Bring Jobs Home Act

Floor Speech

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Ms. Collins, the Senator from Maine, is getting a bipartisan codel to go down to McAllen on Friday, and I look forward to accompanying her on that trip.

But if people can make that one trip--at least one trip--they would learn for themselves that the border is not secure.

This isn't a trick. Sometimes I get the feeling that some of my friends in the Senate think we are going to always claim the border is insecure, so we are never going to do the other parts of immigration reform that they want to do or that need to be done. As a matter of fact, in 2011 the President notably said: Well, people won't be satisfied until we create a moat and fill it full of alligators. He ridiculed those who said the border is not secure. Yet last year alone 414,000 people were detained on the southwestern border, 414,000 from 100 different countries--100 different countries--most of them admittedly from Mexico and Central America and South America.

But people should come visit in Falfurrias, TX. They have a Border Patrol stop there where many migrants are let out of the vehicle by their coyote, which is a human smuggler, and forced to walk around this checkpoint in 100-degree-plus weather. Colleagues will find that some of them die from exposure. People can imagine coming from Central America or South America and coming in that hot weather under those conditions. Some of them literally die. So the Border Patrol has established rescue beacons, they call them, where if the immigrant says ``I have to get some help,'' they can actually hit the button on this rescue beacon, and the Border Patrol will come and find them and make sure they get some medical care. Those rescue beacons are in English, they are in Spanish, and they are in Chinese. I assure my colleagues there are not many native Chinese speakers in Brooks County, TX.

The point is, to anybody who will listen, the border is not secure. It is a national security challenge in addition to our other issues.

I ask people to talk to GEN John Kelly, who is head of Southern Command, who says right now 75 percent of the illegal drug traffic coming from Central and South America into the United States--they have to sit and watch because they don't have the adequate resources to stop it. It is the same cartels that are smuggling those drugs that are the criminal organizations that are smuggling the people. They are trafficking in human beings, and they will transport any commodity, any weapon, any person, anything into the United States as long as they can make money off of it. It is just the way they do business.

It is enormously frustrating to hear the majority leader declare the border is secure in spite of the facts and in spite of the bipartisan acknowledgment that we need to fix this 2008 loophole in order to help solve this problem. But there are people who have shown some courage, people such as Secretary Johnson and others, other Democrats who have said, despite the majority leader's pronouncement that we should actually do something, we should actually solve the problem, and we have it within our ability to do that.

I wish to particularly acknowledge the courage of my friend and colleague Henry Cuellar from Texas. He is a proud blue dog Democrat, as he reminds me almost every time I see him, and he has partnered with me in bipartisan bicameral legislation that would actually fix this flaw in the 2008 law. If we could just get a vote on it here in the Senate, maybe we would have a chance to fix the problem and do what the President acknowledged was the problem in the first place.

I am hopeful we can achieve a breakthrough, but we have about 2 more days that we will be in session before the August recess. My constituents back home don't understand why in the world we would leave without fixing this problem, without addressing this humanitarian crisis, because they see the numbers as we see the numbers. They are going to continue to grow and the crisis will get worse unless we act in a sensible way.

The only way we are going to get that breakthrough is if we get some leadership here in the Senate and the majority leader allows a vote on either what the House is going to send us on Thursday or allow an amendment, which I am proud to offer, which has broad support here in the Senate.

But leadership requires more than just giving a speech or an interview and then heading off to the next fundraiser. It requires thoughtful, persistent engagement and a willingness to spend political capital.

We know all of this is controversial. We get that. But it strikes me that when you are getting attacked from the right and the left, that means you are probably doing something that could at least have the potential for being a bipartisan consensus, which, as we know, is the only way anything gets done here because none of us get everything we want. I would love it if I could get everything I want, but that is not democracy. That is not our system. That is not our constitutional form of government.

I hope the President would tell the majority leader that he believes this 2008 law is a problem, as he said a month ago on ABC News, and I hope he will offer support for his own Secretary of Homeland Security, who I know understands the nature of the problem, but unfortunately I fear he is being outvoted by the political advisers at the White House, not the people making public policy.

The folks in my State and particularly in the region of South Texas and the Rio Grande Valley are watching and waiting and hoping that Washington will act to resolve this ongoing crisis. But we can't act unless the majority leader allows us to act. That is the nature of this institution. He won't allow a vote unless President Obama steps up and leads in order to do what he has acknowledged is the right thing to do and what we must do in order to address this problem.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

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