Immigration

Floor Speech

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Mr. MURPHY. Mr. President, Republicans are going to be on the floor today, taking a sudden 100-percent sincere interest in immigration reform. They are going to propose that the Senate take up a handful of bills to address what they call a crisis created by President Biden on our southern border.

Forgive me for being blunt, but give me a break. Republicans suddenly care about the border because they don't want to talk about the real crisis that President Donald Trump created and that President Biden is fixing: the COVID crisis and our Nation's economic crisis. Republicans don't want to fix our broken immigration laws. They want to distract Americans from the real story right now, which is the implementation of the very popular American Rescue Plan.

There are $1,400 checks that are arriving in people's bank accounts right now. School budgets finally have enough resources to catch up on all of the lost learning for our kids; childhood poverty is about to be cut in half; more production of vaccines. That is the real story.

You know how I know the Republicans are less than sincere in this interest in immigration policy? First, because they controlled the Senate for 6 years and not once during the roughly 2,100 days that they were in charge did they try to honestly bring a comprehensive immigration reform proposal to the floor.

I checked. Two of the bills they are going to ask unanimous consent for today were brought up for show votes in the middle of the 2016 Presidential election as a means of helping Donald Trump's candidacy, but in neither instance was there actually any attempt to try to find common ground to actually pass something.

Go back even further. In 2013, when Democrats were in the Senate, that is when we actually did pass a comprehensive immigration reform bill. But it was Republicans who opposed it--not all, but all of the opposition came from Republicans--and it was the House Republican majority that refused to even consider the bill. That is where it died. So spare me this sudden concern for immigration policy.

But since Republicans are now newly concerned about what is happening on the border, it probably makes sense for us to level set the facts. The facts. So here are four of them.

The first is a pretty simple one. Republicans will tell you that Joe Biden created this crisis, that his policies are the reason why we have seen an increase in migration to the border. But here is the chart, and I want you to zero in on the end of it. As you can see, apprehensions at the border, which are a pretty decent indication of the number of people who are crossing without documentation, started going up in the middle of 2020 precipitously. All that is occurring now is a continuation of these increases. Apprehensions and crossings at the border didn't start increasing on Inauguration Day; they started increasing back in the middle and end of 2020. So you can't say that this was a creation of Joe Biden's policies if what we are witnessing now is a continuation of a trend that began at the end of last year. In fact, as you can see here, the 10-year high for apprehensions at the border happened right in the middle of the Trump administration--a time during which the President was crowing that his policies at the border were the toughest ever.

Here is the second fact. The border is not open, as Republicans falsely claim. Here is what is happening right now on our southern border. Since the pandemic began, the administration invoked something called title 42 that allows, temporarily, during a public health emergency, the Border Patrol to turn everyone back around and send them back into Mexico regardless of whether they have an asylum claim that is legitimate or not. Under law, that is a temporary authority that is only allowed to be used during a public health emergency, and President Trump was using that authority.

The problem was that for these kids who were showing up at the border, who had legitimate asylum claims, right, whose lives were in danger in the places they were coming from, when we turned them around and sent them back to the Mexican border, we were essentially leaving them to die. Their parents weren't there. The smugglers who brought them to the United States had already left.

This was a disastrous, inhumane, unconscionable policy, to turn these kids back around to the border and leave them to the smugglers, to the sex traffickers with no one to help. So the only change President Biden made was to say that these unaccompanied minors need to be protected; we need to process their asylum claims. But President Biden is still turning around, under title 42 authority, every single adult, every group of adults, and every family who comes to the border, under title 42 authority.

The border is not open. All that has changed is that the prior law that was applied before the pandemic began is being applied selectively to unaccompanied minors.

Let's be clear. The authority to expel everybody being applied now to everybody except for unaccompanied minors, that is a temporary authority--an authority that Donald Trump didn't even invoke until the pandemic began.

Third, it is not even clear that what is happening now is anything other than a natural increase in migration during the winter, combined with the buildup of demand from title 42 enforcement in 2020.

The Washington Post data analysts took a look at the recent data on border crossings year to year and month to month, and here is what they said:

We looked at data from [the] U.S. Customs and Border Protection to see whether there's a ``crisis''--or even a ``surge,'' as many news outlets have characterized it. We analyzed monthly CBP data from 2012 to now and [we] found no crisis or surge that can be attributed to Biden administration policies. Rather, the current increase in apprehensions fits a predictable pattern of seasonal changes in undocumented immigration combined with a backlog of demand because of 2020's coronavirus border closure.

What they are essentially saying is that because of conditions on the ground in Central America and Mexico, you saw an increase in crossings and apprehensions in 2018 and 2019 that vanished only in 2020 because of title 42 authority that is now starting back up again.

Again, the data backs this up. This year, from January to February, there was a 28-percent increase in crossings. January to February 2019, there was a 31-percent increase. Go back to 2018; February to March, a 25-percent increase. For the last 3 years, outside of the pandemic environment, during the winter, you will see a routine 25- to 30- percent increase in presentations at the border. This is when people normally cross, during the relatively colder weather months of the winter.

Second, these numbers are really deceiving because these aren't unique individuals; this is just total number of apprehensions. So what is happening under title 42 is that adults are being immediately removed right back to Mexico, but then they are immediately attempting to recross. So many of these numbers look high because you have individuals who never got the chance to make an asylum claim who are crossing multiple times at the border.

The fourth fact is that there is little evidence that American policy at the border has much to do with migration rates. The evidence, the facts show that it is conditions on the ground in the origin nations that are what determine whether people pack up their homes and leave for America

Again, this chart is a good indication of that fact, because Donald Trump would tell you that his policies were tougher than anybody's, but the 10-year high in crossings, apprehensions happened in the middle of Donald Trump's inhumane border policies. Why? Because during this time, conditions are abysmal. Violence is spiking in many places from which these migrants are coming.

Just as a matter of sort of further explanation, if we brought this chart back into the Bush administration, you would find that crossings were much higher, at a much higher rate during the Bush administration than at any time during the Obama administration.

People come to the United States because they are fleeing violence, they are fleeing economic desperation, not because of some message they get from the U.S. Government.

One study I was looking at the other day, a comprehensive study of rationales for crossings data on the times that people cross, says this:

[T]ougher border controls have had remarkably little influence on the propensity to migrate illegally.

These are the facts. These are the facts. Republicans need to stop looking at immigration as a political opportunity. We need to start dealing with the truth.

The number of immigrants showing up at the border today is large, but the winter increase isn't bigger than either of the last two winters prior to the pandemic with respect to percentage increase. It didn't start when Joe Biden became President or because of Joe Biden's policies. The increase started last year, when Donald Trump was President.

To the extent that Republicans oppose President Biden's lifting of the title 42 removal proceedings for kids, what is your alternative? Do you support just dumping these kids, these 10- and 11-year-olds, on the other side of the border, scared and alone, and just leaving them to die or to be forced into the arms of drug cartels or traffickers in Northern Mexico? That is un-American, and I am glad my President chose to end that inhumane, temporary policy.

But even if President Biden continued title 42 authority for kids for a few more months, expedited removal can't last forever. The law doesn't allow it. So once again, pretty soon, every migrant is going to be able to have the chance to apply for asylum, as they should. And herein lies an opportunity. Let's work together to fix what is a legitimately broken system.

I will give an example. People should be able to apply for asylum in the United States. We built this Nation by allowing people to come here from very dangerous places. But the asylum process takes too long-- years between when you present yourself at the border and when you get a final decision on whether you can stay in the United States. Let's fix that. It is within our ability as Members of Congress to fix that. The administration can't do it. They need resources. They need new law and new authorities.

Republicans and Democrats could choose to--instead of playing politics, instead of offering up motions today that are sure to lose, we could sit down and try to do something about it. But for 6 years, Republicans had the opportunity to bring together a conversation around comprehensive immigration reform, and they didn't. Hopefully, we will have the opportunity to do that now.

Lastly, behind every single one of these individuals coming to the border is a story, is a real human being. Ask yourself, if your child were being recruited into vicious drug gangs with a high likelihood of serious harm or death, would you not take steps to keep your child safe? Would you not bring them to a place like America that was safer for that child?

I visited, on Friday, the southwest border. I was in El Paso with a group of bipartisan colleagues and Secretary Mayorkas, who is doing a good job, who is managing this emergency with skill. I met a little girl, about 13 years old, who was in one of these processing facilities waiting to be moved into the asylum process. She was truly scared. She was truly scared. She knew she was going to have a chance to reunite with her family in the United States, but these detention centers--they are better than they were in 2019, but they are no place for kids.

That little girl was coming from Guatemala, a place where there are certain neighborhoods that are more violent than any war zone in the Middle East, a place where murder rates eclipse anything we can even imagine in the United States.

So that little girl, she needs America to survive, but I would argue that America needs her more because without her and the thousands of other children arriving at our border, hungry for a better life, we are going to risk abandoning the entire original idea of this great, one- of-a-kind Nation, a Nation that opens its arms to those who are fleeing violence and desperation. It is not just our tradition; it is our definition as a country--more reason for those of us in the U.S. Senate to resist the temptation to play politics with these kids' lives and with the very complicated, nuanced, important issue of immigration and instead find ways to be truthful about what is happening at the border as a means to come together and do something about it.

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