Merkley, Wyden speak on failed immigration proposal

(Update: Wyden issues comments)

Senator Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., released the following statement after a Senate vote on the Rounds-King immigration proposal failed:

“After President Trump ripped away the legal status of our nation’s DACA recipients, we have been working for months to find a bipartisan compromise that would protect Dreamers – young Americans who know no other home.

“Today’s vote shows that while many senators were willing to negotiate in good faith, the White House and Breitbart-led Republicans are determined to block any compromise and instead want to keep using the Dreamers as hostages for an extreme anti-immigrant agenda.

“This proposal was a tough compromise. It fails to protect Dreamers’ parents, and it provides a path to begin construction of a wall that stops neither people nor drugs. But this proposal also represented the best chance to protect Dreamers, and we need to do right by these young people who are American in every way but a piece of paper.

“Little over a month ago, President Trump convened bipartisan leaders and said if they worked out a deal, he would sign it. He said he would ‘take the heat’ to get that deal over the finish line. But today’s events show starkly that those words were a lie.

“Presented with a true, bipartisan compromise to solve this issue, President Trump didn’t take the heat to sell it – he took a knife to kill it.”

Meanwhile, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., voted Thursday in favor of a bipartisan compromise that he said would protect the estimated 11,000 Dreamers in Oregon as well as provide funding for effective border security measures.

The bill failed to advance in the Senate on a vote of 54 to 45. It needed 60 votes to advance.

The bipartisan, compromise legislation the Senate voted on would have granted permanent legal status to 1.8 million undocumented immigrants, including young people who signed up for the Deferred Action through Childhood Arrivals (DACA). It would provide $25 billion over a 10-year period for certain border security measures such as border security technologies, infrastructure and equipment.

“Dreamers have grown up in America and followed all the rules. They go to school here. They work hard here, often at multiple jobs to support their families. They give back to our communities here,” Wyden said. “The agenda the president and the far right are pushing would rip families apart, force young people to countries they have never known, and do enormous economic harm to our country. These young Americans just want to stay in the only country they know as home. We must keep fighting to give them that chance.”

Wyden said he voted against two partisan proposals, including one that was very similar to the White House plan and would have made radical changes to the legal immigration system, broken up families, severely cut back legal immigration and done enormous economic harm to the country.