Unanimous Consent Request--H.R. 1044
Floor Speech
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Mr. LEE. Madam President, reserving the right to object, I am a little flabbergasted at this moment, when I find myself in a rare circumstance of disagreeing with literally every word uttered by my colleague, the senior Senator from Illinois. He is my friend. He and I have worked together on a number of issues--criminal justice reform, protecting the civil liberties of Americans when it comes to domestic surveillance, all kinds of things on the Judiciary Committee.
I disagree with nearly every single word, every syllable he just uttered. I find myself wondering whether we experienced alternate universes in recent months.
I have worked nearly the entire time I have been in the U.S. Senate on this issue--for years, nearly 9\1/2\ years, on discrete pieces of legislation, trying to fix immigration. Immigration is a big issue. It is a contentious issue. It is an issue as to which, to put it mildly, there is not always bipartisan consensus. It is one of the areas that I have concluded remains open and possible for bipartisan agreement, is on taking discrete, individual problem areas within our immigration code and updating them and modernizing them.
So what we are talking here today about is a bill that I have long championed, the Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act. My sole purpose for championing that legislation--frankly, at great personal expense to myself, at great political expense--was to bring some equity to a system that unduly burdens some immigrants based on their country of origin and based, specifically, on the arbitrary factor of the population of the nation of origin of the immigrant in question.
There has been a lot of misinformation at both ends of the political spectrum, at every point in between, about this legislation. It has been attacked from the right, from the left, from everywhere else. A lot of people claim falsely that it would change the total number of green cards available. It wouldn't, as Senator Durbin just acknowledged. That is one of the few things that he said just now with which I think I can agree.
But over the years, we have had a number of Senators objecting to this for different reasons. Every time we resolve one objection-- sometimes we will resolve two objections, and then one other will pop up. Then we will resolve that one, and three others will pop up. We have been doing this for years and years, and I have worked in good faith with colleagues on both sides of the aisle in order to resolve those concerns.
Now, most recently, Senator Durbin objected to it. Just as I have with each objector before him, I worked with Senator Durbin last fall in order to resolve some of his concerns with the legislation.
In December, as he states, we came to an agreement. We came to an agreement on a way that we could move forward. We set some objectives, and he accurately characterized many of those objectives. What I told Senator Durbin at the time was that I was reluctant to announce that publicly because we hadn't yet made or received a request or a response to our request for technical assistance and input from the affected agencies--most importantly, from the State Department and from USCIS.
At the time, Senator Durbin requested that we go to the floor; that we introduce it. I, reluctantly, and perhaps against my better judgment, agreed to do that, in part based on the fact that Senator Durbin was taking a lot of heat at the time. People were saying that he was opposed to the idea categorically, and I wanted to work with him in good faith to do it.
At the time we had that discussion--at the time the Senator and I made that agreement--I made absolutely abundantly clear we still needed to get technical input, and we still needed to get the input of cosponsors of the legislation.
But out of consideration for the Senator and a lot of the political heat you were taking at the time, I agreed, with that understanding, to go to the floor and announce that we had reached an agreement in principle.
I have honored every single piece of that agreement in principle, and I strongly resent your suggestion to the contrary--every single piece of it. There is not one substantive piece of this as to which I have changed--not one of them, not the 50-50 rule, not the 4,600 set-aside, not the early filing.
The changes that we made were in response to the technical assistance request that we made to USCIS and a couple from the State Department. They had almost entirely to do with what was feasible, what was administratively possible to implement the legislation. After all, we don't want to enact legislation that cannot be implemented without compromising the other responsibilities that that agency has.
So after seeking this feedback, we understood that the language, as written, was, in some respects, technically not feasible for USCIS to implement as we had written it. But, here again, I told him: We inevitably will have to make some modifications based on the feasibility of this.
So I went back to Senator Durbin, and in light of the USCIS comments and the response to our request for technical assistance from USCIS, we made some changes. I went back to Senator Durbin. My recollection is that it was in February. You say March. I believe it was February. But regardless, I came back to you, and I told you: We are honoring the agreement. We are going to have to delay the implementation of some of it so as to make it technically feasible.
Some of these provisions were modified somewhat as to the timing of their implementation, but we honored the spirit and the letter of our agreement.
And yet, when we presented these changes to Senator Durbin, he flatout rejected them, almost without any discussion at all and almost without any discussion about how these materially departed from the agreement we had reached in December in good faith that we announced the existence of on the Senate floor, against my better judgment, out of the goodness of my heart, given the amount of political pressure Senator Durbin was getting on this. And he refused, at that point, to continue negotiations.
This, by the way, was after months and months of trying to get him to negotiate; months and months of trying to get him to the table that we reached, finally, in December.
So I find it astounding. If the Senator is, once again, feeling the political expediency to do so, I am happy to continue these discussions with him, but don't come here and suggest falsely, as he just has, that I have materially departed from the agreement we reached because I did not.
Now, I hope that he is as willing as I am to allow businesses a window of time to come into compliance with the new 50-50 rule so that we don't unnecessarily burden the H1-B workers who are already here. That is what my changes do, is make it so we don't unduly burden those.
I hope the Senator is as willing as I am to extend the transition period before the per-country caps are fully lifted to allow immigrants from around the world the opportunity to ease into the process.
I hope he is willing, as I am, to tackle one major immigration problem at a time in the hope of improving the condition of immigrants in our country without insisting on poison pills.
If there is one thing we have learned about immigration reform in recent years is that if you try to reform everything at once, you will guarantee the failure of the bill. I hope that is not what you are trying to do here, but that is the effect it has when you try to add in other extraneous points.
Never, by the way, was there ever a discussion about increasing the total number of visas in this. That was never the objective. I never hinted at that. You acknowledged that in every one of our discussions.
If you are interested in these principles, as I am, we should be able to find a path forward because all of these changes--all the changes we made to our agreement--were simply made out of expediency in order to be able to ensure that the legislation could, in fact, move forward; that it was feasible to implement; that it could resolve the concerns that you expressed to me and could do so in a manner to ensure the best possible outcome.
If Senator Durbin can agree on these changes, we can pass this legislation. We can pass it not just today, we can pass it right now, this very moment. I call on him to do so.
If the Senator feels he can work with these changes, I am happy to do that as well.
As I said in February, my door is open, and I am always willing to talk about these things with the Senator if he is willing to work with me.
So I ask that the Senator modify his request to withdraw the amendment at the desk and include my new amendment, which is at the desk, the amendment be considered and agreed to, the bill, as amended, be considered read a third time and passed, and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.
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Mr. LEE. That is why we made the 3- to 9-year transition, was to take care of the hold harmless provision.
Now, if the Senator wants to negotiate the terms of that, we can talk about that right now. We can resolve that right now. But make no mistake, the Senator is fundamentally changing and altering the terms of what we agreed to, and he is accusing me of, fundamentally, materially, changing the terms of the agreement, when all I have done is what we agreed to in December.
What the Senator is suggesting here is a deviation from what is possible. I can't agree to what is not possible, to what contravenes what USCIS has said it is capable of implementing. On that basis, I object.
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Mr. LEE. Madam President, I withdraw my objection.
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Mr. LEE. We would have loved to have considered it. I haven't seen it yet. My staff saw it for the first time earlier today. I would love to have a look at it.
This is something that could have been brought up at any moment in the last six or seven months, or the last year. I would be happy to look at it now, but I can't agree to pass something that I have not seen. So, therefore,
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Mr. LEE. Mr. President, I could not agree more. We should do this. I could not agree more that we need to eliminate the outdated, outmoded Elvis Presley era immigration provision that discriminates against individuals on the basis of their country of origin, on the basis of the population of the country in which they were born.
There are reasons why immigration policy is a contentious one. There were reasons why previous efforts have failed, and it always has to do with the fact that people tend to pile on. They get desperate. It is hard for us to reform the immigration code. When somebody suggests 1 reform, others suggest 10 more, and, before long, it chokes the horse. You can't move forward with it.
This one is focused on a very simple concept, that regardless of how many visas we issue, regardless of how many green cards we issue, there are a lot of ways to allocate the number that we have. Let's start with the number we have and figure out whatever reasons ought to influence that decision. Among them should not be the country in which you were born.
Imagine two hypothetical would-be employment-based green card recipients who are otherwise eligible. Immigrant A and B are identical in all respects--in their employment qualifications, their education, proficiency in English, and every meaningful characteristic except one. Immigrant A happens to be born in Luxembourg and immigrant B happens to have been born in India. Because India has a large population and Luxembourg has a small population, the immigrant from India is going to be discriminated against.
It is senseless and based on a bygone era in which immigration policy didn't make sense by today's standards. We ought to be able to get around that.
I agree with Mr. Durbin that we should pass this right now. There is no reason not to.
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