Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, thank you.

I thank the Senator from Ohio for his good work on his piece of legislation. I will talk about that in a minute.

I want to just talk in general about where we are. Obviously, this has been a long hard road, and we are on the edge of passing one of the most significant pieces of legislation that this body will have passed in a very long time.

The good news is we are going to pass it with just about every Democrat voting for it and a very significant number of Republicans voting for it. The reason for that is the vast majority of Members in this body realize that the immigration system is broken and needs fixing, absolutely. We have a dumb system right now. We turn away people who create jobs, and we let people cross the border who take away jobs from Americans.

America is crying out that we fix the system. We have 11 million people in the shadows. They are working for substandard wages, many of them under desperate conditions, and they bring down the wage rates for everybody else, through no fault of their own. We want to bring those people to an earned path to citizenship.

We want to take our immigration system and admit people who are going to create jobs. We have shortages. Google Maps is now in Vancouver, Canada. It is an American company. It is an American idea. But they are in Vancouver, Canada, because they cannot get the employees they need here. They are willing to pay whatever, but Canada's immigration system is much better than ours and they can get the people from all around the globe who are needed to run that part of the company.

We are fair to agriculture, growers. The farm workers have come together on this bill. It is a large improvement over the present system.

Now, I have heard my good friend from Ohio--and I like his amendment. In fact, my staff worked on it with him. But let's make no mistake about it. This is a vast bill, and E-Verify--permanent E-Verify--is in the bill. Maybe it can be improved a little bit, but it is 0.01 percent of the bill. It does not deal with border security. It does not deal with entry-exit. It does not deal with the 11 million. It does not deal with future flow. So I would urge my colleague to reconsider.

Of course, we want this amendment offered, and many of us will support it. But to say that is the only reason--if it does not get in the bill it is not worth voting for--I would have to respectfully and completely disagree with my colleague.

Let's face it, there are Members on his own side of the aisle who will block him from offering it. So that says it all, doesn't it? Why do they do that? Because they do not want a bill to pass. That has been the strategy.

I heard my good friend from Iowa talk about we are not approving enough amendments. Well, I will tell you, the folks on the other side have had a great plan: block votes for 2 weeks and then, in the final hours, complain we have not had enough votes. That is what they have done.

The first week we wanted to move amendments. The able chairman of the Judiciary Committee did. Oh, no. We had to change the rules and change the number of votes it takes to pass a bill around here. Week 2, we proposed many amendments be offered and the pace was painstakingly slow.

That is the plan: Block votes for 2 weeks and then complain.

Finally, last night, we got a list of 35, 36 amendments from the other side. Of course, we have many amendments. That would be 72 amendments because our side would want a one-for-one. That is only logical and fair. Then we heard it was not sufficient, that they wanted more amendments than that.

Furthermore, the Republican steering committee, my own colleagues have told me, sent out word: Get more amendments out there because we want to make sure there are so many amendments that we could never finish this bill.

In fact, even in that list of 36, the majority--not the majority but those who asked for the most amendments--were professed opponents of the bill. They were not interested in improving the bill. The strategy was, at the last hour, create dilatory tactics so the bill could never be approved.

Again, look at the list. One Member--I will not mention his name--offered seven; another offered six. They are two of the five leading opponents of the bill. They are not interested in improving it. Many of the amendments on that list of 35 were debated in committee and defeated by bipartisan votes. The committee was an open process that shows our bona fides. There were 301 committee amendments, more than 130 votes, 49 Republican amendments added into the bill.

Leader Reid has just made a reasonable offer. He took 17 amendments from that list of 36. Every one of them was a Republican request. He did not make them up. He did not spin them out of whole cloth. He added 15 Democratic amendments. We have a lot of people on this side who genuinely want to improve the bill. Of course, the other side objected.

So the idea--the idea that we are not allowing amendments. Please. Take the leader's offer. That is half of the amendments you submitted last night.

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Mr. SCHUMER. It is very hard to explain. It is sort of twisted logic a little bit, it is sort of pretzel-like logic. It is also pretzel-like logic to delay votes for so many weeks and then say all at once we need hundreds and hundreds of amendments. Not right, not fair, particularly, as my good friend from Arizona knows, when so many of those amendments come from sworn opponents of the bill, when so many of those amendments were disposed of in committee. So he is right.

One other point I would make while my good friend from Arizona is here, one of my fellow so-called gang members. We have a lot of disputes in this body because one side is against the other side. One side says one thing and the other side bands together and says no. We get gridlock. We need 60 votes. Neither side has it.

That is not the case here. Every major vote has been bipartisan, with a very significant number from the other side supporting the bill. More than that, the whole process has been bipartisan. The Gang of 8 was four and four. We sat in that room and haggled. We had as many disputes on the Democratic side, which did not want to accept what the Republicans wanted, as disputes on the Republican side, which did not want to accept what Democrats wanted.

But we all met in the middle because we believed in this bill. The sad fact is that while the vast majority of Americans support this proposal--by every poll that is seen, a majority of Republicans support this proposal, a majority of conservative Republicans support this proposal--there is a group in the country and reflected in the Senate that is so opposed to this bill they will go to any length to stop it. But the good news is, when you have a bipartisan majority, that cannot happen. So we get the kind of logic that my good friend from Arizona has pointed out. We get the kind of thing--it is sort of like Houdini. Remember, he tied himself in a straitjacket and then complained he could not get out.

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Mr. SCHUMER. I thank my colleague. Reclaiming my time, I would say, when we get a nerd from Ohio and a farmer from Big Sandy, MT, together, of course we are going to get a very good amendment.

The bottom line, though, is simple. That amendment is in the list that the leader suggested. Every one of the 17 Republican amendments was part of that list of 36. So the bottom line is--and now many more amendments have been filed--just talking about the amendment. Look, E-Verify is in the bill. I would not quite agree with my colleague from Arizona.

E-Verify will work very well without the amendment. I think it will work somewhat better with the amendment. It is a good amendment. I am supportive of the amendment. My staff helped work on the amendment. But let's not say this bill will have no internal enforcement without the amendment. It has very strong internal enforcement. In fact, it has mandatory E-Verify.

My good friend from Alabama has been railing for years that we need mandatory E-Verify in the country. As we work through the process, if the House in its wisdom moves the bill, we can improve things. This is not the last train out of the station. But I say this: If we do not have a bill, we will have no E-Verify, improved, not improved.

So many of the things that many of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle wanted will not be in the bill. Again, to me, having worked in a bipartisan way--and I have taken as many criticisms from my side of the aisle as from the other to get this done, what is happening here--not the Senator from Ohio. He is sincerely eager to improve the bill and I support that improvement. But for many others who are vehemently opposed to the bill, there is a view to delay and delay and delay in hopes--I would say forlorn hopes--that they cannot move the bill.

We have not been on this bill for 1 day. We have been on the bill for 3 weeks. Again, most of the objections, not all but the vast majority, came from the other side when we wanted to move forward. So I would urge that we adopt the leader's motion, 32 amendments, a reasonable amount of time to debate them, 17 from the Republican list, 15 from the Democratic list, and go forward.

I do not think there will be a single objection from our side, I will tell you that much. If you say we want these 32 and then untold more, that is a different story. That is a different story. But, again, let me conclude on a happy note.

We have our differences. But it has been truly amazing to work with the two Senators from Arizona and the Senator from South Carolina and the Senator from Florida and the Senator from Colorado and the Senator from Illinois and the Senator from New Jersey. It has been an amazing journey. On one of the most difficult issues that faces America, we have crafted a proposal that has broad support and strong momentum, momentum that increased with today's vote and will increase further with tomorrow's vote.

Please, one of the things our citizenry objects to is there is always naysaying. It is always easier to say no than to say yes. But as has been pointed out, when you say no, you are keeping the 11 million here under what many have called unstated amnesty. You are keeping a broken system that kicks out of the country people who create jobs and lets into the country people who take away American jobs. You are preventing the change in our immigration system to make America grow.

CBO said: Wow, because of this bill, GDP would grow by 3 percent this decade and 5 percent next decade. It is obvious. That is the energy of immigrants--poor immigrants, unskilled immigrants, rich immigrants, educated immigrants. Our ancestors, such as James Madison Flake, who my colleague from Arizona once told me about, but all our ancestors, whatever part of the globe they came from, worked so hard and are part of the secret to American success.

This bill restores that energy and that vitality. Again, this bill is not perfect. We never claimed it would be. But I would urge my colleague, my good friend, sincere friend from Ohio, who is very smart--that is what my friend from Arizona said--but has many other great attributes as well, and everyone else in this body, to not say, if I did not get exactly the change I wanted, this bill is no good; I cannot vote for it.

That is what has paralyzed this Nation in the last decade. This is an attempt not only to fix our immigration system but to overcome it. I pray to God we will.

I yield the floor.

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