Secure the Border Act of 2023

Floor Speech

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Ms. SALINAS. Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to H.R. 2.

My dad immigrated to the United States from Mexico when he was just a child. He picked cotton and tomatoes in the Rio Grande Valley before eventually earning his U.S. citizenship. Today, his daughter is a Member of the United States Congress and serves on the Agriculture Committee, a true testament to the unique power and promise of the American Dream.

Migrant workers like my dad are the work engine of our agriculture industry today. That is a fact--maybe an inconvenient one for some of my colleagues--but a fact, nonetheless.

By some estimates, immigrant farmworkers make up more than 70 percent of agricultural workers in the U.S. Nearly 175,000 immigrant farmworkers reside in Oregon alone. Their work is backbreaking, exhausting, and at times life-threatening. Yet, they show up, rain or shine, heat dome or ice storm, to do the work, to feed America--not red States or blue States, but every State.

That is why I am completely stunned by the arrogance and shortsightedness of the majority.

Are you so blinded by xenophobia that you are willing to endanger not only our food security but our national security with E-Verify requirements that even Members of your own party call a mistake?

Democrats did offer an amendment to strike the E-Verify provision, but the majority defeated that amendment. Oh, my goodness.

I am hoping that you can think beyond spinning your way out of the reality that this bill will decimate our agriculture industry. The American people are smarter than that and they will see through these political games.

Turning employers into enforcers will result in nothing less than the collapse of our agricultural system and, with it, our ability to feed our great Nation. It would be a willful error of the highest magnitude, something the American people will never forgive or forget.

Empty fields, empty tables, empty bellies; that is what H.R. 2 would do. That is why we must all be a ``no'' vote.

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