FLAKE. Mr. President, over the past couple of months, we have
seen a lot of effort with regard to immigration reform and in
particular to address the situation of the so-called DACA kids, the
Dreamers who were brought here through no fault of their own and are
now protected--many of them--through the DACA Program. But those
protections will run out on March 5. In fact, some have lost their
protections already. So there is a great impetus and urgency to deal
with this program. I have said from the beginning that in order to establish a long-term
resolution and to provide regulatory certainty, a true DACA fix must be
a bipartisan solution. Over the past year, the two big items this
Chamber and the Congress have dealt with--healthcare reform and tax
policy--have been done under rules of reconciliation, meaning that if
we could get a bare majority of Republican votes, that would be enough,
if we could keep all the Republicans together. That is no longer the
case with our approach to DACA. We are not under rules of
reconciliation. It will require 60 votes, meaning that only a
bipartisan solution will do. That is why I have been working on such a
measure with my Republican and Democratic colleagues in Congress, as
well as the White House. As I have said repeatedly, on this issue, I believe that the
President's instincts are better than some of the advice that he gets. I truly believe that he does want a solution for these young
immigrants. I hope we can get there. We will have a meeting tomorrow at
the White House--a bipartisan meeting--to try to get a little farther
down the road. Let me stress that a lot of words that are highly charged are thrown
around this immigration debate. No word is perhaps more highly charged
than the word ``amnesty.'' That has been thrown around by a number of
my colleagues. I would suggest that is not the case here with the DACA
kids. Amnesty, by definition, is an unconditional pardon for a breach
of law. I don't think a child who was brought across the border by the
parents has committed a violation of the law--not the child; certainly
the parents but not the child.
Keywords matched
immigration immigrants DACA