Providing for Congressional Disapproval of A Rule Submitted By the Corps of Engineers and the Environmental Protection Agency--Veto--

Floor Speech

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Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, all across the Middle East and Europe, hundreds of thousands of refugees are fleeing the medieval barbarism of ISIS and the violent cruelty of the Assad regime. Out of a population of 22 million, more than 4 million Syrians have fled to neighboring countries. These refugees--almost all of them women and children--have been living away from their homes for years in Jordan, Turkey, or other host countries, struggling to survive, struggling to be free. Hundreds of thousands have decided to make the dangerous journey to Europe. Many perish along the way. According to the United Nations, over 3,200 refugees attempting to reach Europe died or went missing in 2015 alone.

Throughout our history, when we have been at our best, the United States has accepted the world's most vulnerable seeking refuge from violence and murder. Our principles don't mean very much if we jettison them when we find them politically inconvenient or difficult to live by.

The legislation we voted on today represents a significant departure from our proud history. It would require the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, the Director of the FBI, and the Director of National Intelligence to personally certify that each refugee from Syria and Iraq poses no security threat before admission into the United States and would effectively halt the refugee process. This is not the reason I opposed the legislation. It is worth noting it is likely those three officials would be able to do nothing else during the course of the day to keep us secure because they would be busy signing certifications.

It is very clear, from all the testimony we have heard at our committees and people who are experts in this area, that a blanket prohibition like this doesn't actually make us safe. Refugees are the most thoroughly vetted group of anyone entering the United States. Let's start with that. The United States first screens them and collects biometric data. Only those who pass are then referred to the United States--and refugees don't even know which country they are going to be referred to when they approach the United Nations. Then multiple agencies--including DHS, the FBI, the State Department, and our intelligence agencies-- conduct a rigorous screening process. This includes health checks, repeated biometric checks, several layers of biographical and background screenings and interviews. Out of the 23,000 individuals referred to the United States, only about 2,000 have been accepted. It should be understood by people in this body--and I hope it is understood by the American people--that no refugee enjoys a presumption of acceptance into the United States. The reverse is true. They are required to pass the most stringent standards of any group seeking to enter the United States--a process applicants must endure with uncertainty for over 2 years.

So instead of playing politics, in my view we ought to be having a serious discussion about how actually to keep our country safe and what will make it safer. One of the things I learned when we were working on the immigration bill in the Senate--which still hasn't passed the House. I would remind everybody, the only bill to secure our border, the only bill to provide internal security when it comes to immigration was the bill that passed through the Senate that has never been taken up by the House in any form. One of the things I learned was that of the 11 million undocumented people in the United States, 40 percent of them--almost half--are people who came lawfully to the United States but overstayed their visa, and we have no way of tracking that. We have no way of understanding who those people are. This legislation would have fixed that. I would have loved to have seen the House pass a companion piece of legislation, but that concerns me because there are a bunch of people in here who haven't been vetted at all. So instead of playing politics, we ought to figure out what we can do.

Another example. A group of us have introduced a bill that strengthens the Visa Waiver Program, which terrorists can exploit to enter the United States. Currently, over 25 million people come to the United States every year through this program. Our legislation addresses important security vulnerabilities and closes the program to foreign fighters. The omnibus we just passed in December included some important parts of our bill. It prevents people who have traveled to terrorist hot spots in the last 5 years--including Iraq and Syria--from even using the Visa Waiver Program. It also requires all travelers using the program to have electronic passports, which are harder to fake. These are big changes to make the American people safer. Together, these changes will help stop terrorists from coming to the United States, but there are still important parts of the bill we must pass, including requiring individuals using the Visa Waiver Program to submit biometric data such as fingerprints and photos before boarding a plane to the United States, working with our European partners to close their borders to the flow of foreign fighters heading to ISIS and back, requiring better information sharing on foreign fighters and dangerous individuals.

This is not to say that a refugee--or even a U.S. citizen--is not vulnerable to radicalization. We need to be vigilant about that. Americans are justifiably concerned about the reality of the threat and the dangerous world in which we live today. We must counter terrorist groups' ability to radicalize using social media, both here at home and abroad. Our country needs a much better strategy for countering and degrading ISIS propaganda and its recruitment machine. We have to develop creative and agile technologies to effectively degrade the ability of terrorist organizations like ISIS and others to persuade, inspire, and recruit by using social media. Congress should also pass the Senate immigration bill I mentioned earlier, which included a historic investment to secure our borders and enhance our interior enforcement.

As a reminder to everybody here, this bill would double the number of border agents, expand fencing, implement new technology and resources, address visa overstays, and provide for full monitoring of every inch of our southern border. By addressing real vulnerabilities and investing in smart security solutions, we can protect our borders and also--and also--live by our values.

We cannot allow ourselves to return to dark periods in our history when Americans debated turning away those fleeing cruelty around the world.

My mom who was born in Poland in 1938 while Nazi tanks amassed at the borders--she and her parents miraculously survived--Polish Jews-- miraculously survived one of the worst human events in human history, and they survived it in and around Warsaw. They lived there for 2 years after the war and then went to Stockholm for a year, Mexico City for a year, and then they came to New York City. They came to the one country in the world where they felt they could rebuild their shattered lives.

On my first birthday--when I was 1 year old, 1965, 15 years after my mom and her grandparents came to the country--my grandparents sent me a birthday card. This is what they said in that card. They wrote in English, by the way, 15 years after they came to the United States: The ancient Greeks gave the world the high ideals of democracy in search of which your dear mother and we came to the hospitable shores of beautiful America in 1950. We have been happy here ever since beyond our greatest dreams and expectations with democracy, freedom, and love and humanity's greatest treasure. We hope that when you grow up you will help to develop in other parts of the world a greater understanding of these American values.

We have very few opportunities to live by our values. This is one of those times. In this case it is not about developing them, as my grandparents worried during the Cold War, in other parts of the world. This is making sure that we hold on to the values that have defined us as a nation, that have separated us from so many other nations in the world and made this a place where my grandparents and my mom were able to come and achieve the American dream--a dream that would have seemed unimaginable to them during the Holocaust.

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