“We need to do more to engage and strengthen our neighbors.”
Washington, DC –-(ENEWSPF)–April 23, 2015. Yesterday, Congressman Luis V. Gutiérrez (D-IL) addressed the House of Representatives on the subject of migration in the wake of the tragic loss of life in the Mediterranean Sea this week. At least 700 people lost their lives, and possibly a considerable number more. Rep. Gutiérrez compared the migration issue experienced by our European allies and its asylum seekers fleeing from the south in Africa and across Asia to the U.S. migration experience with migrants coming primarily from the Caribbean and Latin America. And he admonished his House colleagues to heed the words of Pope Francis who reminded us in his comments about the Mediterranean tragedy that migrants are indeed our brothers and sisters.
Excerpt:
“The migrants fleeing violence and poverty and gang- and drug-lord infested communities in Central America, like those fleeing African and Asian countries, are willing to literally risk life and limb for the slim chance of a better life on the other side.”
Rep. Gutiérrez went on to say:
The reality is that we need to do more to engage and strengthen our neighbors; much more to make sure that the actions, trade and consumption of our people are helping, not hurting; and much more to make sure we have secure borders, while also remembering to put doors on those borders so that people can come with visas in a controlled way and not with smugglers risking their lives.
Rep. Gutiérrez also noted that the bills voted out of the Judiciary Committee last month, while acting to make it easier for people who home-school their children to apply for political asylum in the U.S., at the same time are making it harder for those in this hemisphere to apply for asylum, including children fleeing violence and chaos in Central America.
A video of the Congressman’s speech is here: http://youtu.be/OIQf9QywOxY
The text as prepared for delivery is pasted below.
Rep. Luis V. Gutiérrez represents the Fourth District of Illinois, is a Member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, is a Member of the Judiciary Committee and the Subcommittee on Immigration and Border Security, and is the Co-Chair of the Immigration Task Force of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.
Remarks (as prepared for delivery)
April 22, 2015
Mr. Speaker, this past weekend we witnessed the most gruesome example of a story that is becoming ever more common. Hundreds of migrants are missing and feared dead – 700 or more – because the smuggling boat they were packed onto capsized in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Libya.
It was on the front page of every paper around the world.
An estimated 3,500 people died in 2014 making the journey from North Africa to the Southern Coast of Europe.
Right now along our Southern Border illegal immigration is at historically low levels, but we too have a border that is known for smuggling, tragic loss of life, and smugglers no less brazen — no less indifferent to the lives of their human cargo — than those off the Libyan coast.
With few legal options and with great opportunity for work and freedom on the other side, migrants throughout the world are risking their lives in hopes of surviving the journey to live a better life.
During the peak of illegal immigration to this country a decade or so ago, one person died every single day on average trying to come to the U.S. They died of dehydration in the desert or died in trucks and boxcars in botched smuggling operations or perished as stowaways.
And those are just the ones we know about.
Now we hear of “La Bestia,” or “The Beast” — the train carrying migrants from Southern Mexico to the border with our country.
Think about hundreds of people, most of them children and teenagers, clinging to the outside of a moving train while they are preyed upon by smugglers, sexual predators, and every kind of criminal you can think of.
The migrants fleeing violence and poverty and gang- and drug-lord infested communities in Central America, like those fleeing African and Asian countries, are willing to literally risk life and limb for the slim chance of a better life on the other side.
Europe is responding to the migrant crisis by committing to more rescue operations.
The right-wing anti-immigration parties across Europe see the crisis as validation for their call to build a big wall around “Fortress Europe.”
There are a few people who work right here in this building that probably agree with them.
But most people in Europe understand that building civil society and stable economies in the Southern Hemisphere is the best way to entice people to stay home. Foreign aid and international economic development are not dirty words in Europe the way they are here.
In the U.S., the policies set in Washington directly relate to the instability of neighboring countries in Central America, the Caribbean and Latin America. Trade policies initiated in this country have had devastating consequences in rural areas across our hemisphere driving people from the land and driving people into drug cultivation.
And it is our insatiable appetite for illegal drugs, funded with our dollar bills and enforced with U.S. guns that creates and maintains a lot of the instability and chaos that drives people from their homes.
Yet almost every budget that is considered in this Congress cuts mental health and drug counseling, addiction treatment and prevention, and does little to address our role in fueling instability.
And with specific regard to immigration and asylum, in this Congress we are debating laws to make it harder for children to apply for asylum. Laws to make it easier to deport children or put families into lengthy and expensive detention
And to add insult to injury, the Judiciary Committee just approved a measure to allow those who want to home-school their children – but who are prevented from doing so by their own governments – they would constitute a special class of oppressed victims to be considered eligible to apply for political asylum.
So people from Germany and Sweden who want to homeschool their children, that is the kind of oppression this Congress responds to.
People from Central America whose governments are unable or unwilling to protect children from murder and sexual assault? Not so much.
The reality is that we need to do more to engage and strengthen our neighbors; much more to make sure that the actions, trade and consumption of our people are helping, not hurting; and much more to make sure we have secure borders, while also remembering to put doors on those borders so that people can come with visas in a controlled way and not with smugglers risking their lives.
And first and foremost, we must remember the message that Pope Francis reminded of us when he said of those who drowned in the Mediterranean:
Quote: “These are men and women like us, our brothers seeking a better life, starving, persecuted, wounded, exploited, victims of war,” the pope said. “They were looking for a better life.”
Let us not forget that migrants are human beings.
Source: Gutierrez.house.gov
