Broader Options for Americans Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. TILLIS. Mr. President, in a moment, I am going to talk about the immigration debate we are going to have here.

Before I do that, though, I want to recognize that this is Valentine's Day. I happen to be several hundred miles away from my sweetheart, but I want to wish my wife a happy Valentine's Day. I made her a little card. I am sure I probably just violated a rule, but I don't think anybody can fire me. I want my wife to know I love her and wish I was with her.

Now, Mr. President, I want to talk a little about immigration reform. We just heard a discussion. I tell you, sometimes I think I teleport from this Chamber to the Kennedy Center because there are more theatrics going on here than you can find down there on any given day.

Let me give you one example of that. The whole indignant position that the Member from New Jersey just had on ``chain migration'' and somehow that mean Republicans came up with this term because we wanted to make a point. Demographers came up with this term decades ago. People on the other side of the aisle even have references to chain migration in bills they proposed. End the theatrics. Solve this problem.

Let's talk about the President's framework. I was presiding just before I got up here. I heard the word ``hard-line'' used--the hard- line demand of President Trump. I don't agree with everything President Trump has done. In fact, I said a year and a half ago--and I got criticized for it--that when you sit down and talk border patrol and talk homeland security, you are going to find out you don't need a large, monolithic wall from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico.

After the President was elected and after he got into office, he listened to homeland security and border patrol, and he came up with a plan that isn't a long, monolithic wall across the southern border. It is a strategic plan that actually lets us improve the security of the homeland along the northern and southern borders. It is a plan that tries to confiscate tons of drugs that are poisoning Americans in the tens of thousands of every year. It is a plan that makes sure gang members are more likely to be incarcerated when they cross the border illegally and less likely to go into the very communities that many of the people who immigrate to this country go into. It is a plan to make those communities safer.

It is a plan to make sure we know the thousands of people that cross the border illegally are not carrying illicit drugs in a truck or car or a wheel well, the way they do it today, because it is using technology to be able to search more vehicles to make sure our homeland is safe.

It is also a plan that shows more compassion than President Obama's DACA plan. Right now, they are saying: Let's keep DACA going. Well, there are 690,000 people who are in DACA. Their future is uncertain because it is an Executive order. It doesn't have the force of law. It could possibly be challenged by the court. The President decided on September 15 of last year, Congress do your job. You have been talking about immigration reform for two decades. We have an arguably illegal Executive order by President Obama that President Trump kept in place for about a year, and then he said: I am going to give you all 6 months to do your job and come up with something that has enduring value.

The DACA proposal only provided the illegally present persons who came to this country--through the decisions of an adult--some certainty that they wouldn't be deported. It doesn't give them any certainty in terms of a path to citizenship. People said the President has a hard- line plan. DACA allows 690,000 people who signed up for it to be here and, hopefully, not have that decision thrown out by the courts or have the President rescind it.

What we just heard from three or four Members on the other side of the aisle is that the President's hard-line plan is to have nearly three times as many people with a path to citizenship, not a piece of paper that hopefully will be in place for the time you spend in the United States but citizenship. So the President's hard-line plan actually legalizes about two and a half times as many people, not to just let them be here present, to have legal status but have a path to citizenship. That is hard-line?

I am not sure the President was there when he was running for office, but he listened. He recognizes he wants to be the President who gets something done, and he is willing to accept the criticism from people on my side of the aisle who may not support a path to citizenship. I do, and the President does.

I find it remarkable that somebody would say a President, who has endorsed a bill to provide a path to citizenship to 1.8 million people--two and a half times more than President Obama provided a temporary and passing status to--is hard-line.

Border security. Why is border security important? Is it just purely a hard-line deportation force sending people out? No. I already talked about, No. 1, hundreds of millions of doses of heroin, fentanyl, and other illicit drugs come across our border every year. We simply do not have the people, technology, and infrastructure to interdict them. Of the $25 billion, about $18 billion of it would be spent for border security. About 10 percent to 15 percent of that is on the northern border. The remainder is on the southern border. Some of that will be spent on wall structures.

When all is said and done, less than half of the 2,300 miles will have a wall structure. The rest will be spent on training additional personnel. If you have ever gone to a border crossing, you know the long lines they have there. This is actually creating technology that has low-intensity x rays where you could drive a vehicle through. The Border Patrol folks can identify human smugglers, human traffickers, and drug smugglers without ever having the person get out of the car. That is what the border security plan is focused on as well. There are wall structures where they make sense. They don't make sense along about half of the border.

Let me tell you about the humanitarian case for this, which I find remarkable no one on the other side of the aisle will bring up. I went to Texas last year. I went along the southern border. I was on the Rio Grande, on the Border Patrol boats, on horseback, and at night I took ATVs around. I heard a lot of stories by a lot of people, including property owners. Over the last 20 years, 10,000 people have died trying to cross our border on U.S. soil. We have no earthly idea how many tens of thousands of people die just trying to get there. So 10,000 people died over the last 20 years because we didn't know where they were. They were on American soil, but we didn't know where they were. About 1,000 of them were children. If that is not a case for needing to know who is crossing the border and where they are--even if they may get deported if they don't have a legitimate claim to asylum but have this threat to their safety--then I don't know what else is. I don't see how border security is hard-line when you look at the facts--not the theater but the facts.

I think that second pillar of the President's proposal is balanced. It is less than what he originally wanted, but it makes sense, and it shows a lot of movement on his part. Again, two and a half times the number of people are actually getting a path to citizenship--more than the DACA Executive order proposed--and it has border security that makes sense and is no longer this idea of a monolithic wall.

We heard somebody say there is a dramatic cut to legal immigration; that the promise we made to everybody who is in line because of a family relationship is going to be broken. That is utter nonsense. There is no proposal like that on the table. The fact is, there are about 3.9 million people in the backlog who, if the President's proposal is accepted, will get to this country in half the time it takes today. There are about 3.9 million people waiting to come to this country because of a family relationship who we have proposed--that the President has proposed--should be able to get here sooner.

The diversity lottery is also something, I think, people have been misled or they are trying to mislead you. I will leave it to you to decide. The diversity lottery is not ending. This actually comes up with a reasonable way to use those 50,000 green cards in a way that lets us draw down the backlog sooner--instead of having somebody wait 17 years or 20 years to get into the country, maybe 8 or 9, but then it is also with a focus on the underrepresented countries. There are many countries in Africa--about 15,000--that we would like to make sure they have an opportunity every year to come to this country. They are from an underrepresented country. We have already made proposals that said we are open to other proposals to make that be a part of how the diversity lottery gets settled. So 50,000 will continue to come. When we say we are ending the diversity lottery, we are not saying we will end the entry of 50,000 people; we are talking about modernizing it.

The last time we did any major immigration bill, I was 5 years old. I think it is about time to look at how the world has changed and maybe open your eyes and open your hearts to a better way to do it that benefits the person trying to come to this country and benefits our country as a result of their entry. I think it can be a win-win.

The last thing on chain migration is, I want to go back and find everybody who voted for bills in the past, and they voted for a bill with legislative language in it that referred to chain migration. I am sick of that kind of garbage on the Senate floor. That is just misleading. Chain migration is just a process that has been used in the past--not only by our country but other countries--to kind of link people together.

I am absolutely sympathetic with some of the things the gentleman from New Jersey said, but to say that this is some hateful, divisive term is not paying a whole lot of attention to your job. I have only been here 3 years. Many of these people who are here voted for language that had chain migration in it, and now they are saying it is something the hateful folks in our marketing departments created to be divisive. That is just untrue.

Now the last thing. When we are talking about legal immigration in this country--we immigrate about 1 million to 1.1 million people a year to this country. I don't have a problem with that number. If I had Members on the other side of the aisle, some of my colleagues, say, ``Thom, we want to try to maintain that same amount of immigration over time,'' I would say that I am open to it. Some of my colleagues I have worked with on this bill may not be. But the way we go about doing it needs to be modernized.

How many times have I heard that when we have a foreign national here who graduates with an engineering degree or some degree in STEM, that we should just staple a green card to the back of their diploma--how many times have we heard that?--because we need high-end workers. We need welders. We need carpenters. We need plumbers. We need people to come to this country to fill jobs, or at some point, our economic growth is going to be limited by the number of resources we have for those jobs. Our unemployment is going down. The demand for the workers is there. But we have an immigration system where about three-fourths of everybody who comes to this country comes purely because of a family relationship. I bet that if we dig into it, many of them actually could qualify on the basis of merit, but right now, it is just a random selection that doesn't really tie to our needs as a nation and for our economic growth or for our economic security.

I believe that if we get the immigration policy right, over the next 10 years, we will be building a case to have more legal immigration here, more than the 1 million or 1.1 million, but if we don't fix this, we are not going to fix the underlying problem with our immigration system.

I actually didn't plan on speaking. I just grabbed a couple of these slides so that I could talk about it. But it is very important to me for us to--I don't like being a part of an organization that talks a lot and doesn't get anything done, and over the last 17 years, that is all these folks have been doing. They say: Reelect me. I promise you that next year, I will get immigration reform done. Next year, I will file the Dream Act, and we will get it done.

Well, guess what. It hasn't gotten done under a Republican administration. President Bush was sympathetic to this issue. He couldn't get it done. Congress couldn't get it done.

President Obama comes in and says: I am going to fix immigration. President Obama had the votes to pass ObamaCare. There was a time in this Chamber when not a single Republican vote was necessary to pass a bill out of here, right? So if you don't need a single Republican vote in Congress, on the House or the Senate side, why didn't you get it done? Because I don't think you have taken the time to construct something that makes sense, that is compassionate, that is responsible, and that will have the enduring value of law. So now is the time to get it done, and the only way we are going to get it done is with bipartisan cooperation.

If you don't like some of the elements of the President's framework and you set a hammer to it, fold your hands, and say: If you will not vote on mine, I will not vote on yours--look at this and tell us how we can improve it. Tell us what we need to do to get a vote. Tell us what we can do to moderate this. To call this a hardline bill is absurd. It is theatrics. It is the kind of stuff that has prevented us from getting things done for the last 17 years.

I hope people will have an honest discussion and debate. I hope people will come down here, offer all the amendments they want to, and I hope they will be mature enough, if they fail, to move on to the next one because I, for one, want to provide certainty to the DACA population.

I say to the Presiding Officer, you know better than I because you are in the Marine Reserves. There are 900 people serving in the military today--that is more than a battalion, right? We have more than 900 DACA recipients serving in the military. I want to file this bill. I want to get this bill to the President's desk and say to them: Welcome to this country. Thank you for your service. I can't wait to go to your ceremony where you swear the oath as an American citizen.

That is what we can do this week. But I guarantee you, anybody who sits here and says that the President's proposal is unfair and insincere and hardline is playing politics. It makes me wonder if some of them would just as soon have this be the ``if you elect me next year, I promise I will fix this problem'' campaign speech versus take this off the table, provide them certainty, and do something different for a change.

Finally, I started by wishing my wife a happy Valentine's Day. When I get into these speeches--I worked in business most of my career. I haven't been in politics very long. I get very frustrated with the lack of production and with the lack of results. But, Sweetie, I am not mad. I just get a little bit intense when I talk about an issue where the solution is within reach. I am not mad. I am frustrated with the Members of the U.S. Senate who don't see the opportunity to seize this moment and get it done.

Mr. President, thank you for the opportunity. I probably went long, and I apologize to anybody else who may be waiting to speak. But this is the week to get it done. This is the Congress to get it done. This is the President who has given us a historic opportunity. I hope we seize the day.

Thank you, Mr. President.

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