Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. MURPHY. Madam President, I wish to speak about Friday night for a few moments. In Connecticut, on Friday night the world really did stop. Thousands of people in my State watched their television set or their smartphone as images like this one poured in from the blood-soaked streets of Paris: horrific reports, scores dead, more badly wounded. Deep down, in Connecticut, we ached deeply for Paris's loss. Maybe it is because for those of us who hail from the former colonies, we feel a special sense of brotherhood with the French. In my boyhood town of Wethersfield, CT, I grew up a stone's throw from the tavern where Washington and Rochambeau met to plan their campaign against the British. We pain for France because of 250 years of friendship and also because we know, unfortunately, exactly what they are going through. That ominous sense of familiarity and that perverse bond among nations that have been visited by mass terrorist attack are part of the reason why we ached so acutely on Friday night, over the weekend, and into this week.

But also, these pictures cause us pain because we fear this isn't the end of the mass slaughter. We grieve because the massive scale of this particular attack, on a nation that already had its antenna tuned for a potential attack, made us realize how vulnerable we still are today to a similar assault. The threat of another large-scale extremist attack just became so much more real for millions of Americans who had, frankly, begun to settle into an understandable comfortable complacency, a decade and a half since that last major terrorist attack just miles from Connecticut's border.

In Connecticut, to be honest, people are mad and they are scared. Having watched all of this coverage, I understand why. But images such as this also move the people of my State. These are two little kids, Ralia and Rahaf, 7 and 13 years old. This is where they sleep at night, on the streets of Beirut. They went there from Damascus after their mother and their brother were killed by a grenade. Along with

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their dad, they have been sleeping on the streets for over a year. Rahaf, who is 13, says she is scared of the ``bad boys'' in Beirut on those streets at night. When she talks about that, Ralia starts crying.
I don't want to cast with a broad brush all of the people of my State, but I think I can safely say that their hearts ache for pictures like this, for images such as the one of the 3-year-old boy--just about the same age as my youngest son--who washed up limp and dead on the beach in Turkey. My neighbors are not comfortable living in a country that simply turns its back on little kids who have been ravaged by torture and rape, dying from barrel bombs and executions and slipshod escape vessels.

There has been a lot that has disturbed me about the debate here in Washington, across the country, and on the cable news channels since Friday's massacre: the hyperpartisanship, the concern for one religion over another, the refusal to wait for facts before jumping to policy conclusions.

Maybe what has disappointed me the most is the suggestion that the people in my State or the people of this country or this Congress need to make a choice between acting on concern for this image or acting out of concern for this image. The suggestion is that if your priority is protecting us from a Paris-style attack, you can't show compassion for those two little kids. If you want to show compassion for these innocents, then you compromise national security.

Here is the truth: Not only are these two priorities not mutually exclusive, they are actually interdependent. There is simply no choice to be made between protecting this country and helping the victims of terror. We can take steps together--Republicans and Democrats--to make sure terrorists do not get into this country, and we can continue in the best traditions of America to be, as our Statue of Liberty says, a home for ``your tired, your poor, your huddled masses.'' How do I arrive at this conclusion that we can do both, that we can protect our country and respond to the victims of terror in Syria? First, I asked the questions my constituents are asking: How can we be sure refugees fleeing Syria aren't going to pose a risk to the security of the people who live in my State in Connecticut?

Yesterday I sat through two exhaustive briefings to seek the answer to this question, and here is what I learned. There is no one who comes to the United States, in any immigration category, that receives a more comprehensive and exhaustive background check than refugees: biometrics, international background checks, interviews, fingerprints--a process that takes anywhere from 18 months to 2 years to make sure we get it right. It is exhaustive, and it is probably why of the nearly 2,000 Syrian refugees who are resettled in the United States this year, not a single one has been connected to terrorist activity. The other reason for this, as I learned yesterday, is because the profile of the refugees we are prioritizing for entry into the United States tells the story as well. We largely bring women and children, the frail and the sick, those who have been beaten, raped or tortured by terrorists--the ones who simply cannot survive in the refugee camps. It means that of all the Syrians who are already here, only 2 percent of them are young, single males. We aren't bringing into the United States the type of people who fit the profile of those who could pose a danger to us.

The second reason I have concluded that ending the refugee program really will not make us safer is because of conversations I have had with experts about the nature of ISIS itself. I don't think you can argue that ISIS has been contained. Paris showed us ISIS can be lethal anywhere, anytime. Over the past year, ISIS has proffered two narratives to its recruits. The first is that this so-called caliphate is expanding. It is an unstoppable, inexorable force that challenges young Muslims to get on board now before it overtakes them by force. The second is this narrative that there is a war between the West that is left over from Iraq, left over from Afghanistan, left over from the aftermath of Sykes-Picot, left over from the Crusades. It is this idea that the Western World is out to destroy the East, they argue, and we have to fight for our survival.

The first narrative is still strong, but it is not strong as it used to be. ISIS isn't expanding its territory in the Middle East anymore. They have 25 percent less territory than they did last year at this time. The second initiative now actually becomes more important, and the Paris attacks are evidence of this. Indiscriminate attacks on civilians in a place like Paris are designed, in part, to provoke a response from the West to feed this argument over a clash of civilizations. That doesn't mean we shouldn't respond, it doesn't mean we shouldn't respond forcefully, but it should wake us up to the reality of the necessity of this us-versus-them narrative that is essential to the growth of ISIS. The story of the Christian world's marginalization of the Muslim world is the nourishment that feeds the growth of ISIS.

That is what makes our response to the Syrian humanitarian disaster interwoven into our strategy to defeat ISIS. Turning our back on those who have been tortured and raped and battered and beaten by Bashar al-Assad, after having welcomed massive refugee flows from Cuba and Vietnam and Bosnia, feeds straight into this radical Sunni argument that we are at war with Islam. Imagine the glee in Raqqa when they see postings of American politicians arguing we should take Syrian refugees but only the Christian ones and not the Muslim ones. That is a story line that is an ISIS recruiter's dream.

None of this is to suggest we shouldn't be taking the fight to ISIS in Syria and Iraq. I have been a vocal supporter of the thousands of bombing runs by American planes, of our efforts to support the Iraqi Army and the Peshmerga as they seek to kill as many ISIS fighters as possible. Fighting ISIS inside Syria and Iraq is absolutely necessary in order to defeat them. So we engage in that fight with the knowledge that our involvement may also help with recruitment. We weigh the benefit against the cost and we fight.

When it comes to turning away the victims of terror inside Syria, if we are able to build a system that screens out any Syrians who pose a threat to the United States, then the meager benefit can never outweigh the costs of feeding this anti-Muslim narrative. Now that narrative is more important than ever to sustain ISIS.

Here is the most important point to make. The people I represent don't believe we can just stand still in the wake of Paris, even if they believe the screening program is robust enough. They may be convinced of this, but they are certainly right that we can't accept the status quo. My worry over the past week is that this hyperfocus on the refugee program that has only brought in 2,000 immigrants last year--mostly women and children--misses the forest for the trees.

The Visa Waiver Program brings in 20 million people a year--not 2,000--20 million people. It has background checks, too, but nothing like what is applied to refugees. There is a good reason for this difference, because the countries that are part of the Visa Waiver Program are our allies--countries we can generally rely on--but with several of the Paris attackers bearing EU passports, making them eligible for the Visa Waiver Program, this sense of security we have had with these countries has been shattered. If we want to have a real conversation about changing our immigration laws to better protect this country, then focusing on 20 million lightly vetted visitors rather than 2,000 highly vetted visitors sounds like the better approach.

There is absolutely room to make the Visa Waiver Program stronger. There are a myriad of security information sharing agreements between the United States and Europe and among countries within Europe that have not been executed. Now is the time to demand that these agreements, like the umbrella law enforcement agreement between the EU and the United States, be executed, be signed. Now is the time for both the United States and Europe to require that every EU nation modernize their protocols for uploading law enforcement and anti-terrorism information onto the databases that we use to compile our no-fly list. If these agreements aren't signed or these protocols aren't updated, then we need to consider whether an unreformed Visa

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Waiver Program is still in our national interests.
If our goal is really to keep America safe from infiltration of terrorist groups, this reform is the most important one we can make to our immigration system, and it should bring together Republicans and Democrats.

Every day that I go home to my 7-year-old and my 4-year-old, I am reminded that my most sacred duty here is to enact policy that keeps them safe and keeps my constituents safe. The hundreds of calls and emails that my office has received since Friday reinforces for me this commitment, but I live in a nation like no other. I live in the United States of America, a nation that in the late 1800s had emerged from Civil War to become a beacon for the oppressed and the repressed all over the world and millions showed up on our shores--people like my Irish and Polish ancestors--and a nation that was spreading its wings over the world, beginning to understand the impact for good that we could have. It was during that time that the poet Emma Lazarus called America ``The New Colossus.'' The feeling was that we were capable of a greatness, a bigness of both achievement and heart that the world had never witnessed and exceptionalism, one that still burns bright today.

The argument that America cannot both protect itself and protect those who are fleeing terrorism feels so small. It feels so contrary to this idea of exceptionalism that has been at the foundation, at the root of the American story. It feels very weak. In fact, the moments where we have made choices solely out of fear to marginalize others are moments we now regret. We interred Japanese Americans in camps because we were at war with Japan or hesitated to take Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazis out of fear that some might be spies. In hindsight those measures did not reflect on who we really are as a nation.

The America I live in does not settle for false choices that make America look and feel small or powerless. We can save the terrorized and protect ourselves from being terrorized at the same time. In fact, we have to do the former to accomplish the latter. In doing so we can come together as a Congress and as a country to make good policy and to recall that sense of American exceptionalism that caused Emma Lazarus's poem to end up on a statue that was sent as a present to the United States from France as a reminder of our unbreakable bond with them.

I yield the floor.

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