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Floor Speech

Like him, I was just a pup. I was 17 years old when I raised my right hand and took an oath to defend our country and Constitution as a midshipman in the Navy; and there were lots of midshipmen at the height of the Vietnam war. I went on to repeat that oath, gosh, a dozen or more times in Active Duty and in Reserve duty through the heart of the Cold War and right up to today. I took the same oath here not too many years ago. It is an oath I take seriously, and I know my colleagues do as well.

I have had the opportunity to travel to the borders of our country south of us and to any number of countries south of Mexico, all the way down to Colombia. And I have a pretty good idea why people, especially from that part of the world, have come here or have sought to come to this country in enormous numbers. Among the reasons they come here is that we are addicted to drugs--drugs that are, in many cases, trafficked to countries to the south of us. People end up living lives of misery because of our addiction to drugs, illegal drugs. The folks who live down there want to live in a place where they can have their children get an education and have access to healthcare and freedom from crime and corruption. That is what they are interested in, and because of our addiction to drugs, we have helped to make the situation worse for them.

On top of that, the poverty that is facing a bunch of places down in Central America, especially, is made worse because of drought--drought which has been caused, as our Presiding Officer knows, because of the reliance in this country on greenhouse gases, on creating greenhouse gases, which have put so many other places, including countries south of us, in harm's way.

But the challenges at our border today are the results of any number of things: the global pandemic, increased violence, corruption, authoritarian government rule, and on and on. These are issues that we have sought to help address for as long as I can remember.

Under numerous Secretaries of Homeland Security and administrations of both parties, I have had the privilege of serving on the Committee on Homeland Security for the 22 years that I have been in this Senate. I have had the privilege of leading the committee as chairman of the committee for a number of years, and I have led congressional delegations, bipartisan congressional delegations, to the areas south of us. This illegal immigration that we are seeing in the south of our country is unacceptable and unsustainable. And anyone who says it is otherwise, I think, is mistaken. The question is, What do we do about it?

I have known Ali Mayorkas for the better part of a dozen years. He is a good and decent man with a wonderful family--a wife, children--and is someone who deserves our thanks, not the back of our hand. None of us are perfect; God knows I am not. And, certainly, he has made mistakes, but if you talk to the people who are actually involved in the negotiations, the bipartisan negotiations, they are trying to find a solution with respect to the border as part of the supplemental appropriations legislation. If you talk to the people who are involved--to the Democrats and Republicans who are involved--and ask them about how helpful or harmful has been the involvement of Ali Mayorkas, he has been very much involved in those conversations. What I have heard off the record from our colleagues, Democrats and Republicans, is that he has actually played a constructive role and a helpful role, and I hope that he will continue to do that.

If I had a magic wand, with one fell swoop, I would do one thing to help address illegal immigration: I would enact full comprehensive immigration reform. Next Monday, I will be one of the speakers at the annual State of Delaware Chamber of Commerce dinner. It is something I have done for, gosh, dozens of years now. But when I make customer calls, when I visit customers on calls to businesses large and small around our country, I always ask them three questions: How are you doing; how are we doing--this is as to the congressional delegation with Senator Coons, Congresswoman Blunt Rochester, and myself--how are we doing; and what can we do to help?

Do you know what most people say and what most businesses say? Our real challenge is just getting people to come to work. That is what I hear from all kinds of businesses, large and small. We just need people to come to work, people who have a work ethic and people who are trainable and we can count on to show up every day.

There are a lot of people who like to come to this country and work. They don't necessarily want to stay here and live here and become citizens here. They just want to have the opportunity to provide a better life for their folks and make a contribution to this country.

So rather than simply laying all of these problems that we have at the border at the foot of one person--is the Secretary responsible for some of it? Sure. So are we. One of the things that we could do is to adopt comprehensive immigration reform, which the business community in my State has asked us to do for years; and across the country, they have asked us to do that for years. If we did just that one thing, that would make a difference.

The Department of Homeland Security has a bunch of missions, some of them more critical than others. One of those is to protect our Nation from harm, whether the threat is a natural disaster or an act of terror. This is a difficult mission under any circumstances, and it is one that requires strong, principled leadership; and I think we get that from Ali Mayorkas.

Moreover, our border has seen significant changes in demographics and in the populations of those seeking asylum. The people coming across our border who are trying to get into this country look a whole lot different than in the first delegations I led down there as a U.S. Senator, as a junior Senator in this body. It has changed a lot, and we need to change the ways that we are trying to stem it.

I will close with this: I think most of us here--and I know my colleague who is offering this unanimous consent request--are people of faith. We are people of faith. We might be Democrats and Republicans, but we are also people of faith, for the most part. We might be Protestant; we might Catholic; we might be Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, whatever, but we are people of faith.

I was raised in Beckley, WV--a little coal mining town. My mom used to take my sister and me to church, God, every Sunday morning, every Sunday night, every Wednesday night, and most Thursday nights. She was interested in two things: one, in making sure we understood the Golden Rule to treat other people the way we want to be treated and, two, that we had actually read Matthew 25 and actually internalized it in that it is our obligation, our moral obligation, to the least of these. Remember there, in the Scripture, in Matthew 25, it says: When I was hungry, did you feed me? When I was thirsty, did you give me to drink? When I was naked, did you clothe me?

It also says this: When I was a stranger in your land, did you welcome me? Think about that. When I was a stranger in your land, did you welcome me? We have a moral obligation to welcome a stranger. We don't have a moral obligation to let millions of people come into our country without permission and to stay here. That is not part of Matthew 25. But there is a moral obligation that we need to look out for the least of these. I hope we will keep that in the back of our minds as we go forward.

The last thing I would say--and I have said this so many times that my colleagues are sick of hearing it--is that bipartisan solutions are lasting solutions. I am a Democrat who was raised by two Republican parents. I have always believed that the way to get things done is to work together across the aisle. I am encouraged by the negotiations that are underway that involve several of our colleagues on the Democrat and Republican sides in addressing what is going on at the border. I have talked to both Democrats and Republicans who have been part of those conversations and negotiations, and I am encouraged that progress is being made. I think, rather than just pointing fingers at one another, we should actually build on that progress and hasten the day that we can actually begin, in a serious way, in a comprehensive way, resolving this major challenge to our country.

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