Secure America Act
Floor Speech
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Mr. SCHMITT. Mr. President, we are back. We are back to finish the job now, to make sure that ICE and CBP have the funding they need to carry out the mission we have set out in Federal immigration law.
There was a time when this wasn't controversial. There was a time when Democrat Presidents actually gave speeches about our border and making sure that we deported people who were here illegally. But that is a long time ago now. The Democrats have made their central plank of everything that they hold onto in this town about open borders, mass migration, and anti-law enforcement.
We saw this iteration with the ``defund the police'' movement. It simply gravitated to the ``defund ICE'' movement. They don't actually think, as a sovereign country, we should be able to tell people who can come in, how long they can stay, and when they have to leave.
This is a fundamental issue for a sovereign nation, and so we are back now on reconciliation, once again, to make sure that their operations are indeed funded.
I won't even get into the idea of what a departure from the norms this has been, for a policy reason, to hold up an appropriation, but that is what happened.
But now, through the process of reconciliation, Republicans are going to right that wrong, get this right. And the Democrats, they can talk all day long about how they don't want to deport criminal illegal aliens, because that is really what this is about.
I also want to tell the truth about something else very plainly. Mass migration drove up the cost of living for the American people. More deportations will bring that down.
For years, Washington treated immigration as a border issue alone. It is that, but it is also a pocketbook issue. It shows up in rent, wages, downpayments, crowded schools, strained hospitals, and city budgets buckling under the policies their citizens never voted for.
Illegal aliens do not stay at the border. They went to New York City, Chicago, Denver, towns and suburbs all across this country, into the same labor markets, housing markets, classrooms, emergency rooms, and public benefit systems already under strain.
Americans are forced into a bidding war with the entire world. Teenagers looking for a summer job, young couples trying to buy their first home, families trying to make rent, workers trying to get a raise--all of them are told to compete with millions of new arrivals, many here in violation of our laws.
This was a policy of choice. Washington flooded the labor market with workers and the housing market with renters at the same time. The result was exactly what any honest economist would predict: lower wages, higher rents, higher home prices, higher taxes, a weaker American middle class.
From 2021 to 2024, more than 20 million people came into the United States, the largest short-term surge in American history. During that same period, rents skyrocketed, housing prices surged, and communities were priced out of their own neighborhoods.
The United States is short roughly 10 million homes. Washington imported millions and millions and millions of people into that shortage and then acted surprised when prices went up.
There is nothing mysterious about this. Add millions of renters to a tight housing market, and rents rise. Add millions of buyers, and home prices rise. Make housing unaffordable, and family formation gets delayed.
Since 2010, the median age of the first-time home buyer in this country has gone from 30 years old to 40 years old. The median downpayment for a first-home buyer now is more than $40,000. That is way more than the median net worth of Americans under 35.
A young American couple can work hard, save money, follow the rules, and try to start a family. Washington's answer is to make them compete against a migration wave their own government invited, subsidized, and refused to remove. That is a betrayal.
HUD's own report admits that immigration drove as much as 100 percent of rental price growth in States like California and New York, and roughly two-thirds of rental demand nationwide.
The same thing is happening in the labor market. Over the last 25 years, immigrants accounted for nearly three-quarters of all growth in the prime-age civilian labor force. Since 2019, the American-born workforce has not grown at all--not at all. And since February 2020, roughly 90 percent--90 percent--of new jobs have gone to foreign-born workers.
That is a labor market that Washington built: more workers for corporate America, more competition for American workers, more pressure on wages, and less bargaining power for citizens.
The fiscal costs are staggering. A recent congressional study estimated the lifetime net fiscal cost to government at about $68,000 per illegal alien. But best estimates show deportation costs roughly $13,000 per removal. Deporting 10 million illegal aliens would save American taxpayers at least a half a trillion dollars.
That money could be used and should be used to strengthen American households, schools, hospitals, police departments, and our neighborhoods. Instead, Americans are being taxed to subsidize lawbreaking.
A country that does that has broken the faith of its own citizens. Look at New York City, Chicago, and Denver. Sanctuary politicians attacked immigration enforcement, declared themselves morally superior, and watched their budgets buckle. Services are strained. Citizens are told to accept less.
When the bill came due, the same politicians demanded more money from taxpayers. That is the sanctuary city model: benefits for illegal aliens, fiscal strain for citizens, and moral vanity masquerading as compassion.
It is not compassion to make citizens finance their own dispossession. They call it compassion. They call it growth. Strip away the language, and look at what the system does to real people. It lowers wages. It raises housing costs. It strains public services. It rewards lawbreaking. It transfers wealth away from citizens. It turns the American dream into a luxury good.
So let's be clear about the alternative. If mass migration raises the cost of living, more deportations will lower it. Remove illegal workers from the labor market, and wages will rise. Remove illegal renters from the housing market, and rent pressure falls. Stop subsidizing lawbreaking, and taxpayers save money. Enforce the law, and citizenship starts to mean something again.
The economy exists to serve the people of the Nation. The people of the Nation do not exist to serve the economy.
For far too long, Washington inverted that principle. It built an economy for global capital, instead of American citizens. It opened the border in the name of an ideology that treats America like a labor market with a flag attached to it. That experiment, ladies and gentlemen, has failed. It failed the people we represent.
But this decline was chosen. What was chosen, though, can be reversed. We can secure the border. We can end mass migration. We can carry out more deportations. We can restore an economy that serves American citizens again.
This fight is about whether Americans can afford to live in the country their ancestors built. It is about whether citizenship still carries a promise. It is about whether this Nation remains a home for its very own people and whether we are going to fight to make sure America remains a home for Americans.
Now, for the first time in a generation, we have a chance to choose something different--to secure the border, to carry out these deportations, to restore sanity to the labor market, to bring down housing demand, to put American taxpayers first, and to rebuild an economy that serves the American people once again.
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