Issues of the Day

Floor Speech

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Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, I rise tonight, and have chosen not to attend the Congressional Baseball Game, because I think I have an important message that needs to be heard.

I rise to elevate an economic and humanitarian issue that is manifesting itself across Ohio, our Nation, and our continent. Millions upon millions of workers, many landless workers essential to getting America's work done in agriculture and other sectors, live and toil in an eerie, shadow existence.

These workers often are exploited due to our broken immigration and legal systems, which afford them and their work no respect.

Our beloved father, Steven, would say: ``They are caught between the Devil and the deep blue sea.''

Let's take a peek inside who some of these workers really are.

These workers dare to climb skyscrapers and install the steel beams and pour concrete across our country, one slip away from death.

They embrace harsh work circumstances, going into the brutally hot Sun in the south and west, picking your vegetables and fruits for 12 to 16 hours a day at high season.

In our vast tobacco fields, they work from sunup to sundown, picking off flowers from tobacco plants in the blistering 110-degree heat as their fingers and hands numb from the nicotine and their sweaty sunburned bodies turn ripe for melanoma skin cancer, and they have no health insurance.

They work in hot steam chambers cleaning our laundry in the big cities and in the very, very difficult environments of slaughterhouses using electrified cutting equipment, and they are covered in blood in those slaughterhouses for the meat that we eat.

They trudge through manure in dairy farms; and they harvest mushrooms sold in every store, in the grocery stores around this country; in cold, damp, dark, underground caves, walking through horse dung.

They catch, by hand, thousands of chickens every night in the dark, hot coops that generally have 25,000 or more chickens each, where the stench and the dust are life-threatening.

They clean bathrooms in amusement parks, along State turnpikes, and in airports.

And why do they do this work? To survive, while holding out hope for a better life for them and their loved ones.

Without these workers, our tables would be bereft of the food we depend upon. America could not feed itself.

Without these workers, companies would have to pay higher wages and offer health insurance to do the work.

Indeed, many, many, many millions of these workers are uprooted, actually, continental labor refugees, spit out of vicious and violent economic and political systems across the Americas. Yet continental trade compacts like NAFTA and CAFTA were designed purposefully to create this landless class of laborers to purposely undervalue them and their work.

NAFTA caused millions of these workers to be upended and lose their small farmsteads in Mexico, precipitating the largest human exodus from the land in modern history. And, reciprocally, in our country, millions of Americans lost their jobs in factories and farms across the Nation as our jobs were shipped south.

Trade agreements have failed workers on this continent in their homelands; and many of those south of our border fled--fled--to find ways to make a living, drawn by worker shortages in many countries, including our own, finding work in the most unappealing jobs, jobs our citizens won't take.

Now, for those who came here to work, they face even more cruelty by the Trump administration and many Members of this body, too, as their children and families are being ripped apart. And I am going to tell you a story about that in a second.

News reports are beginning to reveal the edges of this ugly system of de facto human bondage. Our Nation, founded in slavery, fought a bloody Civil War over whether the economic system of the South would be extended west, and we have not completely healed from that war even till today.

Sadly, American history has not been immune from subjugating and indenturing workers. This situation of penniless workers in bondage is the modern-day version of a continuing continental exploitation of labor. It is an old story, repeating itself in a new chapter.

Last Tuesday, in a very well-known greenhouse operation in my district in Erie County, Ohio, near Sandusky, the home of the roller coaster at Cedar Fair, this well-regarded greenhouse operation was raided at the height of this spring season by dozens and dozens and dozens of Federal Immigration, Border Patrol, and IRS officials.

At least 114 male and female workers were detained, removed to jails, and are being questioned somewhere. But where? Those who are parents have been cruelly separated from their children, with no provision made for the children.

This is a photo.

I will say something about that in a second, of what was going on last week in Ohio.

The reverberations of this raid in Ohio will be felt across a greenhouse and nursery industry at high season when these companies must have workers. They are highly dependent on thousands of seasonal laborers to perform the necessary work, and I am talking just in Ohio, tens of thousands of workers. The same is true in our border State of Michigan.

I worry about these workers, and I worry about whether these firms will find the workers to perform the work at such a key time of the year. There simply aren't enough hands left to do the work.

Men and women workers, some of whom had worked for this firm for nearly two decades, were surrounded by ICE officers who came out of another State, Detroit, Michigan, heavily armed with rifles. They even tied the hands of citizens of our country behind their backs before questioning them.

Border Patrol helicopters whirred overhead as workers were handcuffed and made to lie down on their bellies before being taken by bus to detention centers hundreds of miles from Erie County, where this raid occurred.

As far as I have been able to determine, the women workers, most of whom are mothers, have been placed in the Calhoun County Jail near Battle Creek, Michigan, and the men, in a facility, the Northeast Ohio Correctional Center in Youngstown, Ohio.

I took particular note that Immigration and Customs Enforcement must have notified the Associated Press that took this picture of the impending raid, as the reporter traveled all the way from Michigan to take this particular photo and report on the raid. But the same notification was not extended to the local press nor, for that matter, to local Ohio law enforcement officials who knew nothing about this raid.

It certainly looks like the Trump administration seems intent on staging a big show on immigration, but where is its interest in real solutions?

Was this raid really about security? or is it more about intimidation? or is it trying to divide Americans along economic and racial lines?

I was told the greenhouse workers put up no resistance. They were peaceful.

When I asked ICE if I could visit the workers in one of the detention centers this past weekend, I was told arrangements could not be made, even though these workers work in the district I represent. This is simply unacceptable.

ICE, which reports to the superlords in the Trump administration responsible for this, have been over a day late and a dollar short in their answers back to us in their communications. Yet people's lives and their children's well-being are at stake. Stonewalling is simply not an option.

So I intend to head to Michigan in a few days to try to find the detention center and, hopefully, speak to some of the women. I understand if I do so, we have to do it over a videophone or something. And I will say to the Department of Homeland Security I expect a full report on the status of each of these workers, as well as evidence they are being treated with dignity and respect in the county jail.

I hope to share more publicly about what I learn with my colleagues here in the House, as well as the people of Ohio's Ninth District. I want a full effort and report on what is at issue with each of the persons apprehended. I want to know where each is located, as well as what can be done to minimize the trauma for their children being separated from their parents.

So how did America get to a point where people who work hard with their hands for a living are rounded up like cattle and their children taken from them to places they know not where?

Some of these children may be Dreamers, Americans who have grown up in the United States whose immigration status needs to be addressed. So let's do it.

Today, we learned that next week this House, apparently, will vote on two competing measures that relate to immigration. One is from Mr. Bob Goodlatte of Virginia, H.R. 4760, called Securing America's Future Act of 2018. That bill only gives temporary status to young people who have grown up in this country. It makes deep cuts to legal immigration. It prevents legal immigrants from sponsoring their family members to enter the United States, and, of course, it boosts enforcement. It is a punitive bill, certainly not a very hopeful bill. And even if it could pass this House, it is not going to pass the Senate.

Then there is this mysterious new bill that Speaker Ryan calls a compromise bill, and the compromise bill we may vote on next week still isn't written. It follows the framework, we are told, set forward by the White House, legal status for Dreamers, increased border security, including funding for a wasteful, ineffective border wall, an end to the diversity visa lottery, and curbing family-based legal immigration.

Wow, there are so many people who have come to our office who want to marry someone who is waiting in another country. How many decades are they going to have to wait?

Just an hour ago, a summary provided said this:

This second measure would authorize funding for construction of a border wall sought by President Trump and give a path for so-called DACA populations to apply for a 6- year, indefinitely renewable, nonimmigrant legal status, after which they can apply for newly allocated green cards.

We will see. Count me as a skeptic.

To date, the Trump administration has failed to help young Dreamers who have been here their whole lives. To date, the Republican congressional majority has failed to provide a pathway for these Dreamers. The majority has failed to act on comprehensive immigration reform, which we really need.

Years of inaction by House Republicans who hold the majority have brought us to this point. And we had a measure down here on the floor that had garnered 216 signatures to bring a set of votes to the floor that could really have addressed this problem, and the majority jerked it off the ledger the other day.

Rather than blaming workers and harming U.S. companies, let's put the blame where it belongs: on the trade agreements that the United States has been passing since the 1990s that set us on a treacherous and greedy path of bad trade deals like NAFTA and CAFTA that threw millions of workers out of work in our country, and millions of workers and small businesses in countries like Mexico lost their work, treated like chattel on this continent.

We need a renegotiated NAFTA. These bad deals have never resulted in a positive trade balance for our country. Instead, they displaced millions of workers in North America. U.S. plants shut down here, and trade deals like NAFTA thrust cheap labor into the market, forcing wages down across the continent, including in Mexico.

Border crossings doubled into our country after NAFTA's passage, including illegal entries of desperate people under desperate circumstances.

Those trade deals disrupted the markets that small farmers in Mexico and Central America relied on to support themselves.

Who would not flee desperation? You would, too, if your livelihood disappeared. Think about it.

The best estimate suggests 11 million undocumented immigrants have assumed some of the hardest, low-paying jobs inside our economy since NAFTA's passage and, 10 years after that, CAFTA's passage. Employers and employees are transfixed by a rigged global economy that pits businesses and workers across this continent against one another.

Who benefited from that? Ask yourself that question. Answer the question.

Many workers have endured long journeys by foot, train, and boat as labor traffickers indebted them to make it across our border. Others who work here simply stayed beyond the expiration of their temporary visitor permits.

The situation is more complicated than many people realize. The reality is about 60 percent of the unauthorized population of workers here has been here for at least a decade. A third of undocumented immigrants 15 years of age and older live with at least one child who is a U.S. citizen by birth.

So do we close our eyes to all of this and what has happened on this continent or do we fix it?

The renegotiation of NAFTA presents a precious moment, and I am with the President on renegotiating NAFTA, but with what provisions? The chance to create a just economic model for all of North America that respects and recognizes both employer needs and labor rights should be in a trade agreement.

Renegotiation could have a monumental impact on not only economic opportunity for millions, but also correct distorted, migratory patterns in labor markets made so much worse by NAFTA. Instead of lifting up workers and improving their plight, achieving good jobs with living wages, the current NAFTA-CAFTA system forces workers in a harsh system that equates to a modern-day versions, yes, of slavery.

Workers understand that standing up and complaining about abusive conditions will mean termination because an employer can report them to immigration authorities. So the guillotine always hangs over their head. A renegotiated NAFTA can bring workers out from under the shadows. It will benefit business. It will benefit workers, and it will benefit our communities and our continent.

When workers are asked why they endure all this, almost all have the same reason: survival and a hope for the American Dream. For those that have come here from other places and work here, they are performing the jobs the rest of America chooses not to do. Rather than end this miserable underground system of indentured servitude, Republicans have chosen inaction time and time again.

NAFTA and CAFTA need to be renegotiated to institute a legal system that gives workers standing in the law, not exploitation, whatever side of the border they live on.

Now, Republican lawmakers fail to acknowledge the vast role American foreign policy has played in creating the conditions in North America that push and pull workers on their perilous trek, destabilizing their way of life. You cannot solve this problem without solving the NAFTA and CAFTA problem.

Recall, President Reagan worked with Congress to pass the last comprehensive immigration reform bill in the 1980s, and at the same time, unfortunately, the United States Government negotiated with international development institutions to develop new policies that favored large multinational corporations but undercut workers, including the smaller farms and businesses that created economic opportunity for communities in our country and south of our border.

In 1994, the North American Free Trade Agreement--boy is that a misnomer--was sold to Congress as a way to keep Mexicans home and to make sure that American workers were cared for. Well, guess what? NAFTA actually threw millions of Americans out of work and also millions of Mexican farmers and small businesses were displaced.

These upended workers sought opportunity wherever they could find it. Indeed, immigration to the United States from Mexico doubled post-NAFTA as millions of U.S. citizens saw their jobs shipped south of the border. And those south of the border, who couldn't even afford food at that point--a desperate exodus began and people were willing to work for penny wages.

A decade later, Congress passed CAFTA, the Central American Free Trade Agreement, further undercutting agricultural workers and small entrepreneurs throughout the rest of the southern tip of North America. So these policies trapped Latin America workers between a foreign policy that drove them from home and a U.S. domestic policy that kept them in the shadows, while driving good jobs out of the United States to low-wage environments.

Ask yourself: Who would benefit in that kind of system? Look at the profits of some of the companies and the CEOs of those companies that did that. We also know, far too many employers take on undocumented workers and exploit them for their willingness to work long hours for no pay.

President Trump, please know, walls will not solve these passive economic inequities our trade policies created. Only fixing NAFTA and CAFTA will.

Our Nation needs comprehensive, continental immigration reform that should include an E-Verify employee system to take the onus off the employers to verify a worker's status, and to give workers standing on this continent.

No border wall can succeed against the enormous pull of our vast economy's needs, including for labor, as employers complain every day to me they cannot find the workers they need.

Let me conclude in my remaining minutes with a few stories that came out of this horrendous raid that occurred in northern Ohio.

Maria Sandra worked at this greenhouse and was present the day of the raid. She recalls clocking in at 7 a.m. These workers work hard. She walked to her van to get her sunscreen and gloves when she heard vehicles slamming on the brakes in the gravel.

The officers got down with large weapons so she figured they were looking for a dangerous criminal. Then she says:

I realized it was immigration. Two men came up behind me screaming at me to walk. I told them I have my ID and my Social Security card. They screamed louder: Walk. I picked up my phone and they told me to put it away, that I couldn't use it. I was so scared seeing how they pushed people and put us together like animals on their way to a slaughterhouse. The officers tied everybody up.

I kept saying, I have my documents. I will show them to you. But they ignored me. They began separating us into two lines. Everybody that was White was let go. I was there so long that I had to use the bathroom. They refused to let me go until many others had to go.

We were taken, tied, to the restroom, accompanied by an officer with a big gun. I kept asking: Why are you doing this? I have all of my documentation in my van. They asked me: Are you a citizen? And I said: Yes. They laughed at me.

I had never felt so humiliated. I can still hear everybody crying. When they finally ran my social, they escorted me to my van, still tied. They told me to leave and I said: How can I drive with my hands tied? Another officer came with scissors to untie me and actually cut my wrist. I pulled away in pain and he got angry and said: Why did you move?

I said: Because you cut me. I stormed out of there in fear. I have never experienced anything like this in my whole life. I was treated like a criminal with no voice or rights.

Gloria Reyes works at Corso's and was there the day of the raid. Gloria's coworker, who was arrested, asked Gloria to drop off her lunch bag at home and check on her children. Gloria's coworker, whose name she would prefer not to give out because of fear of the children being taken, has three children: a little boy, a little girl, and a baby.

Gloria went to that house and when she knocked, she said she could hear them behind the door shushing each other. Gloria says:

I knocked for a while and just kept saying, son, open up. I won't hurt you. I just came to drop off your mom's lunch. The eldest finally opened the door but wouldn't let me in. He broke down crying and asking questions I couldn't answer because I didn't know where any of them were.

I tried to calm him down and said everything would be okay. I went back to take the children food, but nobody answered the door. I don't know if they are okay. Those children only have their mother.

I have been here in this community 42 years, and I have never seen anything like this. Families are being broken without caring of what would be of the children. Working is not a sin, and all of those people just wanted to better themselves.

We work hard, sometimes taking shifts from 7 a.m. until midnight. What the government is doing is wrong. People are suffering. The American children are suffering.

Another woman who worked at Corso's writes that she escaped the raid and she wants to remain anonymous because she fears that she might be hunted down. She said:

I never expected anything like this to happen. When I saw them coming, I ran, and I ran, and ran until I hid under a bed of flowers. I buried myself under the dirt and cried in silence. All I could think about is my kids. I have three. A lot of us have small children who need us. My skin itched of the mud stuck to my body drying.

Is this America? Is this America?

I prayed to God for strength. I hid there for 8 hours in fear of being taken or that maybe ICE would still be around. I still feel like I am there suffocating. When I came out, I asked someone who also works at Corso's for a ride. The entire complex was silent. Lunch boxes were left everywhere. There was a void in the room.

As I got home, I was scared to get out of the car. I looked around the neighborhood to make sure there were no officers around. Walking through the door and hugging my son was a relief. However, I hurt when he asks me: What is going to happen now? I don't know what to say.

All I know is, I have to provide for them. I am alone and I don't have a dime to my name. If I had a voice, I would tell the government that we don't hurt anyone. We are humble people who are just working to better our lives. I would tell them to put their hands on their hearts and realize they are hurting people. Children are suffering. Please stop.

A young girl, age 13, who resides in a place named Willard, her mother was taken in the raid. She said:

I was still in bed when I could hear someone banging on my door. Right after, there was banging on my bedroom window, so I got up to see what was going on. As I opened the door, my neighbor in panic and tears asked where mom was. I said: She is working. Why?

She asked, had I spoken to her? I began to say no when she interrupted me by saying she had been arrested at her job along with many others from our town. My neighbor said: Call your dad. I was so confused and even dumb because I didn't know what to do. I couldn't even remember my dad's phone number. My dad didn't answer, so I panicked. I cried on the floor hugging a picture of my mom. All I could do was cry and hope it wasn't true. Not her.

My father eventually walked through the door and just hugged me tight and we cried. I have little sisters and they kept asking: Mommy, mommy. I would just say: She is at work. It was even harder to tell my little brother. I played a song, ``I Am Not Alone,'' and I prayed and prayed.

That night my sisters wouldn't go to bed, insisting to wait for my mom. I went to sleep at 4 a.m. just thinking every time my mom gave me advice and how I wish I had listened every time.

My dad didn't go to work the next day. I think everybody is scared. Everyone says: Be strong. It is going to be okay. But all I can think about is, when will I see my mom again? When will I hug her again? Now I have to take care of my sisters. But looking at mom's empty chair at the table, just doesn't seem fair.

I hope the American people who are listening tonight think about these human beings that honestly don't deserve to be caught between our government, the Mexican Government, and the governments of the southern tip of North America. NAFTA and CAFTA have to be renegotiated and workers of this continent have to be respected.

We have to treat people like human beings and there must be a legal system that protects them all. ``God Bless America'' and God bless this continent.

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