #CREC-2018-01-08-pt1-PgS53_t7

Again, that shouldn't be controversial. It should be security related. There should be some basic questions about how we are going to handle immigration. We allow 1 million people a year to become citizens of the United States legally--1 million people a year. Yet the American system is also ignoring hundreds of thousands of others who are coming into the system illegally and pretending it is not happening. It is. For 20 years, this Congress has not paid attention to it. Say what you would like to about President Trump, but he is pushing this Congress to do something it has not done in two decades--deal with the issue of border security. This body will have to come to agreement on that. The House of Representatives will have to come to agreement on that, and the President will have to be able to sign it or it will be just another Executive action that will not last very long. If we are going to have lasting, real change in border security, it has to go through the legislative process. The President is pushing us to get that done before the first week of March. We had 6 months of time. Four months of that has already run out. It is time to get that document finished, to deal with the basic things the President has asked for--border security, a legal status for those individuals who are in the DACA Program whom the previous President just put into deferred action status--that we will not arrest them, but they are in some sort of legal limbo in between. President Trump wants to have a permanent answer for all of those families. Dealing with things on border security, not just the wall but the other exceptions to it. The President wants to deal with the visa lottery, which is a system where the names of 50,000 people somewhere in the world are just randomly drawn out of a hat to be able to become American citizens. Many of us said for a long time, that is a foolish way to do your immigration system. Our immigration system should be based on what we need in America--what jobs, what locations--rather than randomly pulling names of people around the world out of a hat. I understand there are millions and millions of people around the world who would love to be Americans, but in America, we want to be able to target those individuals who want to not just be Americans but want to be a part of us, not just culturally but economically, to be part of the fabric of whom we are, to make decisions for ourselves as a nation, and to do it not just in our own policy but also our own immigration policy. It is not too much to ask. There are basic things that should be done. Dealing with the DACA students who are literally caught in a place where they have no home is a compassionate thing to do, but along with our compassion, we also need to uphold the law. Those kids should not be held to account for what their parents did, but their parents should not have the same access to the American system of being naturalized as the kids do--only because the parents did intentionally violate the law. They chose to break the law and bring their child with them when they did it. The child didn't make that decision.