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Floor Speech
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Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, I so appreciate the comments of my colleague from Nevada. So many of us are so frustrated with the failure of this legislature to address this fundamental injustice to our Dreamers.
Certainly immigration has been a part of the American spirit for a very long time. In 1752, three Merkle brothers--a name that was later converted to Merkley--arrived from Germany to be the first three of four settlers of the town of New Durlach.
More than a century later, we had those powerful words written by Emma Lazarus carved into the base of the Statue of liberty:
Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
Generations of immigrant families that were brought in through the Statue of Liberty island immigration center read those words as they arrived and were inspired as they began their American dream. But those who didn't come through that immigration center were also inspired by that vision of people coming from around the world to build this land, this land in which we have government of, by, and for the people.
Among those who have been inspired are those who arrived in more recent times. And our Dreamers, those who were less than 16, arriving before 2007, they were being given the chance, through the decision of President Obama, to grant them status in 2012 to have their American dream. And their success as a group shows it was the right policy and that it is long past time for Congress to pass a Dream Act to give them a path to citizenship.
Our good colleague from Illinois, Senator Durbin, has been fighting for these young people for passage of the Dream Act time and time again. And it is the Senate's 40-vote veto that has stopped us from ever having a vote on that policy, a final vote on that policy.
You know, the Dream Act didn't simply come from one side of the aisle. It was Senator Orrin Hatch, a Republican, who first introduced it in 2001. But the bill for the Dreamers has languished in Congress year after year after year. In 2012, President Obama, therefore, took action and announced a deferred action for childhood arrivals, the DACA policy, to protect those children who were brought here as youth, knew, often, no other country, often spoke no other language. This is their home.
And he noted at the time that this was to be ``a temporary stopgap measure'' for Congress to be able to debate and vote on a permanent legislation, the Dream Act. But Congress hasn't voted--that is, the Senate has never voted on final passage--despite decades, despite bipartisan support. And even now, in December, President Trump said on ``Meet the Press''--so we are talking just months ago, after he won reelection: ``We have to do something about the Dreamers.''
So let's do something here as we note the 13th anniversary of DACA. More than 825,000 young men and women--approximately 8,000 in my home State of Oregon--are caught in legal limbo yet ``yearning to breathe free.'' Won't they be able to breathe a lot freer if we were able to resolve their legal status?
In 2022, the Department of Homeland Security codified DACA. But due to litigation, more than 100,000 applications are still pending from people seeking DACA protections. The Trump administration has been quite aggressive about deporting undocumented immigrants. And it could, in fact, rescind DACA's protections. So let's act. Let's resolve this situation.
Here is what we understand. In 2012, President Obama described recipients as ``young people who study in our schools, who play in our neighborhoods, who are friends with our children, who pledge allegiance to the flag.'' But while Congress waited to act all these years, those young people have grown up. DACA's protections allowed them to graduate from school, to apply for jobs, to become pillars in our communities. Over the last 13 years, they contributed more than $140 billion to the U.S. economy and more than $40 billion in Federal payroll, State, and local taxes.
They enrich our country in so many ways, serving as teachers, as nurses, as police officers, in addition to being our colleagues, our neighbors, and our friends.
We are a nation of immigrants. Unless you are part of the Tribal communities that have been on this land from time immemorial, unless you just arrived as a new immigrant, you are descended from immigrants, immigrants who arrived here often with welcoming arms, as mentioned in Emma Lazarus's poem engraved in the foundation of the Statue of Liberty.
We should not be slamming that door shut on the Dreamers who were brought here as children, who already contributed so much to our country.
Let's not just give speeches about the 13th anniversary, let's get those 100,000 pending DACA applications processed. Let's get the Dream Act to the floor to give DACA recipients a legal path to citizenship, and let's finish the work that Senator Durbin and so many others have been carrying forward for so many years to ensure that the American dream is open to all.
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