Denouncing the Biden Administration's Immigration Policies

Floor Speech

For the second time in less than 2 months, with another shutdown looming, we are wasting our time on a meaningless immigration resolution full of empty rhetoric whose sole purpose seems to be to justify Republicans' lack of desire to address solutions for our broken immigration system.

How did we get here, Mr. Speaker? Earlier this Congress, House Republicans passed their cruel, inhumane, and unworkable border bill, H.R. 2. Republicans continue to say that H.R. 2 is the only way to secure the border, and they continue to say that Democrats have refused to bring H.R. 2 up in the Senate. In fact, that bill has since failed twice to pass the United States Senate, receiving just 32 votes a few weeks ago. That means there are a lot of Republicans over there in the Senate who didn't vote for H.R. 2.

After insisting that the only way to address the border was through harsh border security legislation and holding Ukraine aid hostage, Republicans even managed to get some Democrats to agree to a border bill in the Senate that was written largely by the Senate's second-most conservative Republican Senator, a bill that Minority Leader Mitch McConnell called the toughest border bill in 30 years.

What happened to that bill? Donald Trump said he didn't want to do anything to help the border in an election year because he wants immigration to be out there as a campaign issue. Other Republicans said it out loud as well, saying they didn't want ``to do too damn much . . . to help a Democrat.''

Folding to the cult of Donald Trump, and just hours after the 370- page text of the bill was released, Speaker Johnson declared the bill ``dead on arrival'' in the House. The rank and file fell in line, and the Senate bill died before the metaphorical ink was even dry.

Republicans showed clearly what we Democrats have been saying over and over again, that they don't want to do anything that would help address the issues of a broken immigration system that we face. Instead of solving the problem, my colleagues on the other side want to continue to weaponize the border as a political issue for this election year.

The truth, Mr. Speaker, is that the situation at the border is directly linked to the fact that our legal immigration system has been left in chaos because it has not been modernized in 30 years to meet the needs of our country, our economy, and our families.

When the legal process is so backed up that it takes decades for legal residents to get their children into the country, when employers simply can't get people they need to hire approved because there is a backlog of 2 million people who haven't been processed, or when we have so few immigration judges that asylum seekers wait over 8 years to get their cases heard, then people give in to unscrupulous actors, including the cartels, which promise them that if they pay them a boatload of money, they can get them in by going to the border.

Until you fix the legal immigration system so that it works and update the caps and the quotas, you will continue to see large numbers of migrants at the border. You cannot fix the border without fixing the underlying system, and you certainly cannot fix it with only harsh immigration policy.

Speaker Johnson and others have been caught in their own trap. They refuse to give President Biden the resources that we need to process people more quickly. They voted against more money to secure the border with more technology and equipment that Border Patrol agents have told us that they need. They even voted against more money for more agents at the border.

To hide their hypocrisy, they are now claiming that the President can just ``secure the border'' through harsh executive actions alone, no action by Congress necessary.

Today's resolution is just another ham-fisted attempt to weaponize the issue at the border, and it is filled with misinformation.

The resolution alleges that the Biden administration is not removing people fast enough, yet in the 8 months since ending title 42, despite some of our due process concerns, this administration has removed or returned over half a million people, roughly equivalent to the number of people removed and returned by the Trump administration in all of fiscal year 2019.

The resolution states that the administration ``could comply with the mandatory detention statutes of the Immigration and Nationality Act,'' which no administration, including the Trump administration, has ever complied with because no Congress has ever appropriated the extraordinary levels of funding that such compliance would require.

The resolution complains that the President isn't using the suspension of entry authority in section 212(f) of the INA, but Republicans want to forget that President Trump tried to do exactly that in November 2018 and was stopped by the courts. Even the Supreme Court refused to intervene and lift the lower court injunction.

Enforcement-only policies do not stop people from crossing the border. In fact, when former President Trump implemented the remain in Mexico policy early in 2019, that summer, we saw some of the highest levels of migration of the entire Trump administration.

When President Trump used title 42 to turn back all border crossers, encounters between the ports of entry actually shot up, not down. Cartels made money hand over fist by providing people with multiple entry attempt packages.

One individual was apprehended over 40 times alone, just one individual. In fact, from February 1, 2017, to December 31, 2020, the duration of Donald Trump's Presidency, illegal border crossings went up by over 300 percent.

People do not make the arduous, dangerous journey here on a whim. They do it because they are often fleeing for their lives or are desperate to escape an unlivable situation in their home country. Because of that, they will continue to come, no matter how many draconian policies they may have to face once they arrive.

The way we can deal with that is to have a system that actually works inside the United States, legal pathways for people to come to this country. The way to fix the border is to modernize our current immigration system so that it works to provide people with different opportunities and abilities to apply to be with their families or come here to work or flee war or torture and have their applications and claims processed in a timely way.

We have already seen that when we provide workable ways for people to seek entry and refuge, they will use them, and encounters between ports of entry fall dramatically.

This resolution shows once again that Republicans don't want to do anything to fix the border. This is a resolution that literally does absolutely nothing, changes not one single policy that is on the books.

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Ms. JAYAPAL. Mr. Speaker, I would just remind my colleagues that no President has ever been able to detain everybody that is required by law because we have never appropriated that amount of money.

Velazquez).

Mr. Speaker, while you may not know it from some of the language being used today, we are debating an immigration resolution that is nonbinding.

That means it does absolutely nothing. It is full of empty rhetoric, but it makes no actual policy changes to address the outdated immigration system.

It does not a single thing other than take up time for debate on this floor when we should be working on making sure that our government doesn't shut down.

Rather than debating meaningless resolutions, we should be exploring how to meaningfully reform the broken immigration system to expand lawful immigration to the United States given the documented benefits that it brings.

In 2021 alone, DACA recipients paid $6.5 billion in taxes, refugees paid almost $28 billion in taxes, and TPS holders paid $2.2 billion in taxes. Likewise, in 2021, undocumented immigrants paid approximately $18.6 million in Federal income taxes and $12.2 billion in State and local taxes.

Recently, the Department of Health and Human Services released a study demonstrating that refugees and asylees generated $124 billion in fiscal benefits over 15 years. The Congressional Budget Office, a nonpartisan entity, recently released a report finding that recent immigrants who join the workforce will add $1 trillion in revenue to our country's GDP between 2023 and 2034, and $7 trillion overall to our GDP.

It is also estimated that putting undocumented immigrants on a roadmap to citizenship would not only increase U.S. GDP by $1.7 trillion over the next decade, that action would also raise wages for all Americans and create hundreds of thousands of new jobs.

Unfortunately, Republicans talk a big game when it comes to immigration and border security, but instead of trying to pass thoughtful and bipartisan legislation to address the problems in our immigration system, we are wasting our time on resolutions like the one before us today.

It cannot be clearer: Republicans are simply not interested in solutions.

Barragan), who is the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.
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Ms. JAYAPAL. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for her remarks, and I yield back the balance of my time.

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