Speech #CREC-2018-01-11-pt1-PgS154_t49

I thought it was very interesting that the President had the courage to put this issue in front of the American people and create an air of transparency that we have not had on this issue in decades. In that meeting, he drove two conclusions: one, a scope of the problem and, two, a sense of urgency. The scope is very simply defined as this: We have to address the DACA situation. The President has given Congress the date of March 5 to come up with a solution for these individuals who are in the country illegally--but not of their doing. The second issue is border security. We know that border security is a national security issue as much as it is an immigration issue. The good news is that we know that illegal crossings of our southern border are down dramatically this year just because of a couple of reasons. One is the enforcement of current law, and the second is an understanding around the world that we are going to deal with this issue. The third piece of the scope is chain migration. Any solution to the DACA situation or the legal immigration situation must include addressing the chain migration issue. Then the last is this archaic diversity visa lottery we have in the United States that was related to at least one of the terrorist attacks, and chain migration was involved in both of the terrorist attacks we have recently experienced here in the United States. With regard to DACA, the first item on the scope is that we know we have a March 5 deadline. There is a growing consensus in this body of how to deal with that, and there is great latitude on the part of Republicans in this body to deal with that in a way, with our Democratic partners here, to get a consensus bill that solves this once and for all. The second is border security. Here, with the President's leadership and in these recent meetings with Democrats and Members of the House, there is a growing consensus that we can deal with the national security issues related to our southern border. We don't need a 2,000- mile wall, as even the President of the United States has said just this week.