Remarks at the 2016 National Immigrant Integration Conference, Nashville, TN

Remarks

Rep. Luis V. Gutiérrez (D-IL)

National Immigrant Integration Conference (NIIC)

Omni Hotel | Nashville, TN

December 12, 2016

The Congressman spoke at the National Immigrant Integration Conference (http://www.niic2016.org/) in Nashville, TN, a conference hosted and organized by the National Partnership for New Americans (http://partnershipfornewamericans.org/) and the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition (http://www.tnimmigrant.org/). Rep. Gutiérrez represents the Fourth District of Illinois, is a Member of the Judiciary Committee and is the Co-Chair of the Immigration Task Force of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.

(Remarks As Prepared for Delivery)

Not many Members of Congress get to be part of a movement.  Not many get to help organize the nation for genuine, progressive social change.  For that privilege, I want to thank all of you because working together, we are doing work that matters. 

Your work makes life for my constituents better and it makes fighting much easier when it is arm in arm with good people like you. 

There is no one I would rather share a fox hole with than Josh Hoyt [Executive Director of the National Partnership for New Americans] who is a national leader, a Chicago institution, and a personal friend.  My biggest critics are at home in Chicago and so are my most stalwart friends.

And outside of my family, the people who keep me going and keep me fighting are either in Chicago or they are here in this room or part of this movement.

And this movement has now sent one of its own to Congress.

So I want to say thank you to Seattle and to the pro-immigrant movement for sending Representative-elect Pramila Jayapal to us in Washington. 

We will take good care of her and I’m proud to know she is joining me in our fight for immigrants, for fairness and for justice.

The new class in Congress – and the last several classes of young leaders who are coming to Washington to fight for immigrants – from Phoenix and Florida, Los Angeles, Nevada and New York – there are new leaders in the House who will join with us.

I wish we had a better two or four years ahead of us, but Rep. Jayapal, thank you for stepping up and continuing the fight in your new role.

I cannot sugar coat things, we are looking at a very dark time.

Even when we had a President who said he was for immigration reform, we lost more than three-million people to deportation.

So with all due respect to the topic of integration that brings us together at this conference, we know that we cannot integrate immigrants into our community if they have been deported and I think the next several years present a challenge like no other we have faced in recent memory.

I’d like to talk about our three challenges right now inside and outside of Washington.

We have to organize.

We have to lock arms with our allies.

And we have to keep our eyes on the prize.

Let me explain what I mean.

Right now, we need to organize ourselves and build the power of this movement to resist the onslaught of the Trump Administration and his army of flying monkeys opposed to legal immigration and legal status for immigrants – Ann Coulter, Jeff Sessions, Kris Kobach Numbers USA, FAIR and all the rest of them.

We do not know for sure that they will pull the strings in the new Administration, but we have to prepare for the worst.

We should assume they are coming for immigrants and our posture should be that if they try to come for DREAMers or their moms or their neighbors or try to register Muslims or put people in camps or criminalize immigrants, they will have to go through us.

Trump says he wants to deport 2 or 3 million people starting on Day One and he claims that he wants to deport criminals. 

And we know that the idea that 2 to 3 million undocumented immigrants being serious, violent, or dangerous criminals – like a lot of things Trump says – is pure baloney.

A mom who is picked up by ICE while driving without a license because her kid is sick and needs to go to the doctor…Trump would label her criminal, but we would not.

If she came back after she was deported so that she could raise her family, Trump would label her a criminal, but no reasonable person would label her a criminal because every reasonable person who was in the same position would probably do the same thing.

We have to organize ourselves to fight for that mom and all the others like her who live and work here and raise families – who work two jobs or pick garlic in the hot sun and contribute to strong communities in so many ways.

In Chicago, the organizing work has already started.  We are going to train people to help defend members of their own communities – and leverage the leadership of the Mayor, Senator Durbin myself and others to help prepare and organize a crew of community defenders. 

It is not enough to fund the downtown lawyers, although they will be a very important part of the effort.  It is not enough to have very solid sanctuary policies that create a firewall between the City and ICE.

We need to build the power of the community to defend itself.

And guess what?

Whatever we do in Chicago makes the Mayor in New York and Houston and Los Angeles and a lot of other people take notice because, in case you haven’t heard, politicians can be a bit competitive.

So, Bill De Blasio, Jerry Brown, Governors, Mayors, City Council people – the competition is on to see who can be the most helpful in working with this movement to build the best, most inclusive and successful model for community defense.

Even if we are on our own in cities and communities, every organization and congregation can play a role in getting ready.

If every person targeted by Trump has a lawyer or a BIA certified defender – or both – they will have a much better chance of winning their case. 

Plus, dragging out the process for any individual deportation case will make it harder and harder to bring millions and millions of cases. 

Inside the Congress, we also need to organize, and that work has begun with Zoe Lofgren and Lucille Roybal-Allard as my partners and with a broad group of supporters – hopefully including Rep. Jayapal just as soon as she is sworn in.

Inside Congress, the resistance is starting with the DREAMers because we cannot stand idle as Trump and his ilk try to take away one of our key victories under Obama.  We fought so hard for it, we can’t roll over when there’s a move to take it away.

So I am working to introduce a bill like the bill that Senator Graham and Senator Durbin introduced – The BRIDGE Act – and to identify a Republican leader to work with us so that it is truly bipartisan on both sides of the Hill.  But that’s just the beginning.

Because we can’t just defend the DREAMers.  We have to move to defend the whole immigrant community… in coalition; A coalition that says if you come for the DREAMers, if you come to deport Moms and Dads, if you want to register Muslims, if you want to cut-off legal immigration, you have to go through us.

And by us, I don’t just mean the immigrant and refugee and Asian, Latino, progressive coalition, but women, young people, environmental defenders, the LGBT community – whoever might have a target on their backs, we have to join arms with them.

If they come after young people who have been organizing for Black Lives Matter, we have to lock arms with them so that if anyone is getting thrown under the bus, they must try to throw us all under the bus. 

When they come to shut down Planned Parenthood, we need to be on the picket line with our allies too.

We can’t have this, “well, I feel bad for them but at least they are not coming for me,” stuff.

They are coming for us, sooner or later and the more of “us” that there are – the more people who think of themselves as part of “us” – the harder it is for them to target any of us individually.

I have told my colleagues in the CHC that we need to be walking arm-in-arm with the Black Caucus and the NAACP and the LGBT Taskforce and the Human Rights Campaign. 

And many of us already do that, but we have to be more intentional and more institutional and more conspicuous.

So we organize, we link with our allies, and the last and most important thing we need to do is keep our eyes on the prize.

The majority of the country – even if not a majority of the Electoral College – are with us and this is a minority President taking office. 

We cannot forget that and we cannot let others forget that.

But while we fight against deportation and fight to protect those with DACA, we cannot lose sight of what we are for.

It is good to introduce the BRIDGE Act, but it has to be a bridge to something, a bridge to somewhere.  If we are able to protect the people who signed up for DACA, we need to have them work with us towards something.

That’s why I am announcing today my intention to file a bill early next year that encapsulates our vision for legal immigration and legal status for immigrants.

A bill that shows that we want people to come with a visa and not a smuggler and that says that we envision an America where immigrants are fully incorporated into society -- not left to float outside of society in legal limbo, here and working for decades but not fully part of the communities – not fully welcome in the country that our community is embracing with hard work, sweat and contributions.

We have to have a vision of legal immigration that stands next to the vision that Jeff Sessions and Kris Kobach  are selling which is walls and deportation and reducing or eliminating legal immigration.

We need to show America that the choice is between a modern immigration system that makes people play by a common set of rules so that immigration works for and is controlled by the American people for the benefit of the American people and those who come to join us….

…Which stands in counterpoint to a system that encourages the black market to flourish, that keeps families waiting decades, that relies on criminalization, marginalization and deportation rather than inclusion and integration. 

Our bill must establish the functioning courts and appeals process we need for a modern immigration system, but unlike previous incarnations of comprehensive immigration reform, we do not need to craft all of the enforcement mechanisms.

For two reasons:  Number 1, the U.S. has already implemented a lot of the enforcement stuff we have proposed over the years in our comprehensive legislation already and we have nearly the lowest level of illegal immigration we have had in three- or four-decades. 

And secondly, Republicans will be coming up with all of the enforcement-only and deportation-only and militarization and criminalization bills they can think up… so we better be clear about what we want.

You look on my Facebook or Twitter and you’ll see a lot of haters telling me to go back to Mexico, even though I am Puerto Rican and born in Chicago.

And there are many, many people who are blessing me and encouraging me.

But you get a lot of average folks who say – and probably really believe – that they are FOR legal immigration and AGAINST illegal immigration.  They really believe that about themselves and we have to show them that we are on their side.

That what we have been fighting for gives us more control at the border because people are coming on buses during daylight hours using their real names carrying a visa – not hiring a smuggler to risk their lives coming in the dark of night.

That we are the side that wants to protect the labor rights of all working people because we want one set of labor laws for one labor market, not segmented into legal and illegal or above board and under-the-table.

That we will update the visa system – which right now has people coming with visas that they applied for when Bill Clinton was President if they can apply at all – so it becomes modernized to regulate and facilitate immigration for families, for employers, for asylum seekers, for refugees or for people who want to build America up.

That we are for immigrants putting down deep roots that benefit their own families, but that also benefit the communities they help make stronger and safer and healthier.

We must articulate that vision and I look forward to working with you – all of you – in crafting that vision, introducing legislation, giving Democrats, fair-minded Republicans – if they have the courage – and most importantly, the American people and our community a place to stand and ideals and a vision to stand up for.  

Thank you very much.

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