On the recordJanuary 17, 2018
Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman, Congressman Costa, for his remarks. He made several very important points. One of them was the economic benefits of the DREAMer population, the DACA population, on their communities and how not only for California and his district, but for so many other parts of the country where you do have DACA recipients, it would be a real economic blow to deport these folks, to uproot them from the communities and simply get them out of here. It would be an economic blow to the economies of those cities and towns and States and, of course, to our Nation. The second thing that I thought was very important is really the human element that right now, as you can imagine, these 800,000 young people are watching the United States Congress. Their parents, their brothers, their sisters, everybody who loves them realizes that their future hangs in the balance. They are living in fear and incredible anxiety wondering whether they are going to be allowed to stay in what is for most of them the only place they have ever known as home. It would be like deciding that I am going to go live in Egypt or live in Uruguay or anywhere else. I simply have no connection to those places as home. That is what these young people are facing if this Congress refuses to act. That is what they are facing now.
