National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2018 -- Motion to Proceed

Floor Speech

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Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, it was 1 week ago when President Trump and Attorney General Sessions announced that they were going to rescind the DACA Program. This is a program created by President Obama by Executive order that allowed those who had come to the United States as children to have an opportunity to be given 2 years on a renewable basis where they would not be subject to deportation and could work.

These young people are known as the Dreamers, a term that came about when I introduced the bill 16 years ago called the DREAM Act. These are young people who, frankly, are just asking for a chance, an opportunity to be part of the only country they have ever known.

The laws of the United States are very tough and very strict, and they say that, if you are undocumented, in their situation, you have to leave America for 10 years and then petition to come back in. That is why I introduced the DREAM Act. So these young people who were brought to this country by their parents would have a chance.

President Obama used his authority in an Executive order to allow them to apply for DACA protection. They had to pay a substantial filing fee and submit themselves to a criminal background check before they would be allowed to stay. So 780,000 young people did just that, and they are protected currently, but only for a few more months, under this DACA provision.

What is going to happen to them, we don't know. The only thing that makes any sense at this point is for Congress to act, for us to do something to replace the DACA Program, which the President is going to rescind, with a law--a law that establishes clearly the requirements, as well as the rights, that will be given to these individuals under the law.

That is why I have introduced the Dream Act with my cosponsor Lindsey Graham, a Republican of South Carolina. There are three other Republican cosponsors at this point, and we hope to move this forward.
President Trump has said he is interested in working with us, and we are going to take him at his word.

Despite rescinding DACA, I hope the President will be on our side to come up with a replacement that is fair.
Also, I want to address many of the myths that have come up about DACA, as well as the Dream Act. I am going to quote an unusual source for this Senator. The source is a man named David Bier. David is an immigration policy analyst at the Cato Institute. Those of us who live in this Washington environment of politics know that the Cato Institute is not a liberal think tank. It is the opposite. It is a conservative, largely Republican think tank, and Mr. Bier has published an article that has been seen in the Washington Post, in the Chicago Tribune, and in other papers entitled the ``Five myths about DACA.'' Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record the Washington Post article entitled ``Five myths about DACA.'' There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in the Record, as follows:

[From the Washington Post, Sept. 7, 2017]

Five Myths About DACA

(By David Bier)

The Trump administration's move to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, has created an uncertain future for the 800,000 young unauthorized immigrants who had been granted protection from deportation and permission to work legally. A six-month delay provides a chance for Congress to save the 2012 program. But if we're going to debate the merits of DACA, we should know what we're talking about. Here are some common myths.

Myth No. 1

DACA incentivized an increase in illegal immigration. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) is among those who support ending DACA because it has ``encouraged more illegal immigration and contributed to the surge of unaccompanied minors and families seeking to enter the U.S.
illegally.'' Statements like this betray a misunderstanding of who is eligible for deportation relief under the program.

DACA applies only to immigrants who entered before their 16th birthdays and who have lived in the country continuously since at least June 15, 2007--more than a decade ago. No one entering now can apply.
Perhaps the chairman thinks that children coming to the border are confused on this point. But the facts don't support that view either. To begin with, the timing is wrong.

According to data from the Border Patrol, the increase in migrant children in 2012--the year President Barack Obama announced DACA--occurred entirely in the months before the president announced the policy. The rate of increase also remained the same in 2013 as it was in 2012. Even then, the total number of juveniles attempting to cross the border-- unaccompanied and otherwise--never returned to the pre- recession levels of the mid-2000s.

Another problem with the theory is that although the majority of DACA beneficiaries are of Mexican origin, the increase in children crossing the border stems from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. These countries share one common trait: much higher than average levels of violence than anywhere else in North America. A careful study of this phenomenon by economist Michael Clemens found that more than anything else, a rise in homicides between 2007 and 2009 set off a chain of events that led to the rise of child migration.

Regardless, overall illegal immigration is far below where it was before the United States' last legalization program, in 1986, when each border agent caught more than 40 border crossers per month. Last year, it was fewer than two per month. DACA had no effect on this trend.

MYTH NO. 2

DACA has taken jobs from Americans. In announcing the Trump administration's decision this past week, Attorney General Jeff

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Sessions said that DACA ``denied jobs to hundreds of thousands of Americans by allowing those same jobs to go to illegal aliens.'' This myth even has a name in economics: the lump of labor fallacy. It supposes that the number of jobs in the economy is fixed, and that any increase in workers results in unemployment. Yet this notion is easily disproved.

From 1970 to 2017, the U.S. labor force doubled. Rather than ending up with a 50 percent unemployment rate, U.S. employment doubled.

If adding workers made the economy poorer, we might expect that people would try to ``free'' themselves from competition by moving to a desolate mountain and making everything for themselves. That no one does so is an admission that competition is actually good. We depend on other workers, DACA recipients included, to buy the products and services we produce. That's one reason earlier efforts to restrict immigration did not produce any wage gains.

MYTH NO. 3

Repealing DACA would benefit taxpayers. Sessions also argued that ending DACA ``protects taxpayers.'' But the opposite is true. According to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), first-generation immigrants who enter the United States as children (including all DACA recipients) pay, on average, more in taxes over their lifetimes than they receive in benefits, regardless of their education level.

DACA recipients end up contributing more than the average, because they are not eligible for any federal means-tested welfare: cash assistance, food stamps, Medicaid, health-care tax credits or anything else.
They also are better educated than the average immigrant.

Applicants must have at least a high school degree to enter the program. An additional 36 percent of DACA recipients who are older than 25 have a bachelor's degree, and an additional 32 percent are pursuing a bachelor's degree. The NAS finds that among recent immigrants who entered as children, those with a high school degree are positive to the government, to the tune of $60,000 to $153,000 in net present value, meaning it's like each immigrant cutting a check for that amount at the door. For those with a bachelor's degree, it's a net positive of $160,000 to $316,000. Each DACA permit canceled is like burning tens of thousands of dollars in Washington.

MYTH NO. 4

DACA repeal protects communities from criminals. DACA repeal, the attorney general further claimed, ``saves lives'' and ``protects communities.'' He implied that DACA ``put our nation at risk of crime.'' But DACA participants are not criminals. Unauthorized immigrants--the applicant pool for DACA--are much less likely to end up in prison, indicating lower levels of criminality. More important, to participate in DACA, applicants must pass a background check. They have to live here without committing a serious offense. If they are arrested, DACA can be taken away even without a conviction.

Only 2,139 out of almost 800,000 DACA recipients have lost their permits because of criminal or public safety concerns-- that's just a quarter of 1 percent. Four times as many U.S.- born Americans are in prison. About 35 times as many Americans have ended up behind bars at some point before age 34.

MYTH NO. 5

DACA repeal is just about politics. Obama criticized the DACA move this past week as ``a political decision'' that was ``not required legally.'' But legal issues certainly factored into the Trump administration's calculation. The timing coincided with a deadline that several states imposed on the administration, stating that if the president did not wind down DACA by Sept. 5, they would sue. If President Trump wanted to end DACA for political reasons, he could have done so on his first day in office.

Obama should know that defending DACA legally could be difficult. After all, when he attempted to implement a similar but much broader program in 2015 for undocumented parents of U.S. citizens, courts shut him down. Obama implemented DACA without going through Congress, and although some legal scholars dispute whether it faces the same legal issues as the 2015 program, the Trump administration would have confronted a real possibility of defeat had it chosen to defend DACA in court.

The correct response, however--for economic reasons and security reasons, but above all for moral reasons--would have been to actively push for Congress to enact the program, not to announce its demise and leave the chips to fall where they may.

Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, in this article, he spells out in some detail why some of the myths that were perpetrated by Attorney General Sessions and others last week need to be explained. One of them is that DACA somehow incentivized an increase in illegal immigration. Mr. Bier makes it clear that, when it comes down to it, you cannot arrive in the United States today and expect to be protected by DACA tomorrow. In fact, you have to have arrived in the United States at least by June 15 of 2007, more than a decade ago. So to argue that DACA was an incentive for more immigration in this country is just plain wrong.

What about those kids who showed up on the borders years ago, thousands of them? Well, it turns out that they weren't eligible for DACA or the Dream Act, and it also turns out that most of them were not from Mexico but from parts of Central America, which has been devastated by crime waves and gang activity.

The second myth that Mr. Bier addresses is that these DACA recipients--780,000--are taking jobs away from Americans. What he points out is that, if you start with the premise that we have a static amount of jobs in this country--what he calls a ``lump of labor fallacy''--then, it is dog-eat-dog to fight for those jobs.

It turns out that we have an expanding economy, and he proves it by giving us a statistic. Between 1970 and 2017, the U.S. labor force doubled. So rather than ending up with a 50-percent unemployment rate, our U.S. employment doubled. It is an expanding and dynamic economy.

The case can be made effectively that the DACA recipients are people who can add to the economy. All of them have to have the equivalent or a high school education. Many of them--large percentages of them--have college degrees and even more. So they can bring a lot to the economy.

The other point or the other myth that Mr. Bier addresses is whether repealing DACA would benefit taxpayers. The point he makes is that these DACA recipients are paying taxes in the jobs they are working and, by and large, are ineligible for any Federal programs or any Federal assistance.

So they are a net gain in terms of our Treasury and in terms of what they can do. For example, if you are protected by DACA today on a 2- year renewable basis, you do not qualify for a Pell grant to go to college. You don't qualify for a Federal Government loan. You have to find out how you are going to do it some other way. So these young people who are working and paying taxes are not drawing from any of the government programs that other people their age draw from.

There is also this argument that DACA somehow is going to make America less safe and that there will be more criminals. Don't forget what I said earlier. To qualify for DACA, you have to submit yourself to a criminal background check. The likelihood of the next crime being committed by a DACA recipient is very narrow. The likelihood that it is committed by someone who is already an American citizen is much more likely.

Finally, there is the argument that DACA is just about politics.

Well, it can be about politics, unless we do our job in Congress. We are supposed to pass the laws. The President has challenged us to pass a law that will help deal with DACA. We have, I think, an awesome responsibility to do just that.

I was at Loyola University's medical school on Friday and met several of the DACA students who are in medical school at Loyola. They are extraordinarily bright individuals who competed and were accepted at Loyola's medical school. Now they have a program. As they complete the 4 years of medical school at Loyola, they want to apply for residencies so they can specialize. If you are going to be a resident, you had better be prepared to work. If you don't have DACA protection, you can't legally work in the United States. Thirty-two aspiring, really bright, young medical students soon to be doctors will be stopped in their tracks if we don't replace DACA because they cannot apply for residency because they cannot legally work in America without DACA protection or something like it.

Would we be better off in America if those 32 individuals did not become doctors? Of course not. We want them to become doctors. In Illinois, the State is helping to pay for their education with the promise that they will practice medicine in an underserved area of our State. I am from downstate Illinois, small-town Illinois, and I will tell you that we desperately need more doctors, not just in individual towns but at the hospitals that serve those towns. If these 32 can help us reach those goals, we are going to have better medical care across our State, but that depends on Congress and Congress meeting its responsibility.

I have come to the floor of the Senate over 100 times now to tell the stories of individuals who are affected by

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DACA and the Dream Act, and I want to do that again today. I found that speeches are great and statistics are fine, but when you hear the stories about these individuals--who they are, what they have done, and what they aspire to do--you can understand the context of this important national debate.

The person I want to introduce today in the Senate is this young lady, Cristina Velasquez. She was brought to the United States at the age of 6 from Caracas, Venezuela. She went to elementary school in Madison, WI. She wrote me a letter. Cristina wrote the following:

I spent my formative childhood years in the Midwest where I learned to assimilate and learned the values this country was founded on. The salt-of-the-Earth quality of people around me and extraordinary kindness between strangers shaped my own values and attitude toward others. Growing up in Madison taught me a great deal about compassion, patience, and hard work.

Cristina was an outstanding student. In high school she was a member of the National Honor Society. She was elected vice president of her class, and she managed the track team. She found time to volunteer at a local summer camp for pre-K students. She graduated from the Honors College at Miami Dade College. She is currently a student at Georgetown University, majoring in international law, institutions, and ethics.

She has received the President's Volunteer Service Award 2 years in a row and is a Walsh Scholar. As a graduate of Georgetown, I can tell you nobody ever named me a Walsh Scholar. This young lady obviously is very talented.

During her time at Georgetown, Cristina has interned in the House of Representatives and has piloted a college mentorship program at a local high school. In addition, she also has found time to have two part-time jobs. She has to. You see, as a person who is protected by DACA and undocumented, she doesn't qualify for government assistance to go to college--certainly not at the Federal level. So these students have to work extra hard to stay in school.

She has dedicated two of her undergraduate summers and a full school year volunteering to teach in Miami and in San Francisco. In both of these cities, she worked with high-achieving, low-income students trying to get them into college. You see, Cristina's dream ultimately is to be a teacher.

Last week in my office, Cristina joined 15 other students from Georgetown who came in as we were debating DACA and the Dream Act on the floor. I am sure they wanted to hear my speech on the floor but, just to make sure, we bought a dozen pizzas and the crew seemed to be pretty happy with that decision. It was an impressive group of students. Every one of them was a DACA recipient.

These young people have so much potential, but they are worried. They don't know what their future will be with the decision made last week by the Trump administration to repeal DACA. Congress hasn't acted to pass the Dream Act, and we should.

As for Cristina Velasquez, she will graduate from Georgetown in December. She has been accepted into Teach for America. Most of us know that organization well, but for the record, it is a national nonprofit organization that places the most talented recent college graduates in challenging school districts in urban and rural areas where they have a shortage of teachers. Teach for America has 190 teachers working in these challenging districts who are currently DACA Dreamers. They are teaching kids all across America.

What does it say about us? What does it say to their students if these Teach for America Dreamers are invited to leave the country? That is exactly what Mr. Steve Bannon said on 60 Minutes on Sunday when he came out against our efforts to pass the Dream Act. He wants Cristina Velasquez gone. He thinks America is a better place if she is gone. I think he is wrong, and I think most reasonable people would agree.

Cristina is going to start the program, Teach for America, next summer and teach next fall, but without DACA or the Dream Act, Cristina and 190 other Teach for America teachers will be forced to drop out and leave their students behind.

Instead, many would have them deported back to countries they have never known, saying they are not part of the United States and they don't have anything to offer us. Will America be a stronger country if we deport Cristina or if she stays here to teach children in challenging districts? I think the answer is clear to any reasonable person.

When we introduced the Dream Act, Senator Lindsey Graham and I--a Republican of South Carolina and a Democrat of Illinois--cosponsored the measure. We gave a press conference. Senator Graham said: The moment of reckoning is coming. Well, that moment has arrived.

Republican leaders in Congress need to help us to pass the Dream Act once and for all and make it the law of the land. We need to bear responsibility for these hundreds of thousands who can make America a better country. They show with their lives that the promise of America is still very much alive.

As for this Senator, I have been at this for a long time. I am going to see it to the finish line. I still have that dream of the day when President Trump signs the Dream Act into law in the Oval Office. It will be a great day, particularly for this country to recognize that these young people offer special talents and a special commitment to the future of America, which we desperately need.

I yield the floor.

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