Marketplace Fairness Act -- Motion to Proceed

Floor Speech

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Mr. DURBIN. Madam President, I want to draw attention to the major flooding going on in Illinois at this moment, particularly in Chicago and its suburbs but not exclusively. It is affecting downstate as well.

Hundreds of families have been evacuated from their homes, and more than 30,000 people are without power and we are experiencing a major storm. The Rock, Fox, DuPage, Illinois, and Mississippi Rivers have overtopped their banks, damaging hundreds, if not thousands, of homes and businesses. Several levees are near the breaking point.

In many areas, the flooding is so bad it exceeds what we saw during the major floods in 2008 and in 1987. The ground is so saturated that a sinkhole in Chicago swallowed three cars this morning, and Libertyville High School has sunk a foot into the muddy soil.

More than 300 flights have been cancelled out of O'Hare and Midway Airports, and hundreds of schools in and around Chicago were closed today because of dangerously high water.

People along the Des Plains and Fox Rivers in Grundy, Kane, and LaSalle Counties have been evacuated--and the evacuations are ongoing.

More than 30 major roads in northeastern Illinois are closed due to flooding. Heavy rain has completely filled the large underground flood control system known as the Deep Tunnel in Chicago. This project was designed to handle sewer backup problems and water pollution in Cook County. The Chicago River has swelled by 6 feet, triggering locks to open and for the flow to be reversed back to Lake Michigan.

For the first time in recent memory, the DuPage County government is shut down because of flooding. All county government buildings, including the health department, are closed. Governor Patrick Quinn has issued a state of emergency for the entire State of Illinois. National Guardsmen are on hand helping to evacuate people and monitor water levels and road closures. First responders are supplying sandbags, pumps, life vests, generators, and other supplies along the threatened riverbanks. Sandbagging operations are ongoing in Boone, DeKalb, Grundy, Kane, McHenry, and Will Counties.

My office is in close contact with Mayor Nicholas Helmer of Prospect Heights--where many people have been evacuated. We are also working with Mayor-elect Matthew Bogusz and the interim mayor, Mark Walsten of the city of Des Plaines. They are working hard to make sure the communities are safe.

Communities all along the Mississippi River and the western part of the State could be next in the flooding. Water is already rising in Quincy and the Quad Cities, and communities downstate--such as East St. Louis and Cairo--could see major flooding this weekend as storm runoff from up north works its way south.

My colleague Senator Mark Kirk and I are ready to help the affected communities in any way. We have cosigned a letter to the Governor to put in writing what we have said orally: We stand prepared to work with all of the Federal agencies available to help our State during this flooding challenge.

We understand they are doing everything possible at the local level. If the situation continues to worsen, there may be need for Federal assistance. Senator Kirk and I will work together on a bipartisan basis to make sure it is there. My thoughts are with the people and families affected by floodwaters in Illinois, especially those who had to leave their homes. I am particularly grateful for the people who are working around the clock to control these rivers. I have spoken to John Monken, Director of the Illinois Emergency Management Agency, and am monitoring the efforts on a minute-by-minute basis. I will continue to work with Federal, State, and local officials to make sure vital resources are made available for the flood control effort.

Madam President, a short time ago there was a press conference that was historic in nature. Eight Senators, four Democrats and four Republicans, came together to announce the introduction of an immigration bill. It is a bill we have worked on for months. The four Senators on the Democratic side are Senator Schumer, Senator Menendez, Senator Bennet of Colorado, and myself; on the Republican side, Senator McCain, Senator Lindsey Graham, Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida.

When you put the eight of us in a room you have the full political spectrum in the Senate. But we decided as a group to try to do our best to write a law to deal with the immigration challenge in America. It is a substantial challenge. America's immigration system is badly, badly broken. I say that because we estimate there are 11 million people living in this country who are undocumented. They are people who get up and go to work every day. They may have picked the fruits you put on your cereal this morning. They could be cleaning your room in the hotel you stopped in in Chicago. They could be taking care of your mother in the nursing home this evening. They are spread across the economy. They are hard-working people. Most immigrants are. But they are undocumented. They have no country. About half of them are here because they came judicially as visitors or college students and they stayed. They are here illegally, there is no question about it. They are undocumented. The question we asked ourselves over and over for the last many years is, What are we going to do?

In the last Presidential campaign, Governor Romney said they should self-deport themselves, they should leave. That is not going to happen. It may be good campaign rhetoric but it doesn't reflect reality. What you find when you get to know the undocumented is they do not live in houses filled with undocumented people. It is not uncommon to find that dad is a citizen, the children were born here and they are citizens, it is mom who is undocumented. These stories are repeated over and over.

So the eight of us sat down and said: What are we going to do to deal with this and what are we going to do to deal with the problem this creates in the economy? Here is what it is. It is not a matter of 11 million people working in the economy undocumented. It is the fact that they end up taking jobs and being paid the lowest possible wages, so their work depresses wages.

In addition, in most cases--many cases, I should say--they are being paid in cash. Their employers are not paying into unemployment, workers compensation, Social Security, Medicare. They are off the books. That doesn't help our country if they are not paying taxes and if their wages are so cheap and so low it hurts the jobs of American workers.

In addition, many of these workers are mistreated. It is not unusual for me to hear that in Chicago a group of workers worked a whole week and then their boss said: Oh, the money didn't come through. We are not going to pay you. What are they supposed to do, call the police? Go to court? They are undocumented. There are abuses that take place when it comes to these workers and it does not help the overall economy.

There are other issues as well. About 12 years ago I got a phone call in my office from the Merit Music Program in Chicago, which offers to kids, low-income-family kids, musical instruments and instruction. And 100 percent of these kids end up going to college. One of them, Tereza Lee, was Korean and very good playing the concert piano. She was accepted at Julliard and the Manhattan Conservatory of Music, which was amazing. She came from such a poor family that many times she would go to school and go through the trash basket to find uneaten food to try to get through the day. But, boy, was she good at a piano, and it was recognized. When she went to fill out the application to go to school there was a box that said nationality, citizenship. She said to mom, What do I put here? Her mom said, I don't know. We brought you in on a visitors visa at the age of 2 and we never did anything. So she said we better call DURBIN's office. They called my office and we checked into it. The law is very clear. She is not documented, she is not a citizen, and she needs to leave America for 10 years and see if she can get back in, get a green card to come back--10 years. This girl was 18 years old. She had never done anything wrong. She came here at the age of 2.

I put in this bill called the DREAM Act and it said if you, like Tereza Lee, came here, no fault of your own, no criminal record, finished high school, we will give you a chance. Go to college, enlist in the military, and we will let you become a citizen someday soon.

The DREAM Act has been out there for 12 years and didn't pass but we still have hundreds of thousands of these young people. Half a million of them have signed up under the President's Executive order not to be deported if they are eligible for the DREAM Act. There are many more out there. That is one of the unresolved issues in our immigration system. I could go on and give you volumes of problems with the current immigration system in America.

We decided to sit down and do something about it. In the first meeting we had, the Republicam Senators, Senator McCain, Senator Flake from Arizona, as well as Senator Graham and Senator Rubio, said the first item on the agenda: Fix the border. It does us no good to deal with immigration problems within the country if we do not deal with the flow of people into the country.

The border is strong today, stronger than it has ever been in 40 years. But there are weaker parts. There are about nine different sections of our southern border and about three of them are problematic. Six are pretty strong. So we agreed, let's make sure the nine sections of the border have the investment they need to be as strong as possible. Then let's do more. Let's create a computer system, expand the one we have called E-Verify so if you go to apply for a job in America and you are asked to show a picture ID, such as your driver's license, the employer can enter the information into a computer right at work and up pops a picture which should match your picture on the license. If it matches, you can be employed; you are here legally. If it does not match, there is a question, you may not be employed. So E-Verify will make sure that in the workplace you have to be part of the system. You have to be registered in America.

The third element involves visitors visas. We give a lot of people an opportunity to visit this great country from all over the world. Some of them never go home and we don't know it. We know they came in; we check that. But we don't know if they ever left. We are finally going to finish that system so we know, we have information collected not only when they enter, when they leave, and if they overstay, we can go after them. So those things which we debated and included in our immigration bill deal with the draw of people into America, the border, employment, visitors visas.

Then we asked, what to do with the 11 million people? What to do realistically and honestly. Here is what we suggested in the bipartisan bill we have introduced. We said first you have to step forward and register with the government. You have lived in the shadows. You have always feared a knock on the door and deportation. Now come forward. If you come forward and register, we will put you through a criminal background check. If you have a serious crime in your background, you are finished, we don't want you, goodbye. If you do not, we will go forward. We will give you a chance to register with the government, pay your taxes, pay a fine, make it clear you are learning English and working in America. If you do that, you can stay here legally and you can work here legally. You can even travel outside the country legally and come back. It is a provisional recognition of an opportunity for legalization. At the end of 10 years, after you paid the fines, after you have been reviewed on a regular basis, you will have a chance to get a green card and move toward citizenship over a 3-year period of time.

This is basically the system, a system that strengthens the border and creates a pathway to citizenship for 11 million people. And, as far as the DREAM Act I mentioned earlier, this is the strongest version of the DREAM Act of any I have introduced, any I have proposed on the floor of the Senate in the last 12 years. It is going to give these young people a chance.

There was a young woman here at the press conference named Tolu Olubumai. She was born in Nigeria. She came here at an early age and went through high school and then went through college. She received a chemical engineering degree from a prestigious Virginia university. That was 10 years ago. She has never been able to work 1 day as an engineer, despite her talent, because she can't get licensed. She is undocumented. She deserved a chance. She will get a chance under this bill, under the DREAM Act, as she should.

I can go through stories--I have told about 54 different ones on the floor of the Senate--of young people in her circumstances, came here as kids, knew no other country. As Bob Menendez often says, pledged allegiance to the flag every day in the classroom, only knows our national anthem. They have no country. They will have a chance because of this bill.

There are other parts of this bill that are important too. When it comes to employment, the first rule I insisted on, we all insisted on, was that any job opening had to be offered to an American worker first. That is in every part of this bill, because we still have people unemployed and they should have first priority on any job opening. But if the job can't be filled--and let's be honest, some of these jobs Americans are not standing in line for, particularly agricultural workers, backbreaking work of picking fruits and vegetables. There are many of these jobs that will go unfilled unless migrant workers, for example, agricultural workers, come to fill them. So what we say is basically offer the job to an American first at a wage that is the prevailing wage, average wage in the industry. If it goes unfilled, then a foreign worker has an opportunity--only if the unemployment rate in this country or in the region where the person works is below 8.5 percent. So we want to make sure American workers have the first chance.

Then what to do about the extraordinarily educated and talented people who can make a difference in the American economy? It was 6 or 8 years ago when I spoke to the Illinois Institute of Technology commencement. It was at the Chicago Theater on State Street in the city of Chicago. It was a happy day. All of these graduates from the prestigious Institute of Technology were getting their chance. They went through the baccalaureate degrees and they were pretty diverse. But then, when they got into the advanced degrees, the master's degrees and Ph.D.s, it took a little longer because it was tough to pronounce all of the names from the South Asian continent, India and places nearby. These are graduates, foreign students, admitted in the United States, trained in the United States, receiving their degrees from this prestigious institution, and the next thing we did after handing them their diploma is, figuratively, gave them a roadmap to show them how to leave America, to take their talents and everything they learned to go someplace else to compete with American business.

We are going to change that. If foreign students come here and are educated here and have skills we need in our economy and can help create jobs and grow our businesses, we are going to give them that chance with a green card. That makes sense. They can expand the economy. Some of the major high-tech corporations in America today were actually created by immigrants to this country who came here because they loved the freedom, the opportunity no other country can offer. We have to give more just like them a chance to build tomorrow's Intel, tomorrow's Google, and they will do it and create American jobs in the process.

We want the United States to be a magnet for this kind of job creation. We also want the United States to have more homegrown engineers ourselves. Maria Cantwell brought this up at our Senate luncheon this afternoon and I told her it was an issue I felt strongly about, not only making sure we have the talent we need but that we grow the talent we need--improve our schools, focus on the STEM subjects--science, technology, engineering, mathematics--and bring more American students to the point where they can make a good living using those skills. That is part of our responsibility as well.

There are many aspects to this bill, immigration reform, that will come tomorrow before the Senate Judiciary Committee. I will be there. We will be having a hearing to discuss it on Friday, then again on Monday. Then soon after, after we come back from our break in the first part of May, we will have an actual markup of the bill in the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The bill has been filed now. It is available for everyone to read. We are not trying to push anything through in a hurry.

It will be discussed, debated, and amendments will be offered in the committee and on the floor, as they should be. At the end of the day, it gives us a chance to make sure we fix this broken immigration system in this country.

I come to this debate with some personal history. It was in 1911 when my mother was carried off a ship in the Baltimore Harbor. My grandmother, whom I never met, brought my mother and her brother and sister over from Lithuania. They were immigrants to America in 1911. Somehow or another--although they could not speak English--they found the right train, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, and took that train to St. Louis.

They got off the train when they came to a town called East St. Louis, IL, where my grandfather was waiting. That immigrant family made a home there, and that is where I was born and grew up.

My mother was an immigrant to this country, a naturalized citizen, and I am first-generation American. I am blessed to be standing on the floor of the Senate. That is my story, that is my family, but that is also the American story. Every single one of us has a version of that story. It may not be your parents or grandparents, but go back far enough and you will find a story just like that in your background.

I said many times on the floor of the Senate that I had the good fortune to go back to my mother's village in Lithuania, Jurbaricas, which is near Kaunas. My mother never made it back to her village.

When I got there, I asked the people in that village what was left from the time my mother was there in 1911. They said the Catholic Church where she was baptized was still there as well as an old well in the center of town that everybody used for water. They said, your family must have used it.

I took a look at the old well, and I could not even pick it out now because of all the traffic circles around it and everything. I thought about that moment when my grandparents said to their relatives and friends: We have an announcement. We are leaving. We are picking up everybody and going to America. We are going to a place called East St. Louis, IL, because there are some Lithuanians there from this area who found work.

Stanley Yochiss, who was the pharmacist and druggist in that area, was kind of like the Godfather. People who didn't trust the local banks would leave their money with Stanley. The Lithuanian community, similar to many communities, worked the toughest jobs in the packing houses, steel mills, and jobs such as that.

I often thought about that meeting my grandparents had when they called in their relatives and friends and what might have happened afterward when they left. As they were walking away from my grandparents' home, I bet one of them said to the other: Can you believe this? The Kuticaite family is leaving. They are going to America. They don't even speak English. They are leaving their home, their church, all their relatives and friends, the dog, the cat, and chickens. They are all leaving. They will be back. This will not work. They never looked back.

Repeat that story millions of times and we have the story of America. We have the story of people who came to this country and have somewhere deep in their DNA this appetite and thirst for a better life. They were willing to risk everything for it to get to this country, and it still happens.

We hear about people walking across the desert on their way to America and dying in Arizona and Texas. We hear of all the dangerous things they do to get to this country. That is what is great about America and that is what is great about Americans and what is in our DNA as a people. We should never forget how important immigration is to us. Those who criticize immigrants have forgotten where they came from. Those who criticize immigrants don't realize the diversity of America, the talent of America, the drive of America is all about immigration. We have to control it. We have to make sure it is done legally and done in a systematic way. We cannot absorb everybody who wants to come here. But by bringing in new blood to America, we revitalize the American dream every single generation.

This bill is an important one. We have not done anything to immigration in 25 years, and it shows. We have a mess in this country, and it is time to straighten it out.

Eight Senators produced a bill--four Democrats, four Republicans. I think the bill is balanced and should be debated and considered. I hope it passes. I hope the day comes soon when it is signed into law by the President, who fully supports comprehensive immigration reform.

I said today at the press conference that I want to be at at least one of the naturalization ceremonies when my DREAMers get a chance to become part of the only country they have ever called home. They are going to make this a better and stronger nation, and they are part of our citizenry.

I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

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