Broader Options for Americans Act
Floor Speech
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Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, as we speak, there is a horrific scene playing out in a high school in South Florida. Turn on your television right now, and you will see scenes of children running for their lives--what looks to be the 19th school shooting in this country, and we have not even hit March.
I am coming to the floor to talk about something else, but let me note once again for my colleagues that this happens nowhere else other than the United States of America, this epidemic of mass slaughter, this scourge of school shooting after school shooting. It only happens here, not because of coincidence, not because of bad luck, but as a consequence of our inaction. We are responsible for the level of mass atrocity that happens in this country with zero parallel anywhere else.
As a parent, it scares me to death that this body doesn't take seriously the safety of my children, and it seems as though a lot of parents in South Florida are going to be asking that same question later today.
We pray for the families and for the victims. We hope for the best.
Mr. President, I came to the floor today to talk about immigration. I want to make a specific case to you today, but before I do, I want to talk a little about process.
I heard a lot of my friends on the Republican side of the aisle say on this floor and in the Halls of Congress that President Trump has made an immigration proposal and Democrats have been asking for an immigration proposal, so we should just accept his first and only offer. What is the big deal? President Trump gave you something that says ``immigration'' on it. Why aren't you accepting it?
It is a terrible proposal. It is bad for America. To his credit, President Trump does attempt to try to deal with these Dreamer kids, but there are 3 million potentially eligible individuals in this country, and it only allows about 1.8 million of them to get through the process.
But that is really not the worst part. The worst part is that it cuts legal immigration by 40 percent. It basically abandons this country's commitment to family-based immigration. I wouldn't be here if we only had skills-based immigration. Most Members of this body wouldn't be here if the only way that your parents or grandparents or great- grandparents could have come here is because of a Ph.D. or a degree or a certificate. Most of the people in this Chamber, I would imagine, are here because their parents or great-grandparents or great-great- grandparents came here because they had friends or family here. Let's not reimagine the history of this country.
Democrats aren't obligated to accept the first offer from this President if it is not good for America. Negotiation still has to be part of the legislative process, and I am glad there are Members of the Republican and Democratic caucuses who have been trying to do that. We will see where that goes.
The President has put this proposal on the table that dramatically cuts immigration into this country because he sees immigration as a core weakness of this country. He views new entrants to America as an economic drain. That is why he wants to potentially kick out 3 million Dreamer kids next month if we don't act. That is why he wants to dramatically cut down the number of people who are allowed to legally immigrate to America. He views immigrants as a problem that needs to be dealt with. And he is not alone. Many Americans agree. I, frankly, hear from them regularly in Connecticut.
Frankly, one could also argue that there is nothing more American than being scared of immigrants. Every single new wave of immigrants to our shores has been met with some degree of fear and derision and prejudice. Like clockwork, every generation or two, American politicians denounce immigrants as a threat to the American-born worker.
In the 1850s, growing numbers of Catholic immigrants from Ireland--as the Murphys came--and from Germany led to an anti-immigrant party arising in this country that elected more than 100 Congressmen, eight Governors, and thousands of local politicians. They claimed that Catholics could never be Americans because they owed allegiance to the Pope.
Starting in the 1880s, hundreds of thousands of Chinese immigrants began to immigrate to the west coast, causing a spike in anti-Chinese sentiment that eventually resulted in the passage of something called the Chinese Exclusion Act.
Fearing those who are different from us in skin color or religion or national origin or language is an unmistakable facet of American history, but over and over again, we have overcome these base instincts because our better angels prevail but also because of this bright, straight line that connects America's liberal immigration policy with our economic greatness.
I want to take just a couple of minutes to make for you a compact but irrefutable case for the correlation between economic power and American immigrants.
From 1870 to 1910, it is no coincidence that America's transformation into a global economic powerhouse occurred during a period of massive influx of human capital. During that time, nearly 15 percent of all Americans were foreign-born. That is a share that our country has never reached since then. This period of unprecedented growth forever dispelled the myth that we still labor under today that the number of American jobs is fixed. Immigrants increase demand, and that increased demand creates jobs.
Organizations from the National Academy of Sciences to the conservative Cato Institute have done their own studies on this question and have come to the same conclusion.
Cato recently said this:
Immigrants add jobs, in part by raising consumer demand. So getting rid of immigrants, such as by deporting unauthorized workers, would most likely destroy jobs and raise native unemployment.
That makes sense, right? But if you don't believe that immigrants create growth, there is another, even simpler explanation as to why we need robust immigration. At present birth rates, we don't have enough people born here to fill all the jobs that are going to be created in the next 20 years. It is estimated that, accounting for growth, America is going to need 83 million new workers to enter the workforce in the next 20 years. But here is the problem. Only 51 million new workers will be native-born. That leaves us 32 million short. Unless folks start churning out a lot more babies, immigration is the only way to fix that deficit.
Not convinced? Well, think about how the Federal budget works. Most of our budget is social insurance--working-age Americans paying into accounts that pay benefits to older, nonworking Americans. You need a balance between the two in order to not go bankrupt. Many of our competitor nations around the world are spiraling toward this demographic cataclysm. By 2030, the median age in Japan, with strict immigration policies, is going to be over 50. It is extraordinary. Do you want to know why Germany is so interested in bringing refugees into their country? Because without them, their median age in 2030 will be 48. Budgets simply can't work with that many retirees and that few workers. Because of America's liberal immigration policy, our average age, which today is 38, will increase in 2030 to just 39. During that time, China--another country that doesn't really allow immigration-- will go from having a median age that is 2 years younger than that of the United States to 3 years older.
In 2010, undocumented immigrants and their employers sent $13 billion to Social Security. Without them, the trust fund would be out of money today.
You are not there yet? Let's talk jobs. Just ask your farmers in your State how important lower skilled immigration is to keeping their farms afloat. But let's talk about high-skilled jobs. Would it shock you to know that 31 percent of Ph.D. holders in this country are immigrants? It is amazing. And more than one-quarter of all high-quality patents in the United States are being granted to immigrants.
How about a study from 3 years ago that Senator Cortez Masto referred to that found that immigrants are twice as likely as native-born Americans to start a business. That is not good enough for you? Here is a mind blower: 43 percent of Fortune 500 companies in the United States were founded or cofounded by an immigrant or a child of an immigrant. You know who they are. The founder of eBay came to the United States from France, where he was born to Iranian parents. Google's cofounder, Sergey Brin, emigrated with his family from Russia when he was 6. Elon Musk, who started SpaceX, which has 4,000 employees, came from South Africa. Daniel Aaron, who cofounded Comcast, was a refugee of Nazi Germany. Henry Ford was an Irish immigrant. Estee Lauder's family was Hungarian. Herman Hollerith, one of the founders of IBM, had German parents. You don't want Ford or IBM or Google to be part of the American story? Then keep saying immigrants are an economic drain.
Margaret Thatcher once marveled of America: ``No other nation has so successfully combined people of different races and nations within a single culture.'' This combination is our definition as a nation, but it is also the story of our economic greatness, of our sprawling leap in under two short centuries from an idea to the biggest, most dynamic economy on the face of the planet. To deny that history or to misremember it would be perhaps an irreversible error.
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