It was unusual for Nancy to show up when I was having meetings at the Capitol Hill Club. The Capitol Hill Club, one block from the House office building complex, is a clubhouse where Republicans can fundraise and meet prospective congressional candidates—political activity that is prohibited in our official offices. It was fall 2017, and Nancy’s presence meant something was wrong. I excused myself from my meeting and met Nancy halfway.
“What’s up?” I asked Nancy.
“There are Dreamers doing a die-in in our office.”
Orange T-shirted protesters were trying to take over my office in the Cannon House Office Building. Draping themselves on chairs and lying on the floor of our cramped office suite, they were chanting, “We are the Dreamers, the mighty, mighty Dreamers,” livestreaming the event on social media. So many people crammed in that they were spilling into the hallway, blocking the door. The adjoining congressional offices were objecting to the noise.
I was pissed. “Don’t they know I’m on their side?” I asked Nancy. “Why are they in our offices? I’m one of the few Republicans trying to negotiate an actual solution to their problem.”
The demonstrators were protesting because I hadn’t become a co-sponsor of the DREAM Act, a sixteen-year-old piece of legislation that allowed young men and women, known as Dreamers, who were brought into this country illegally by their parents, to remain and pursue citizenship as long as they met specific work, school, and background check requirements. This bill had been introduced every year since 2001 and had never passed the Senate.
Even in 2010, when President Obama had Democratic majorities in Congress, six Democratic senators killed the DREAM Act from becoming law. Obama’s inability to pass the DREAM Act resulted in him taking executive action to create the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program—DACA. DACA was basically the DREAM Act without a pathway to citizenship.
Such protests were going to become louder and more frequent because of opposition to President Trump’s decision to make good on his campaign promise to phase out DACA—which preceded the die-in in my office by a month.
While I was finishing my meetings, complaints by my Cannon neighbors caused the Capitol Police to escort the protesters out.
The protestors were correct. I hadn’t signed on to the DREAM Act. I generally didn’t cosign legislation that I knew had no chance of being signed into law. In sixteen years, the Dream Act had never been signed into law (it passed the House multiple times, including 2020 when I voted for it, but never got close to passage in the Senate), and the legislation as it was written would never be signed into law. While I opposed Trump’s executive action, I also opposed Obama’s, because a lasting solution to the terrible uncertainty faced by these young men and women, who have only ever known the United States of America as their home, requires a permanent legislative fix, not executive action.
Dreamers contribute to our history, culture, and economy. If for some dumb reason they were all deported, our country’s economy would lose at least $280 billion over the next decade because hundreds of thousands of people would be taken out of the workforce. Social Security contributions alone could decrease by $31.8 billion.
DACA recipients have the overwhelming support of the U.S. public—that even includes a majority of Trump voters, according to a June 2020 POLITICO/Morning Consult poll. So legislation to allow the Dreamers to stay should be an easy fix that combines pragmatism (these young people contribute to our economy, helping everyone who participates in it) with idealism (a significant majority of Americans think this would improve our country). But immigration reform often ends up being a political bludgeon used by both sides to pander to their edges.
We have always benefited from a global “brain gain”—the immigration of smart, hardworking individuals who contribute to our society into the United States from other countries—because we are one of the few countries that doesn’t require you to be born here to be a citizen. This simple fact enables our country to prosper by attracting the best, brightest, and hardest working people from all over the world. The adage that if you aren’t growing then you are dying, is true for our country. Our birthrate alone will not be enough to sustain the population necessary to keep our great economic engine humming along. We need immigration to attract the skills necessary to meet the needs of our economy. We should be embracing the fact that America is a quilt and adding to it, not preventing additional quilt blocks from being attached.
During my service in the federal government, I received a pretty good education in the byzantine U.S. immigration system. In addition to learning the process of how visas are actually granted, I learned things like how almost half of all Fortune 500 companies have a founder who was an immigrant or the child of an immigrant, immigrants are twice as likely to be granted a patent, and the share of immigrants in high-skill occupations, particularly jobs that prioritize math and science, continues to rise.
For more than two hundred years, smart, productive people have come to our shores as a result of a global brain gain that has significantly benefited America. Entrepreneurs. AI specialists. Software engineers. Researchers. Agricultural workers. Housekeepers. Retail clerks. We need immigrants to join our workforce so the U.S. can continue to thrive. If you’re going to be a hardworking member of our society, let’s streamline our immigration process in order to get you here as quickly as possible.
We need people like the parents of former representative Mia Love (R-Utah). I worked in Congress with Mia on a variety of legislation, including immigration bills. She was the first Black Republican woman and the first Haitian American to be elected to Congress. Her parents, Maxime and Marie Bourdeau, fled Haiti with ten dollars in their pockets. Her dad worked up from the very bottom to become a paint-company manager while her mother was a nurse’s aide, and they worked hard to make a life for their family, insisting their children not be burdens on society.
But when I was in office, I was routinely approached by constituents who claimed that immigrants “take our jobs.” I always quizzed them.
“Was your job taken by an immigrant?” I’d ask. The answer was always no.
I would dig a little deeper.
“Did somebody in your family have a job taken by an immigrant?” Again, I always got a shake of the head.
I’d try one more time.
“Do you know anybody whose job was taken by an immigrant?” The answer was always the same: “No, but I saw something on Facebook.”
Social media: the ultimate source of real facts.
Instead of “taking our jobs,” abundant research has found that immigration has overall boosted wages and income of Americans.
We need businesspeople like Reza Mizani, who founded and runs South Texas Renal Care, a practice that employs more than one hundred people and cares for thousands of kidney patients in twelve locations around San Antonio. Reza grew up in Iran, but during the brutal Iran-Iraq war in 1985, his desperate parents sent him to Turkey, where he lived on his own at the age of twelve until he was able to emigrate to the Dominican Republic and then on to the U.S.
Homesick and fending for himself in Istanbul, Reza recalls a very “dark time” as his family sought to find him a home away from Iran. Each day he went to a library where he found books to teach himself so he wouldn’t fall behind when he could return to his schooling. When he finally got to the Dominican Republic, he graduated from medical school and then did his residency when he moved to the United States.
In San Antonio, Reza launched his practice because he wanted to care for the whole patient while dealing with a brutal sickness that is the source of misery to patients and their families. Coming from a background of significant struggle and suffering, Reza has used his experiences to build a practice that cares for each patient with patience and respect.
This country also wouldn’t thrive without immigrants who have dedicated themselves to public service, like my friend Ambassador Sichan Siv, who escaped Cambodian slave labor camps and arrived in the U.S. in 1976 with just two dollars. The Khmer Rouge killed his entire family. From his start picking apples in Connecticut, Siv rose to serve in the White House as deputy assistant to President George H. W. Bush and served at the State Department before becoming a U.S. ambassador at the UN under President George W. Bush.
As we consider changes to our immigration laws—such as moving to a merit-based system of immigration, which uses a points system based on attributes like labor-market skills and education—we need to ensure our definition of “merit” would allow for people like the Bourdeaus, Dr. Mizani, and Ambassador Siv. They would not have benefited from a “merit-based” system because they did not have the high-level skills and top-tier educations that we traditionally assume lead to automatic success in this country. However, each one of them, and the families they built, contributed greatly to our economy and our culture and made their American Dream come true.
But we need to remain aware of the people who came before us, and the value and impact they have had. The great equalizer is someone’s ability to work hard, and the Bourdeaus, Dr. Mizani, and Ambassador Siv exemplify that.
Just as my experiences with our visa issuance system informed my understanding of immigration, my time in the NCS, where part of my job included traveling in alias and entering into countries illegally, gave me a perspective on the weak underbelly of an issue intimately connected to immigration—border security. This unique mix of experiences allowed me to bring a point of view, forged in real-world experiences, to the challenges of the U.S.-Mexico border.
When a lot of people think of the U.S.-Mexico border, they conjure images of illegal immigration and drug smuggling. And, yes, both are serious problems. But the U.S.-Mexico border—two thousand miles with fifty-five active land ports of entry—is critical to the economic health of the U.S. economy. The Border or La Frontera is not just a line of demarcation between the U.S. and Mexico. It’s a region where the people and the economies of the U.S. and Mexico meld, with commercial, cultural, and family ties that have an enormous impact on the rest of the country.
Mexico is the top U.S. trade partner, with trade in goods between the U.S. and Mexico totaling more than half a trillion dollars a year. Nearly five million U.S. jobs depend on trade with Mexico, and Mexico is the first- or second-largest trading partner for twenty-seven American states.
Hundreds of thousands of people cross the border legally each day, and up to 1.5 million U.S. citizens live in Mexico. It’s not uncommon for people to work in the U.S. and live in Mexico, and vice versa.
To correct misconceptions about the border, I brought congressional colleagues and administration officials down for tours of the border. Some were nervous when I took them into Mexico. Many were expecting the Battle of Mogadishu in 1993, with shootouts in the streets like Black Hawk Down. But the reality is that 80 percent of the extreme violence in Mexico happens in 20 percent of the country, and very little of that violence spills over into the U.S. The border cities of El Paso, Laredo, Eagle Pass, and Del Rio are among the safest cities of their size in the U.S.
When President Trump came to office, immigration became a signature issue. He branded illegal immigrants as rapists, drug dealers, and criminals, expressed support for limiting legal immigration, issued the order to rescind DACA, imposed a travel ban that severely restricted travel to the U.S. for citizens of seven largely Muslim countries, and pledged to build a wall all along the U.S.-Mexico border.
I knew these positions were going to be disastrous to La Frontera and the rest of the country. So, I began to think of an immigration and border security solution—something I could fight for, rather than just talking about what I was against. The first step in this process was to find a willing Democrat to partner with on this difficult task.
All my Democratic colleagues with whom I consulted said the same name—Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-California). Pete and I, as well as our staffs, had months of thoughtful debates over contentious issues. We held consultations with immigration groups and experts across the political spectrum. Most of our colleagues thought it would be impossible to come up with a truly bipartisan plan, but Pete and I shared the same goal of solving an important problem. In early 2018, Pete—who had become one of my best friends in Congress—and I introduced the Uniting and Securing America (USA) Act.
Instead of sprawling legislation that tried to fix everything at once, which only drives everyone into their partisan corners, the USA Act was highly pragmatic—it was targeted and bipartisan.
With sixty co-sponsors across the political spectrum, it had four aims, all with strong support on both sides of the aisle: First, protect DACA recipients from deportation. Second, implement operational control of the border though increased manpower, technology, as well as physical barriers where it made sense. Third, fix the immigration backlog keeping families in limbo. And finally, advance reforms in Central America to address the root causes driving unlawful migration to the United States.
Of those four provisions, allowing the DACA recipients benefiting from the program at the time to remain in the U.S. and offering them a pathway to U.S. citizenship should have been the biggest no-brainer. It certainly was a big issue in Texas, which is home to more than one hundred thousand DACA recipients.
Dreamers are our classmates and our co-workers: 97 percent are in school or working. They start new businesses at a rate almost double the American public. They are paying taxes as well as purchasing homes, cars, and services from American businesses—creating jobs and contributing to our economy. During the height of COVID, an estimated two hundred thousand Dreamers worked on the frontlines fighting the pandemic.
The USA Act was also the only bipartisan bill dealing with DACA recipients that also included measures on border security. In fact, it was the first time the Congressional Hispanic Caucus had agreed to support pairing a DACA-related solution to border security. Safeguarding the homeland and limiting the flow of illicit drugs is an essential component of any immigration bill and any immigration policy, because it’s critical to garnering Republican support and important to the country’s security as a whole.
President Trump’s approach to border security was, of course, his wall. But the smart solution to border security isn’t building a thirty-foot-high concrete structure from sea-to-shining-sea. At $33 billion, that was the most expensive and least effective way to create border security. It was a third-century solution to a twenty-first-century problem. If Border Patrol takes hours to respond to certain parts of the border, then a wall is not going to prevent anyone from doing anything, since nobody will be there to apprehend someone who goes over or under the wall.
There’s a notion that the people of La Frontera don’t care about border security. That’s ridiculous. For them, “border security” means “public safety.” They want to keep drug mules, cartels, and human traffickers off their land. They want to be able to move back and forth across the border safely, securely, and quickly.
Effective border security should be evaluated by how much illegal drugs and immigration is being stopped rather than how many miles of wall we have built. True security can’t be achieved with a one-size-fits-all solution. Each section of the border has unique geographical, cultural, and technological challenges, and each section should be addressed with a specific approach.
At the beginning of President Biden’s first term, he exacerbated a crisis at the border because he lacked a real plan. His unwillingness to clearly condemn illegal immigration encouraged illegal immigration. The crisis diverted resources from those with legitimate asylum claims and rewarded kingpin human smugglers. President Biden’s own secretary of homeland security, Alejandro Mayorkas, explained that America was “on pace to encounter more individuals on the southwest border than we [had] in the last twenty years.”
A physical barrier may be an effective tool in the densely populated areas where there is urban-to-urban contact, like in cities and towns. But gaining operational control of our entire southern border, meaning we know everything that crosses it, requires a smart, flexible approach based on technology and manpower, which I like to call a “Smart Wall.”
The USA Act included language from a bipartisan piece of legislation I had previously introduced called the Secure Miles with All Resources and Technology (SMART) Act. The SMART Act directed the secretary of homeland security to perform a mile-by-mile examination of the border to determine the best tool needed for that section to achieve operational control of the border.
Innovative solutions to usher in a new era of border security are being deployed along portions of the border by companies like the California start-up called Anduril. The company is installing a technology-based barrier that uses day- and night-time cameras mounted on thirty-three-foot portable surveillance towers powered by solar panels and equipped with radar. The towers are networked, feeding information to an artificial-intelligence system that distinguishes among drones, human figures, animals, and vehicles, sending location and mapping information to the cell phones of U.S. border patrol agents.
The system allows agents to monitor hundreds of miles and respond strategically. As an added benefit, at roughly $100,000 a mile, it costs a fraction of the $24.5 million per mile it would have cost to build a contiguous physical wall.
I first took Anduril’s co-founders, Palmer Luckey and Brian Schimpf, to the border in 2017. We humped through walls of bamboo-like Carrizo cane along the Rio Grande in hundred-degree weather to witness some of the conditions that Border Patrol agents face. We talked to local law enforcement and local landowners.
I introduced Palmer and Brian to a rancher who was using do-it-yourself technology to monitor the interlopers, cartels, and drug smugglers that plagued his property. The rancher agreed to host three of Anduril’s test towers, and he saw immediate results—a significant decrease of illegal activity happening on his property, and the arrests of those that continued. By the end of 2022, more than two hundred of these towers will be protecting our border and giving Border Patrol agents the intelligence they need to achieve effective border security.
Along with a DACA solution and enhanced border security, a critical component of the USA Act was aimed at fixing our broken immigration court system. Immigration courts, a branch of the Justice Department that conducts removal proceedings and adjudicates asylum claims for immigrants, are hopelessly logjammed. Between 2009 and 2019, the case backlog quadrupled. But resources to the courts have not kept pace, and the backlog continues to grow. In June 2021, there was a 1.4 million-case backlog, the highest ever.
There are too few judges for the cases flooding in. The average wait time to get in front of an immigration judge has soared to close to two years, causing people to languish, unable to earn a living or contribute to society. The USA Act required the attorney general to add 165 immigration court judges and beef up their training, including in skills like interviewing children and handling cases involving survivors of sexual assault and trafficking.
The Trump administration’s inhumane family separation policy, announced in 2018, had its roots in the dysfunctional immigration court system. With epic waits for court appearances, all illegal border crossings were referred for federal criminal prosecution, leading to children being separated from their parents when their parents were sent to jail.
One night in June 2018, while I was on a layover in the Dallas airport on my way back to San Antonio from Washington, DC, I received word that the family separation policy had hit my district. Tyler Lowe, my district director, advised me that in the outskirts of El Paso at the Tornillo Port of Entry—the same port of entry we had renamed for Marcelino Serna—a makeshift tent facility to house unaccompanied minors, including those separated from their parents, was being erected.
The facility was destined to become the largest shelter for migrant children in the country, ultimately holding children who had crossed the border unaccompanied by their parents, while other facilities around the country would hold children separated from their parents.
After learning about the Tornillo facility, I switched my flight to El Paso so I could do what I usually did when there was a breaking situation—show up so I could listen and gather on-the-ground intelligence. I knew I would get questions from my constituents and the media, and I wanted to see firsthand what was happening, and how the children were being treated.
I ran into headwinds—the Department of Homeland Security wasn’t approving congressional visits to the site. But I didn’t take no for an answer when I was a kid, and I definitely wasn’t going to take no from a department tasked with implementing a policy that went against our ideals as a nation. Besides, I knew the individual running the facility wouldn’t refuse entry to a congressman if I showed up unannounced.
I arrived at the Tornillo facility a little after ten P.M., knocked on the door, and was let in. Floodlights illuminated the facility, which was composed of several tents, each one housing about twenty children and two adult chaperones. I talked with several officials overseeing the care of the kids, who explained that the biggest complaint about the facility itself they were getting from the kids was that the AC units were set too high, making them super cold.
At this point, there had been about two thousand separations at the border, and from what I had seen at Tornillo, the individuals tasked to execute a terrible policy were trying to do their jobs with humanity. But how the hell did we get to this point? Our immigration policies should reflect our country’s values, and our values are not snatching children out of their mother’s arms, even if that mother crossed the border illegally.
Public outrage at the policy, including among Republicans, was starting to mount until Democrats started the movement to “Defund ICE” (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement). Republicans were driven away from working with Democrats when calls to abolish the agency revealed that many Democrats were more interested in grandstanding than working with Republicans on correcting an executive branch policy that many in both parties disagreed with. This hypocrisy was further illuminated when some of the most vocal Democratic representatives in Congress failed to hold the Biden administration to the same standards as the Trump administration when it came to the ongoing crisis at our border.
Our government must treat all people humanely, even ones who come here illegally.
While having more judges is a fix to an acute problem of streamlining immigration courts, the solution to the chronic problem of illegal immigration is to address the root causes of why people flee their home countries in the first place. To address this chronic issue, the USA Act provided foreign aid and economic development dollars to the countries of the “Northern Triangle”—El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.
Among the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere, the Northern Triangle nations have historically made up the vast majority of illegal immigration coming across the southern border of the U.S. Their citizens seek to escape brutal violence, lack of economic opportunity, and extreme poverty. These three evils are fueled by the lack of trust that citizens living in the Northern Triangle have in their governments, primarily due to political corruption.
In the decades following the end of World War II, the Northern Triangle served as a backdrop to the intrigues of the Cold War and had faced decades-long civil wars. Honduras served as a staging point for the training of the Contras to counter the USSR-backed Communists in Nicaragua, the Sandinistas, who were trying to destabilize El Salvador and the rest of the region. The CIA was influenced to support the overthrow of the first democratically elected government of Guatemala at the urging of the United Fruit Company—the folks that provided the Chiquita banana to the world. Decades of conflict prevented the growth of strong legal institutions, which led to an inability to prosecute crime and the expansion of corruption through all levels of the government.
Corruption is politicians taking bags of money to do something or not do something. But corruption is also a bureaucrat or low-level public official who won’t provide a public service without compensation in return. This kind of corruption has eroded trust in all levels of the governments of the Northern Triangle. An entrepreneur can’t get a building permit unless there is a bribe. A business can’t import or export a product without paying a bribe to a customs official. A citizen who is lost can’t even get the police to give them directions unless they pay a bribe. If the police won’t give directions, then how do you get them to prosecute a crime or prevent a murder?
In El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, homicide rates are among the highest in the world. Women and girls are in particular peril: El Salvador and Honduras have the greatest rates of murder of women and girls in Latin America. In the 2000s, in response to the persistent violence issues, the governments of the Northern Triangle implemented controversial anti-crime policies, like expanding police powers and enacting harsher punishments for gang members, that failed in their intention to reduce crime and likely indirectly led to a growth in gang membership by placing an increased burden on prisons that were already overcrowded and oftentimes run by gangs.
Imagine how bad a situation must be when you think the best option you have is to put your family through a treacherous 2,300-mile trek with no guarantee of success—or even survival. If we were faced with those circumstances in our country, I have no doubt we would undertake the same terrible journey if we believed it was the only way to secure our children’s future.
After a trip that involved meetings with government officials, anti-crime units, and humanitarian groups throughout the Northern Triangle, it became clear that there were programs that could improve the underlying conditions causing the flight. Foreign aid programs that strengthen the rule of law could go a long way to fixing the root causes driving people north. For example, rebuilding police departments on the principles of community policing reestablishes trust between the community and those tasked with protecting and serving that community. Additionally, digitizing government services (like allowing citizens to pay for services online, whether it’s a driver’s license or a business permit) promotes transparency and reduces opportunities for corruption by expanding a citizen’s access to public services. These foreign aid programs cost a fraction of what it costs the U.S. government to deal with the illegal immigration situation within our borders.
But the Trump administration went in the opposite direction and cut off aid to these countries. Instead of that approach, we need a Marshall Plan for the Northern Triangle to coordinate federal and international efforts to strengthen the rule of law and economic prosperity in Central America—much like the U.S. rebuilt the war-torn European nations after World War II.
One of the reasons for the success of the Marshall Plan was that it called for the European countries we were trying to help, to conduct a detailed self-assessment of their needs. They then made a multi-year commitment to take actions like deliver on production commitments, create internal monetary and financial stability, and reduce trade barriers.
We need this same commitment from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, as well as an agreement from them to work together as one region. With this commitment, the U.S. should develop a ten-year National Economic Security plan for the Northern Triangle that coordinates the foreign aid initiatives throughout the federal government.
It should specifically detail how the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation’s plans for debt financing, equity investing, and development of investment funds will work in concert with State Department and USAID grants, while supporting the poverty-reducing investments made by the Millennium Challenge Corporation. This group is an independent agency that provides grants to countries that have been determined to have good economic policies and potential for economic growth. That ten-year plan should be developed in partnership with the ongoing efforts of American and international philanthropies operating in the Northern Triangle.
This is the kind of change Pete and I thought the USA Act could inspire.
In addition to outlining ideas on how to solve this decades-long crisis, our work had an added urgency to it. When President Trump announced he was scrapping DACA, the potential deportation clock began to tick for the young men and women already in the DACA program. Speaker Ryan promised to bring a bill up to fix the problem so there wouldn’t be any unreasonable deportations. But Speaker Ryan’s deadlines came and went.
Finally, in May 2018, Pete and Rep. Jeff Denham (R-California) came up with the idea of using a rare legislative tactic called a “discharge petition” to force Speaker Ryan to schedule votes on four immigration bills, including the USA Act.
If the USA Act had come up for a vote in the House, we knew we would have well over 235 votes for passage, and it likely would have won approval in the Senate. In the previous year, an earlier version of the USA Act co-sponsored by Senator John McCain (R-Arizona) had received fifty-four of the sixty votes needed for the legislation to move, and we thought we had a way to get those remaining six votes.
We introduced the petition on May 9, and to be successful we needed the signatures of 218 House members by June 12. We had thirty-four days to pull off something that had been done successfully only twenty times in more than ninety years. Assuming all 193 House Democrats supported the petition, we needed just 25 Republicans to join the rebellion. Pete Aguilar led the Democrats working on this effort, while I worked with Jeff and Carlos Curbelo (R-Florida), who were spearheading finding other Republican representatives looking for a deal.
Six days before our deadline, we had 215 signatures—three signatures shy of our goal. We had the entire Democratic Caucus signed on, save one, my good buddy Henry Cuellar (D-Texas). But he had promised me early that he would be a yes, so we just needed two Republicans.
GOP leaders, however, were also mounting an opposition. Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-California) warned us that forcing a bipartisan vote on immigration would cost us the House, because conservatives would be pissed off if we saved DACA without building more wall than what the USA Act would likely produce, and also if we didn’t restrict legal immigration. Speaker Ryan played “good cop,” urging us to work within the party to find a Republican solution.
Days before the deadline, we’d turned over every rock and twisted every arm, landing on two realistic candidates: Reps. Dennis Ross (R-Florida) and my friend Dan Newhouse (R-Washington).
The day before the deadline, during a meeting with leaders of the Republican rebellion, Speaker Ryan called. If we would stop pushing Dennis and Dan, Ryan promised votes on some agriculture bills that were important not only to Dennis and Dan but to many of my colleagues in the room.
I was mortified that my battle buddies were contemplating taking Ryan’s deal. We had leadership where we wanted them, and we didn’t have to settle for some bullshit vote on legislation we knew would go nowhere in the Senate. But reading the room, I could tell things were not moving in the right direction.
“I’m fine with that,” one member of our group finally said to Ryan.
“So am I,” said another. I was the lone objection.
It was over. The discharge petition, and ultimately a vote on the USA Act, would not happen. Solving four of our biggest national security challenges failed because of some vague promise over an ag bill vote. I abruptly walked out of the meeting to save my friends from an eruption. We had come so close.
I often get asked if there was something I regret not doing while I was in Congress. My answer is easy—not getting the USA Act passed. Its failure reflects all the problems with Washington—appealing to the fringes rather than the middle, the lack of willingness to be honest and do the right thing, the failure to get audio and video to match, and the inability to recognize how more unites us than divides us.
Through a pragmatic idealist point of view, the issues of immigration, border security, and foreign aid could be a clarion call rather than a weapon to exacerbate political contempt. The practical reality is that our economy needs two things to keep growing: a fresh supply of people to contribute to it, and additional markets around the world to trade with it. Our economy has been successful because our country has been built on the noble principle that despite the circumstances of your birth or your position in life, you can achieve a better, richer, happier life if you work hard and obey the law. Recognizing these realities is the first step to solving these challenges, which is necessary for keeping this century the American Century. Having leaders who are willing to inspire rather than fearmonger is the subsequent step.
There are many issues we could solve with real leadership in Washington, DC. While DC has consistently shown an inability to muster the convictions to solve a problem like immigration, when it comes to another national security issue involving an opponent that is undefeated, we have to change our ways.