I took President Trump at his word when he said he wanted to treat Dreamers with heart. Just as I took Leader McConnell at his word when he said this week would be about protecting them from deportation. But now, as I listen to my Republican colleagues on the Senate floor, I’m hearing less and less about Dreamers, and more and more about spending tens of billions of taxpayer dollars on a useless wall that President Trump promised Mexico would pay for!  

Likewise, I’m hearing a whole lot about politically-loaded terms like “merit-based immigration” and “chain migration.”

These aren’t technical terms you can find in our laws. They’re political catchphrases designed to incite fear and push policies that forever change how LEGAL immigration works in the United States. The more insidious of course is the term chain migration. I am appalled when I hear my colleagues talk about chain migration. 

Just like I am appalled that the media – even the so-called liberal media – has adopted this phrase as if it’s actually a legitimate term. And I can’t be the only one who thinks the term chain migration is downright insulting to the millions of Americans whose ancestors were actually brought to this country in chains.  

The Republican Party has long claimed to be the Party of so-called Family Values. Well, chain migration is a term that de-humanizes families. It’s a term designed to make our system of legal immigration and family reunification sound threatening and illogical. But there’s nothing threatening about uniting mothers and fathers, and there’s nothing more commonsense than uniting brothers and sisters and sons and daughters.

So I ask my colleagues to please give it a rest. If you want to have a debate about the merits of our immigration system – we can have that debate. But that debate over comprehensive immigration reform is not the debate we are having this week. This debate is about whether we will do right by America’s Dreamers… This debate is about whether we will listen to the voices of the American people who overwhelmingly want us to solve this crisis.