Denouncing the Biden Administration's Immigration Policies

Floor Speech

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Ms. JAYAPAL. Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to this absurd and pointless resolution.

I will say that I actually agree with the previous speaker across the aisle, my friend across the aisle, when he said that this body wants to do absolutely nothing that actually solves the situation at the border. I agree with my friend across the aisle that this body, controlled by the Republican majority, has no interest in doing a single thing.

That is why, Mr. Speaker, we keep voting on resolutions that do nothing. They are pointless, they are absurd, and they are a tired recycling of the same talking points that we hear every day from the majority.

Frankly, the majority is not trying to hide it. Whole sections of today's resolution, including its title and 12 of the 32 whereas clauses are copied and pasted from the other grievance-airing resolution that we considered in March, so these aren't even new.

These are the same things that we are voting on over and over again because there aren't actual solutions that Republicans are willing to move forward on that would fix the immigration system.

Likewise, 2 weeks ago, we voted on a pointless rehashing of H.R. 2, the Republicans' extreme, cruel, and unworkable immigration bill that is going nowhere fast.

What are we doing here, Mr. Speaker? Why does the majority insist on wasting our time with these bills filled with nothing but empty rhetoric designed to try and weaponize the issue of immigration instead of solving it?

What we should be doing is talking about how to create a bipartisan, workable immigration system that allows Americans to reunite with their families, allows American businesses and universities to attract the best and the brightest, and create a workable process so that people wouldn't be forced to go to the border as the only way here. We should be talking about the fact that immigrants are good for our country and good for our economy. That is what the majority of Americans believe, despite all of the rhetoric from the other side.

One in four American doctors were born abroad, and roughly 45 percent of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or children of immigrants. Seventy percent of agricultural workers are immigrants. Immigrants feed us, they heal us, and they help ensure that the country remains an economic powerhouse.

We could be here on the floor embracing the positive impacts of immigrants rather than demonizing them, finding ways to allow people to work more quickly to fill the shortages that we have in our labor sector.

The Congressional Budget Office recently announced that new immigrants will add $1 trillion in previously unexpected revenue to our country's GDP between 2023 and 2034. Similarly, the Department of Health and Human Services found that over a 15-year period, asylees and refugees alone contributed nearly $124 billion more in revenue than they received in services from the government. Documented and undocumented immigrants pay tens of billions of dollars in taxes every single year.

Instead, what are we doing here on the floor? The same tired rhetoric that we hear every single week. The majority insists on demonizing immigrants and the border.

It is true that we desperately need to fix a broken immigration system that hasn't been updated in over 30 years, but we cannot do that, we cannot solve that problem just through harsh enforcement measures alone. We have been trying that approach for 30 years under different Presidents, and every time it fails.

The truth is that the immigration system is all connected. People are coming to the border because the legal immigration system has not been updated in three decades, and they cannot find another pathway to come under.

The wait time for some legal permanent residents to bring their families into this country is over a century long, a century to bring your own family to this country. Employers are begging us to modernize the employment-based immigration system, because the limits on high- tech visas were set when floppy disks were the height of technology, and people cannot hire the people they need. The small number of immigration judges that we have are absolutely crushed under a massive backlog of asylum cases so extensive that it is now taking people over 8 years to get a hearing.

Under these circumstances, it should not surprise anyone that some desperate people see coming to the border as their only option, especially when they are fleeing for their lives from countries that cannot or will not protect them. If they are willing to face the dangers of the journey and deal with unscrupulous actors like cartels to get to safety here, even the most draconian of policies will not deter them.

That is why, despite what you hear from the other side, even when former President Trump implemented the policies that this resolution holds up as the cure to all of our problems, encounters at the border actually went up, not down. They didn't work.

Instead of talking about these failed policies, we could be discussing the countless, real, bipartisan solutions that passed when Democrats held the House majority, solutions like the Dream and Promise Act, the Farm Workforce Modernization Act, bills that would fix real gaps in the immigration system, provide lawful status to people who have been contributing to our communities across the country for decades, and actually make improvements that would relieve pressure on the border. We could be trying to pass the kinds of investments that would actually increase the number of immigration judges and asylum officers that would help speed up the process and make it work effectively.

Will any of those things make it to the floor in this Congress under a Republican majority whose only goal is to keep this issue out there as an election issue, just as former President Trump told them to do? No, we are just going to spend our time debating pointless resolutions that do not a single thing to fix the real situation of a broken immigration system.

We are going to keep debating nonbinding resolutions filled to the brim with mistruths and disinformation.

Mr. Speaker, I hope we can one day get back to actually governing in this House, but I fear that today is not that day.

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