-9999

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. DURBIN. Madam President, you know as well as I do what is happening in our home State of Illinois when it comes to the migrants that are being bussed from Texas, primarily, into our State--the impact it has had in the State and in the city of Chicago, in particular. These migrants are arriving in the city without any consultation or warning and are being dumped in places near the city, totally unprepared to face the cruelty of the winter that we are facing in Chicago.

I am amazed at the number of people who have shown extraordinary caring and have stepped forward to try to help. I thank Catholic Charities, Salvation Army--there are so many groups. There is a New Life Center, Matthew DeMateo--extraordinary, just a miracle worker. He manages to find a way to put a roof over the heads of those migrants that come to our city and give them a fighting chance to have a decent life. So many more just like him prepare to step up and provide shelter, provide basic clothing, food, accessibility to schools, and more.

I really want to commend the mayor as well. Brandon Johnson has taken an approach toward this which I think is humane and consistent with the traditions of America. He shows a caring heart time and again, and I respect him so much for it.

Recently, the city of Chicago tried to put some order into this disorderly process, identifying times and places where the buses could stop so that people could be received properly, cared for, and go about their lives as best they could.

But, unfortunately, there has only been one example of cooperation by the State of Texas. There are plenty of examples the other way--people who are sent to airports in Rockford where they are dumped out of airplanes on the tarmac with no place to turn; people who are put in suburban towns and rural areas, which even if they wanted to help, would be so limited to what they could do.

We understand the politics of the situation better than most. We do politics for a living. But there are a lot of people who are helpless and victims of this situation who need to be taken into consideration.

The city of Chicago gave the Texas Governor a safe, convenient, accessible option to drop the migrants off at a warm shelter for orderly processing, but only one bus from Texas has attempted to register with the city. The Texas Governor has chosen cruelty and chaos over orderly and humane processing.

I don't understand the politics of that moment. These people are as vulnerable as any people on earth. They are doing the best they can for themselves, and they are in a situation where they need a helping hand in many instances.

Last week, my colleagues in the Senate were working on a negotiated border compromise to deal with the policy and law on the border. I support that completely. I don't know what the final product will be, and I am hoping to support the bill. This process is long, long overdue.

I made immigration one of the issues of concern for my services. I am the original author of the DREAM Act that was part of the Gang of 8 10 years ago that passed legislation--bipartisan legislation--on the floor of the U.S. Senate. I believe that it is important--it is inevitable-- that we deal with this in a humane and thoughtful way.

And let me say a word about what is going on at the border. I believe in the asylum process. If you are a student of history, you know that during World War II, the United States had a policy of turning away refugees.

There is the well-publicized and notorious example of the SS St. Louis, a ship which came from Europe and tried to find a port to disembark in Havana and in Florida and failed. The passengers were returned to Europe--some 700 of them--many of whom died in the Holocaust. They were Jewish people looking for a safe place in the world where they could live, and we turned them away in World War II. That is a fact.

But at the end of the war, we decided there would be a different approach in the future. We would have an orderly international process led by the United States when it came to refugees. And we established that and lived with it under Presidents of both political parties for decades.

The situation we face at the border today defies what I just described to you: the desperate people, in numbers we can handle, coming into the United States through an asylum process. What we are facing now is just not comparable at all. The thousands and thousands of people who are turning up at our borders each day are unsustainable.

There was a story in the New York Times this morning about the number of immigrants who are coming to our southern Mexican border from Africa--Africa. And they told a story about a group of people in Guinea, Africa, who found a way to travel from Guinea to Turkey, then to fly from Turkey to Colombia, then from Colombia to Honduras, and then to Nicaragua, where they were transported to the border.

This defies a stereotype in our mind about where the refugees are coming from in Central America. In this last year, more than 10,000 people from Uzbekistan showed up at our southern border in Mexico. How do you explain this?

Well, one explanation is pretty obvious. We have a refugee crisis in this world, the likes of which we have never seen and in numbers from all over the world--hundreds of thousands of people who are desperately looking. Today, there are over 100 million displaced people worldwide, including over 30 million refugees. It is the largest refugee crisis in history. That is the starting point of this conversation.

The second point is equally important. Many of these people have found their way to the United States through international groups, some of them for very sinister purposes, who are trying to make a lot of money on helpless people by promising them they could get into the United States and have a much better life. These people are being exploited in Africa, in Asia, and around the world, and we have to deal with this seriously. They are not the ordinary course of refugees coming to the United States. They are overwhelming numbers that have completely bankrupted our system in its response.

I hope this bipartisan group finds a way to deal with it and to resolve it in a humane fashion; and I am open to any suggestion. In the meantime, I want to commend the people in my State--the mayor and others, who are stepping up to do their very best to be humane and American in their response. Many of us can trace our own immigrant roots back one generation or two. I am certainly one of those. My mother was an immigrant to this country. I have met with these immigrants from all over the world and all over the United States, and I have talked to them. And, although I say to them the situation at our border is not sustainable, it has to change, and we can't deal with the massive numbers that come our way, I look at each one of them and I see in their eyes the eyes of my own family making that decision to come here, desperately trying to get to the United States. It is a natural human instinct.

But we need an orderly process. The bill that we passed, the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act, established such a process. We took the 11 million people undocumented in the Nation, and we said to them: Step forward, identify yourself, register yourself, pay your taxes, and go on working. Realize at a future time, many, many years from now, you may be eligible for legal status and even citizenship. That was part of the promise. And we need to establish such an approach today to find a way to deal with those who are here and those who want to stay here and are of no danger to the United States.

The fact is, we cannot absorb all the people in the world who want to come to the United States at this moment. It is just not practical. It is not humane even to think in those terms. But those who are here should be brought in and assimilated into this country. If they are here and are no danger to our country, they can be an important part of our future. We need them in so many different ways.

The Presiding Officer and I know about the agricultural community in our own State who have come to us desperate. These are conservative individuals politically who see the reality that our workforce is not adequate for our economy and the birthrate is not sufficient for us to sustain a new population of workers.

Let's find a thoughtful way to deal with this, stop overwhelming the border, and have an orderly process. That can be done, but it has to be done on a bipartisan basis.

Some of the people involved in this process have said publicly they don't want to find a solution, that they have too good a political issue. I hope that they are wrong. I hope that we can find a solution on a bipartisan basis that serves our Nation and that serves the world.

We need an orderly process. It took 3 to 5 years over in Europe for them to come up with their own process. We need to find our own way of doing so. I am willing to work with them as chairman of the Judiciary Committee and with my background on immigration issues, if there is anything I can add to the process.

I hope that this week, we will receive a report from this bipartisan committee that moves us in a direction of an orderly process at our border while not being overwhelmed with numbers that are unsustainable.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source