Securing America's Future Act of 2018
Floor Speech
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Ms. LOFGREN. Madam Speaker, this is an anti-immigrant bill. It slashes legal immigration. It will injure the ag industry. It criminalizes nearly the entire undocumented population. It will undermine public safety and removes critical protections for families and children, and it even fails to provide a pathway to legal permanent residence for Dreamers.
Sometimes my friends across the aisle say the problem with immigration is we don't have assimilation. You don't get assimilation when you create a permanent underclass of people who are Americans in every way but their paperwork.
It eliminates family-based categories, and this is the relatives of Americans. American citizens and legal permanent residents, forget it. You are not going to be able to get your family members in if this bill passes.
It mandates the use of E-Verify, which would be highly disruptive to restaurants, hotels, and other industries, and the changes in the ag worker provision are just a fig leaf.
The bill transforms a civil law violation into a crime so that undocumented immigrants, including the parents of Dreamers the bill purports to help, become criminals overnight.
It would accelerate separation of kids from parents when 11 million American workers suddenly become subject to prosecution.
Undermining our asylum system by establishing impossibly high evidentiary burdens, it removes protections, as I have said, and it does nothing to reunite the thousands of children who have been taken away from their parents at the border. Instead, it facilitates putting mothers in the cages with their toddlers.
So why are we debating a bill that nearly everyone, even many in the Republican Party, think is a terrible idea? I fear it is because the very extreme elements of the Republican Party have become the loudest and the most powerful.
I continue to have faith in the good people of our country. The American people spoke out loudly against President Trump's family separation policy. They couldn't stand seeing little children, babies, and toddlers ripped from their mother's arms. And we saw a reversal, but it is not a solution, because locking up mothers, putting those mothers in the cages with their toddlers is not the solution to this problem.
We are not going to let hatred, bigotry, and xenophobia prevail in this country.
Madam Speaker, I urge a ``no'' vote on this bill.
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Ms. LOFGREN. Mr. Speaker, this bill is a step in the wrong direction in so many ways.
I wish that we had had an opportunity to sit down, reason together, and come up with a plan that really serves our country. That didn't happen.
Here is what the result was: The Chamber of Commerce has just reported that the Niskanen Center that they have relied on indicates that, if this bill became law, the U.S. would lose $319 billion in GDP. That would be the impact, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, for adopting this bill.
And I wonder what my colleagues on the other side of the aisle are really doing by turning every undocumented person in the United States, currently a civil law violation, into a crime. We are now creating 11 million prosecution opportunities.
At the same time, The Washington Post is just reporting, this is the headline: ``Trump Administration Will Stop Prosecuting Migrant Parents Who Cross the Border Illegally with Children, Official Says.''
What are we doing here? We are doing a bill that would incarcerate families and children to pursue a policy that the administration now says they don't intend to pursue.
Now, I don't have a lot of trust in the Trump administration because it changes daily.
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Ms. LOFGREN. Mr. Speaker, I would urge my colleagues on the other side of the aisle to take a step back here.
Your President has left you out on a limb. He just sawed that limb off for a bill that does damage to the country for a policy that he now has apparently abandoned. This is a ridiculous situation here.
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