For the Relief of Shigeru Yamada

Floor Speech

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Ms. ZOE LOFGREN of California. Madam Speaker, Shigeru Yamada was brought to the United States from Japan when he was 10 years old. He entered the country on a non-immigrant visa with his mother and his two sisters, and remained here on his mother's student visa for over 3 years. Although his mother became engaged to a U.S. citizen, which would have resulted in lawful permanent resident status for Shigeru and his sisters, tragedy prevented this from coming to pass. When Shigeru was 13 years old, his mother was killed in a car accident, and he and his siblings were taken to live with their maternal aunt and uncle in Chula Vista, California.

When Shigeru's aunt attempted to formally adopt him, she was unable to complete the process before he turned 16 years old. Under current immigration law, virtually all adoptions of foreign children by U.S. citizens must be completed before the child's 16th birthday in order for the child to qualify for legal status in the United States. Although Shigeru's sisters obtained legal status through adoption and marriage, Shigeru continued to reside here without such status.

Despite these difficulties, Shigeru shined. He graduated with honors in 2000 from Eastlake High School, where he served on student government, participated in numerous community service activities, and excelled at football and wrestling. He was an All-American Scholar and was named ``Outstanding English Student'' his freshman year. He was also voted the ``Most Inspirational Player of the Year'' in various sports, both at the junior-varsity and varsity level. He served as vice president of the associated student body his senior year. Shigeru later obtained an associate's degree from Southwestern Community College.

Shigeru's story highlights so many things that are wrong with our current immigration system. First, Shigeru is just the type of young person who would benefit from the DREAM Act, which passed the House with bipartisan support 1 week ago today. More importantly, America is just the country that would benefit from providing Shigeru a path to lawful status, so that he could continue to excel and serve as a model to all those around him.

Second, Shigeru's story highlights the nonsensical inflexibility of our international adoption rules. Earlier this summer, the House passed H.R. 5532, the International Adoption Harmonization Act of 2010. H.R. 5532 would harmonize our international adoption rules by setting the uniform deadline by which all adoptions must be finalized at a child's 18th birthday. One purpose of H.R. 5532 is to ensure that when a child is legally adopted by U.S. citizen parents between the child's 16th and 18th birthdays, the child is permitted to remain with his or her parents in the United States. The need for this commonsense piece of legislation was demonstrated by the many private immigration laws enacted by previous Congresses to provide exactly this form of relief to just those individual children who came to our attention--bills just like the one before us today. H.R. 5532 remains stalled in the Senate, which represents a real failure to protect American families and adopted children.

I remain hopeful that our Senate colleagues on both sides of the aisle will recognize that passage of the DREAM Act and H.R. 5532 are both in America's best interest. But under current law, S. 4010 represents the only option for Shigeru Yamada to remain in the United States, the country that he rightly calls home.

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