Pathway to Citizenship

Floor Speech

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Ms. TLAIB. Madam Speaker, I am a proud child of immigrants.

Both of my parents immigrated from Palestine. My dad's journey actually was from Palestine as a young boy, and he grew up, his teenage years, in Nicaragua. From Nicaragua, at 19 years old, he came to the United States.

My father, with a fourth grade education, couldn't ever experience human dignity anywhere except until he came here and worked for Ford Motor Company and became part of the United Auto Workers, the UAW. That is when he felt, for the first time, human dignity in the workplace.

My father, in the 1970s, used to be in Detroit, on the corners. If you came up to him before he got to Ford, he would pull up his arm and say, ``Which watch you want?'' Because he hustled. That is how he provided for his family.

My mother only went up to eighth grade because she was trying to provide for her family, which is a farming family in Palestine. When she came to this country, pregnant with me, never could they have imagined their daughter ever becoming a United States Congress Member and coming here with that lived experience and understanding the importance of bringing truly loving and caring farm immigrant neighbors.

The human impact on doing nothing in regard to immigration is real. I grew up in Southwest Detroit--20 different ethnicities. I want you all to know what that feels like, right?

I mean, this is a majority Black city with a little bit of beautiful Brown spice here and there. I mean, it was just incredible to grow up in such a diverse community, where I felt like it made me a better mother, a better advocate, a better American because, at that moment, I appreciated things that my immigrant neighbors had seen through their lens and my Black neighbors through their experience in this country as they were fighting against racism, and continue to do so, and discrimination.

It is so incredibly important, as we think about this, not to allow others to fear our immigrant neighbors, to allow our country and policies to blame them for everything wrong in our country, when we all know they helped build it.

I also want to take a moment because I think it is incredibly important to know that I grew up in a border community. Right there in Detroit, on the other side, you can see Canada. What does that mean? Because people focus on the southern border. What that means is Border Patrol and immigration enforcement is right there in our community.

Why this is important is because I want you all to know, as they are supposed to be patrolling that border, making sure that illegal drugs and substances don't come in, that is not what they did. This very, very broken Customs and Border Patrol system and structure in place is so racialized that they turned on this beautiful Southwest Detroit community. They turned on my Latino neighbors. They turned on my Muslim brothers and sisters, many of them just trying to experience and live in this border community.

A 9-year-old ACLU investigation of Customs and Border Patrol operations in Michigan revealed just how incredibly racist the agency is. The report revealed that, even though CBP's mandated mission is to police the border, only 1.3 percent of their cases in Michigan involved attempted entries from Canada that were illegal. Ninety-six percent of those arrested by CBP in Michigan were recorded by agents of being nonwhite.

Now, I want to explain this to you all. My block club president, this beautiful Cuban, Black, mixed person, he is an incredible advocate. He works in the auto industry. He is out there with this guy from Germany coming in on a visitor visa. He is in this car, and he is showing them the border, the riverfront, just the walkway, and just showing: Hey, that is Canada. This is my community. This is where I live.

He is driving around and, of course, CBP stops him. He goes to the guy who is here on a visitor visa: Hey, I know you are from Germany. Don't worry. Just have your immigrant documents ready and everything.

But guess what? They didn't ask the guy from Germany for any of his documents. They asked the U.S.-born citizen, Brown neighbor of mine for those immigration documents.

Not only that, one of my neighbors running around in her own local park, in her own local park, was asked: Where are your papers?

People are now being asked to carry their documents with them, and this never happened for a very long time, up until about 15 or 20 years ago. To my good colleague from New Mexico, you should know this. This is a community that has never seen these kinds of ICE and immigration operations at schools, which is illegal. It is against our own Federal policies. They were doing them near churches. I mean, literally, near churches, against their own Federal policy. So it is really incredibly important to understand just how broken those systems are.

We can continue to talk about the contributions and the benefits of immigrants and our immigrant neighbors, but I don't want to make it out so--of course, it is an economic benefit. Many of my colleagues don't even realize that most of the food on the table, most the things that are done, are from immigrant hands touching it, most of it.

You look around. Everybody knows. Everybody knows who is building our country. Everybody knows that the agricultural community and industry relies on our immigrant neighbors. Everyone knows that. But they don't want to do that. They want somebody else to blame. Instead, my colleagues want to focus on making a pathway to citizenship, one much more humane. They are focused on blaming them for any economic downfall.

Guess what? Poverty is increasing, not because of our immigrants, but because we haven't been able to focus and put people before profits. We would rather do tax breaks for billionaires instead of actually taking care of our neighbors. We try to go ahead and blame our Brown and Black communities for everything going wrong in their own neighborhoods. That is just not how it works.

I am here because I also wanted to talk about Jakelin, if I may. Jakelin's story was really eye-opening to me as to what is really going on at the border. She was a 7-year-old who died shortly after arriving in the United States in 2018.

Jakelin turned 7 years old on her 2,000-mile journey north through Mexico. She was given her first new pair of shoes for this journey. Her and her father went north in search of a better life and to try to make money to send home to Jakelin's mom and her two siblings. Her family is from a tiny village in Guatemala, and they lived on approximately $7 per day. She was one of two children to die in CBP custody that month alone.

I say this because, where is the morality when it comes to these beautiful children that are coming with their parents? Where is the morality and understanding that people are coming here for this better opportunity and we have no pathway? This broken immigration system is hurting all of us. We need to wake up and understand that.

My beautiful neighbors in southwest Detroit always have my back. They are the ones when they got up in the morning who knew where my kids were, what was going on in the community. They were and still are just an integral part of my neighborhood and my community. When I look around, all I see is beauty, people that just want to live and thrive in our country.

I can show all kinds of economic benefit, but it is not enough, because a lot of people want to blame my immigrant neighbors for everything wrong. And everything wrong is not because of that; it is because you keep putting corporations before our people, period. That is it. You look at the budget, you see how much we are spending on defense versus how do we address infrastructure issues? How do we address the broken education and inequity in our education system?

I have a school district right now where the majority of fountains have garbage bags over them because they have no clean water coming through in our schools. Our kids don't have clean drinking water in schools. That is not because of all of these things that they keep talking about, about broken immigration. No.

If you look at what President Reagan did, President Bush and President Clinton, if you look at what they did, they created some sort of pathway. It wasn't perfect. But this constant vilification needs to stop. It needs to stop, because that is the lazy approach. That is the lazy approach of legislating in this country.

Come on. I grew up here. You know what Detroit and this beautiful Black city taught me? You always have the backs of the people you represent. You focus on helping them get through everyday issues. You focus on what is broken inside, not looking far away and saying it is all their fault. Some of them are not even here, and they are blaming everybody else. Accept the fact that we haven't had the courage to stand up and say the economic divide in our country is real, that our folks are paying the high cost of auto insurance, folks are paying a high cost in a number of issues regarding their homes, regarding the education system and so many other systems.

I am passionate about this because not only am I a child of immigrant parents, but I was my mother's translator until I was 12 years old. I still remember, Madam Speaker, that I went into Sears and I was translating for my mother and this cashier just looked at her and looks at me and looks at her and looks at me--and I am 12 years old--and she goes: ``She needs to learn English.''

I look and smile. Of course, the southwest Detroit girl came out of me. My head did bob a little bit, and I said: ``Excuse me, but I am not translating what you are saying to my mother. I am translating what my mother wants to say to you. Why? Because even with her heavy accent, you are dehumanizing her. You are othering her. You are making it like she is less than, even though she tries.''

As she beautifully speaks the English language, I feel like, my God, like, if anything, people should appreciate it more.

So I say this because this lived experience of my mother, as a naturalized American citizen, who is so proud of having human dignity here, this freedom of raising her daughter who is now a United States Congresswoman, should be celebrating it and should be honoring it. Instead, I know what is happening to her in the streets. People are yelling at her to take off her hijab, vilifying her. That is what we are doing to our immigrant neighbors, the same ones who pick fruit and put it on our tables, who open and revive neighborhoods that have never seen life since they came to our communities.

I am tired of it. I am tired of folks using fear-mongering rhetoric to create hate towards my immigrant neighbors.

They are here because our country offers something that others don't. We should understand that. We should create a humane and fair and just immigration system, not one that hurts them and allows children to die, that targets women in detention centers, and separates our families. It is simply wrong.

The most American thing I could do up here is push back and say: Enough. We are a Nation of immigrants. All of us. I am tired of the hate and the racism.

I thank the Congressional Progressive Caucus for always speaking that truth to power.

Ms. LEGER FERNANDEZ. Madam Speaker, I think it is important to remember that they are not here just because we offer something more. Immigrants are here because we need them. We don't exist as a country without immigrants. They are here because they bring music and because they bring food and poetry and art and laughter. They bring community.

But they also bring incredible economic benefits. I talked earlier about the $1.7 trillion over 10 years, the 438,000 new jobs, the $700 in increased wages for everyone, the 6 years of additional life that we give Social Security. All of those are economic benefits.

Do we know that three-fourths of undocumented immigrants in the labor force are actually essential? That means they are the essential workers. Not just that. They are healthcare workers: 38 percent of the home healthcare aides caring for our loved ones at home, 29 percent of physicians, 23 percent of pharmacists. They are taking care of us. They are keeping us healthy.

Not only that. They are our entrepreneurs. They are the ones who are starting our businesses. Right now, 25 percent of new firms in America are opened by first-generation immigrants. The New American Economy reports that over 3 million immigrant entrepreneurs employ almost 8 million American workers across the Nation.

It is immigrants and the children of immigrants, who we have just heard, who come and serve in Congress, but they also start over half of all Fortune 500 companies. Yet, they are subject to the hatred that brought tears to my colleague's eyes. It is not right.

They are subject to that hatred in order to detract us from talking about what we need to talk about. What we need to talk about is, what we have been doing in this Congress when we passed the American Rescue Plan.

Instead of going back and being able to tell your communities that we passed the American Rescue Plan, help is on the way, we are going to be putting shots in arms, and we are going to get people back to work and kids back in schools--they don't want to talk about that. They want to talk about that border. That border is not threatening any of us, but that is what they want to talk about because they don't want to get to the work at hand.

But we are going to get to the work at hand, and we are going to push to include immigration in the reconciliation.

We heard earlier discussions about the manner in which families have been torn apart and separated at the border by the Trump administration. I have a bill that will not only reunify those families, but, as a mea culpa, as a way of saying we are sorry, we will make sure that they actually receive a visa and that they receive the kind of care that we must do whenever you traumatize a young child. They need that help.

We are also going to push to make sure that everyone who pays taxes receives the child tax credit. Those immigrant families are working, they are paying their taxes, and they were not getting the benefit of the child tax credit. We are going to make sure that we push for that and argue for that. We are going to make sure that we highlight who our immigrant brothers and sisters are, because they are us.

I want to remind us here today that back when this country was founded, even with all of its faults and flaws and original sins in how we started, that even back then, when our Founders talked about what this House should look like, they said that it should be a mirror, a portrait of America. They said that we should make sure that Congress has the right to pass the laws regarding how we vote us into office, because they did not trust those States. This was back at the founding. They did not trust those States because they knew that they would fight against having our House look like a miniature of the American people, a portrait.

That is the other thing that we are going to fight to do, to make sure that we get the voting rights in H.R. 1 passed and H.R. 4 passed, because that is how we also continue to push for immigration reform. We know America wants it. We talked about those polls, 83 percent, 67 percent. There is great, great support for that. It is only because we are not able to truly exercise our democratic values of self-governance that we have not yet passed it.

But we have this moment in reconciliation. We have this moment. It is a priority of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. It is a priority of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. It is a priority of so many of our colleagues. So I am incredibly hopeful.

I am looking forward to listening to the President's words, after a recent meeting with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, to tell us that he will also be supporting this.

We call upon the Senate to support immigration reform in the reconciliation act.

Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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