Where We Go from Here by Bernie Sanders

Author:Bernie Sanders
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

February 15, 2018

AN UGLY DAY IN THE SENATE

Today, two amendments designed to provide legal protections and a path to citizenship for 1.8 million Dreamers were defeated in the Senate. They both got over 50 votes but needed 60. We were able to get only eight Republicans to vote with us. It was an ugly day, with the strong odor of xenophobia and racism in the air.

There are some 800,000 immigrants in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, and another million who are eligible for the program. These are young people who were brought into this country by their parents illegally, often as infants, but who have spent virtually their entire lives here in the United States. Almost all of these young people are working, or in school, or in the military. I was impressed to learn that some 20,000 of them are teachers.

Over the past two years, I have had the opportunity to meet with Dreamers on a number of occasions. Several of them, in fact, worked in my presidential campaign and did a great job. A few days before the vote, I had a number of Dreamers in my office. They talked about their concerns not only for themselves but for their parents, who had worked so hard to support and educate them. They also expressed what DACA meant to them in terms of being able to legally hold down a job, go to school, or simply drive a car without fear. They are proud of this country. They want to become citizens.

The DACA issue poses a great moral crisis for this country. Can we turn our backs on these 1.8 million young people, allow them to lose their legal status and be subject to deportation—to be thrown out of the only country they have ever known? If that were to happen, it would be a moral stain on this country that would never be forgotten.

As the son of an immigrant, who came to this country with limited education and skills and who might have been denied entrance to Trump’s America, I feel very strongly about this issue. The day before the vote, I was on the Senate floor. I stated, “Mr. President, this whole debate over immigration and the Dreamers has become somewhat personal for me, because it has reminded me that I am a first-generation American, the son of an immigrant who came to this country at the age of seventeen without a nickel in his pocket, a high school dropout who knew no English and had no particular trade.”

I continued: “But the truth is that immigration is not just my story. It’s not just the story of my wife’s family who came from Ireland. It is the story of America, and of tens of millions of families who came from every single part of this world.”

Amazingly, poll after poll shows that a very strong majority of Americans—Democrats, Republicans, and Independents—want to protect the Dreamers. Some of the polls have support for the Dreamers at over 80 percent.

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