Border Security and Immigration Reform Act of 2018

Floor Speech

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Mr. CURBELO of Florida. Mr. Speaker, I thank the distinguished chairman for yielding me time.

Mr. Speaker, the reason I am here is because I made a commitment to my constituents, and, really, to the country, that I wanted to improve our country's immigration system.

If you look at the reality of what is happening today, it is really sad. We have a chaotic situation at the border. We have drug traffickers active at the border, bringing in their drugs, poisoning the American people.

We have human traffickers, which are exploiting some of the most vulnerable people in the world, profiting off of them.

Some of these children that get brought over by coyotes get abused, molested, raped.

This is what is happening at our southwest border, and it has to change.

The underlying bill invests in border security, and most Americans-- an overwhelming majority--want to see the situation at the border improve. And an overwhelming majority believes that the United States of America, like every country in the world, has the right and the duty to enforce its laws and to protect its borders.

I am also here, Mr. Speaker, because I made a commitment to some of the victims of our broken immigration system.

There are a lot of young immigrants in our country who were brought over as children. Some of them have no memory of their countries of origin. They are the victims of a broken immigration system. Some of these young people--I know their stories because I know them well--when they are 14 or 15, they discover that they are undocumented, after years of having sat in classrooms with our own kids, pledging allegiance to our own flag, and loving this country just as much as we do.

And that is why this bill contains a solution that is fair to these young immigrants.

If we don't pass this bill, these young immigrants, the Dreamers, the DACA recipients, could lose all of their protections in a matter of months.

Now, we don't have to get into why or how that happened. We know that there are some court challenges out there, but that is the reality. That is what we are dealing with today.

In addition to that, we have all spoken out against this tragedy of children being separated at the border and the difficult position that the current and the previous administration were in of having to choose between enforcing our immigration laws and separating families.

Yes, the Obama administration planned and started detaining families together until a court told them that they could not, and now we have a true tragedy on our hands. This bill would also help solve that issue.

In addition to that, we modernize our immigration laws by making sure that our economy's needs are met.

Now, the alternative is to vote ``no'' and to double down on the status quo: a failed broken immigration system that has created so many victims over the years, from the small children who get abused by the human traffickers, to the young immigrants in our country who discovered one day that they were undocumented, to drug trafficking at the border that is poisoning so many people in our country.

A vote against this bill is a vote for that status quo. And I don't think anyone in this Chamber supports the status quo on immigration.

Mr. Speaker, I know this bill isn't perfect. This isn't the bill I would have drafted. My bill is the Recognizing America's Children Act. That is the bill that I drafted and that I would prefer. But there are 435 of us in this Chamber, and sometimes we have to meet somewhere, meet into the middle, compromise.

And let's not let this time be like it always is on immigration where everyone says: Unless I can get 100 percent of what I want, no one is going to get anything. And that might be easy for us to say here in this Chamber, but that isn't something easy for people to hear. For the American people, for young immigrants brought to our country, for the DACA population, that isn't easy for them to hear.

They want to hear that we are going to find a way to get to yes, and that although our solution might not be perfect, it will leave us at a place better than the one we are in today.

Mr. Speaker, that is why I respectfully ask all of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to strongly consider supporting this legislation that will leave our country much better off than it is today.

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