Broader Options for Americans Act -- Continued

Floor Speech

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Mr. WYDEN. Madam President, right now it is estimated that 700,000 Dreamers face the very real threat that they may be ripped from the only life and the only country they have ever known. These are young people who have grown up in America. They go to school here. They work hard here. Often, they work at multiple jobs. They get terrific grades. They give back to their communities. They have done everything right.

I have met with them at home. My colleague Senator Merkley and I have met with many of them at joint meetings. A number of them say point blank: We like to serve America. We believe in America.

That is all they have known. They serve in the military. They want to do police work. They want to be first responders.

In fact, to earn their DACA status, they had to come forward, give their information to our government, and then submit to a background check. Now they are living under this cloud of uncertainty because the President, on his own, stamped an expiration date on the DACA Program.

What I wish to do for a few minutes is to talk about these terrific young people--these special young people, the Dreamers--and what they contribute to our country.

I was very pleased recently to have Esli Becerra join me at this year's State of the Union speech because in my view he and his younger brother Kevin embody the very best about our country. Esli came to Oregon when he was 8 months old. He got his first job before he was 10 in order to support his family. I am going to talk a little bit about these two terrific young people because, literally, for years now, each of them would take turns working to support the other, so that between them they were always saying: We want to do it the American way. We want to do it by dint of hard work and thrift and in the spirit we have in this country, where if you work hard, there aren't any limits to what you can achieve. They are two very, very special young men.

Esli wanted to get a higher education. So his younger brother put in the sweat equity to make it happen. Kevin, who is a U.S. citizen, worked more than 80 hours a week after he graduated from high school to help pay for Esli to go to Lane Community College in Eugene.

Let me repeat that. Kevin, a U.S. citizen, who worked in our office, as well, worked more than 80 hours a week after he got out of high school because he said: I want to help my brother get ahead.

Esli has now built a real professional career. He is a visual effects artist in Portland. So he has turned around, and he is stepping up to help pay for Kevin's college education. We have these two remarkable brothers who, year after year, were either working or going to school in order to help each other get ahead in the way that we hope young people will do by dint of hard work and discipline and supporting each other. They are brothers, and they have been in each other's corner and supportive of their families their whole lives. We need more people in America like the Becerra brothers.

They are not alone. Another of Oregon's estimated 11,000 Dreamers is a young man named Daniel Kim. He immigrated legally to Beaverton, OR, from South Korea, but he learned that his immigration lawyer never filed the paperwork needed to get permanent legal status. So without this information, he found out very abruptly that he was considered undocumented.

Thanks to DACA and a special military recruitment program, Daniel had the opportunity to serve our country. He seized the opportunity and joined the U.S. Army the first chance he got.

I will state that I just find it painful to hear the disparaging talk about immigrants. Unfortunately, the President uses that kind of language too often. Maybe it is easy for people in Washington, DC, to forget that these debates are about real people. They are not just about acronyms and numbers. Daniel and Esli are the types of young people this debate is about--a soldier on the frontlines defending our country, a young man working hard at home in Oregon and supporting his family. These are the young people whose lives have been turned upside down by a Presidential decision, and they are just pawns in this raging political battle.

Young people like Esli and Daniel signed up for DACA so they could work and give back to the country. Dreamers are integral parts of their communities. They pitch in and help those communities grow. If all DACA recipients lost their protections, it would be a massive economic hit to our country--$280 billion lost. Even going beyond the humanitarian impact of breaking up families, that is what DACA recipients mean from a dollars-and-cents standpoint.

The crisis Dreamers are facing began last year when the President made the decision to terminate the program. Senators from both parties have now been working to fix it. Time after time, Senators have brought bipartisan ideas forward, and I would like to note at this point that Senator Schumer went to the President and put the border wall on the table for discussion, making it clear that this was something that he didn't support but that he would put it out there just to try to generate some goodwill and to try to find a way to get folks working together. Throughout this discussion, sometimes it seems the President just will not take yes for an answer.

So Senators from both sides keep working in the best tradition of this body. On the healthcare front, we sure showed here recently what could be done when there is bipartisanship and Senators are working together. He sits right over there--Chairman Hatch of the Finance Committee. He and I worked together. I am the ranking Democrat on the committee. We now have a 10-year authorization to the Children's Health Insurance Program. Nobody would have ever imagined that a year and a half ago. We have made a transformative set of changes in Medicare to update the Medicare guarantee to cover chronic illness, cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and stroke--where most of the healthcare spending is. We got that done, as well as the biggest change in child welfare policy in the Families First Program, an approach that Democrats and Republicans had been dreaming about for 30 years. I bring it up only by way of saying that bipartisanship can break out here in the Senate.

Right now, as I am on the floor, I know we still have a big group of Democrats and Republicans who are saying that this is too important to just have another political food fight. They are working on a compromise plan--Democrats and Republicans--that would bring this DACA crisis to a close, invest in border security, make some changes to our legal immigration system, and particularly do justice to the Dreamers, like young Esli Becerra.

The reality is that when we are doing something like that, it is pretty obvious that nobody gets the bill they would have written. Nobody gets the bill they would have written for themselves if they were to go back to their office and take out a sheet of paper and write down from A to Z, but that is pretty much what we have to recognize if we are going to find some common ground. That is how the bipartisan process is supposed to work.

Colleagues, bipartisanship is not about taking each other's dumb ideas. Anybody can do that. Bipartisanship is about taking each other's good ideas. That is where we have a big group of Senators--Democrats and Republicans--working together on this issue.

Unfortunately, it seems that recent reports indicate that the President and his team are working to derail this bipartisan solution. They are insisting on some kind of approach that will make radical changes to the legal immigration system, for example.

I wish to note for a second that this is very important in the Wyden household. My parents fled the Nazis in the 1930s. Not all got out. My dad basically talked his way into the Army. They weren't all that interested in my dad. He was overweight, and he had health problems. But my dad convinced them that he was a German kid, and he could write propaganda pamphlets that we could drop on the Nazis, telling them that they were going to die and they were going to freeze. My dad was the most patriotic person I ever met. We are better because of legal immigration in this country. Yet in order to get this compromise, we have now seen proposals to radically change the legal immigration system.

I see my colleague, an outstanding member of the Finance Committee, who knows so much about these immigration issues on the floor, and I look forward to his remarks.

The fact is, the President is demanding an approach that goes way beyond DACA and border security, which are two natural bookends for bipartisanship, and it is where this debate begins. Unfortunately, what the President is really pushing breaks up families and severely cuts back legal immigration, and I just noted that I have seen why legal immigration makes our country better and stronger. What the President is talking about would, on top of this, do enormous economic harm to this country and is certainly not going to get the votes here in the Senate to proceed with 60 votes. The bipartisan solution on which both sides have worked hard together is the best opportunity that the Chamber has to end the DACA crisis.

The Senate really cannot come up with sustainable solutions when we just play to those who take the most extreme view. We can't get a sustainable solution. By the way, that is how debates in the Senate are supposed to work--two parties, hand in hand, bringing their ideas forward and finding solutions both sides can agree on. That is why I mentioned Chairman Hatch and our finally getting the major health reforms recently that people never dreamed were possible.

On this debate at hand, the question of justice for the Dreamers and reasonable border security--two bookends that I happen to think could fit and produce principled bipartisanship through this group of Senators who are working together--this is our opportunity. Millions of families across the country are following this debate, and they are hoping to get some good news on this issue where there has been gridlock for so long.

Passing the bipartisan proposal is our opportunity to give it to them. This is the time for the Congress to come up with a permanent solution for Dreamers. This is not something to be deferred any longer. It is time to act now. I urge my colleagues in the strongest way possible to support the bipartisan proposal--Democrats and Republicans coming together--when there is an opportunity to vote on it, which I believe will be shortly.

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