Cornyn: Humanitarian Crisis at the Border Needs Compromise, Not Politics

Today on the floor, I urged my colleagues to work together to address the humanitarian and security crisis at the southern border. Excerpts of my floor remarks are below, and video can be found here.

My state has 1,200 miles of common border with Mexico, so obviously this is very personal to me and my constituents who live and work along the border.

Ours is a compassionate country. We are a nation of immigrants. Everybody - almost everybody - came from somewhere else at some point in their family history. But the only way we are going to be able to maintain that compassion and that generosity when it comes to immigration is by bringing some order out of chaos.

If we want to have any sort of impact on the massive numbers of people crossing our border, which will only grow, we have to look not just at the problem but at the root cause.

I would urge all of our colleagues on the other side to stop viewing this through a purely political lens. This is not a question of Trump wins, you lose.

I’m afraid that defines a lot of our politics here in Washington today. But that's a terrible mistake.

We need to view this together as the humanitarian crisis it is – President Obama called it that – and view it as a problem that will only continue to grow without our intervention, which it is. We need to view it as an urgent issue that requires our cooperation and, yes, our compromise.