Congress Needs to Legislate on Immigration Issues

Floor Speech

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Mr. ESPAILLAT. Madam Speaker, I rise today to address a matter of great concern to all Americans.

Yesterday, House Republicans recklessly voted to impeach Secretary Mayorkas. They engaged in a sham exercise that not only degrades the value and the importance of this democratic institution, but last week they went through the effort to engage in an exercise to publicly lay at the doorstep of one person, Secretary Mayorkas, the crisis of migration and immigration which has been permanent in the United States of America for decades upon decades upon decades.

House Republicans blame a single man for a perennial immigration crisis caused by Congress' decades-long failure to pass immigration law.

During the Reagan administration, we saw how President Reagan addressed comprehensive immigration reform. In fact, alluding to the great lady at the New York Harbor, he said: ``It is that lady who gives us our great and special place in the world.''

George Bush addressed the immigration crisis.

George W. Bush addressed the immigration crisis.

This crisis has been before us for decades upon decades upon decades. Yet, yesterday, after a failed vote last week by one vote, the Republicans recklessly voted to impeach Secretary Mayorkas in a sham process that, as I said earlier, degrades the value of this great democratic institution.

Even conservative scholars will note that Secretary Mayorkas has done a strong job in advancing solutions within the confines of our existing immigration laws, which we all agree are broken. Yet, instead of working with us to actually improve our laws, the Republican leadership pursued a bogus impeachment trial, fueled purely by their desire to win votes and by fanning the flames of xenophobia. We saw that play out in New York during the past weeks, and we saw the results last night.

New Yorkers rejected that attitude. New Yorkers rejected that effort to divide us. Instead, Republicans must join Members of their caucus in critical efforts to actually pass legislation on immigration.

This can be achieved by passing the bipartisan--and let me say this again, Madam Speaker--the bipartisan Dignity Act, which I stand in support of today.

H.R. 3599, the Dignity Act, represents Congress' best chances in 37 years to finally fix our broken immigration system, and is supported by Republicans and Democrats.

This bipartisan bill contains immigration fixes in four key areas that both Democrats and Republicans should fall behind. One, of course, is border safety. We all agree that something should be done about the border.

The other one is immigration reform. Components of immigration reform that we know are critical and important, as Ronald Reagan said, for the future of our Nation. A third bucket is jobs and the economy. We must inject more energy in jobs and our economy. Of course, the fourth bucket is the root causes of migration in our hemisphere.

So for border security, we can do a lot by providing substantial funding to combat fentanyl smuggling and for border technologies that will modernize our ports of entry. Fentanyl is coming in through our ports of entry by wheels. Vehicles are bringing it in. Let's modernize our ports of entry to ensure that we stop that crisis.

Madam Speaker, again, we have a solution. It is called the Dignity Act.

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