Condemning actions by the Government of Syria that have hindered the investigation of the assassination of former Prime Minister of Lebanon Rafik Hariri conducted by the United Nations International Independent Investigation Commission (UNIIIC), expressing support for extending the UNIIIC's investigative mandate, and stating concern about similar assassination attempts apparently aimed at destabilizing Lebanon's security and undermining Lebanon's sovereignty.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding me time.

Mr. Speaker, I would just like to say briefly that I think that our Nation would be much more persuasive in our attempts to try to change the behavior within Syria if we also acknowledged that there are the news reports about a covert war in Iraq that has expanded in recent months to Syria, and that bombing has been taking place along the Syrian border.

I think it is going to be kind of difficult for us to engage Syria in discussions when they may be getting indications that we are attacking their country.

[From the New Yorker, Dec. 12, 2005]

Annals of National Security, Up in the Air

Where is the Iraq war headed next?

(By Seymour M. Hersh)

In recent weeks, there has been widespread speculation that

President George W. Bush,

confronted by diminishing approval ratings and dissent within

his own party, will begin pulling American troops out of Iraq

next year. The Administration's best-case scenario is that

the parliamentary election scheduled for December 15th will

produce a coalition government that will join the

Administration in calling for a withdrawal to begin in the

spring. By then, the White House hopes, the new government

will be capable of handling the insurgency. In a speech on

November 19th, Bush repeated the latest Administration

catchphrase: ``As Iraqis stand up, we will stand down.'' He

added, ``When our commanders on the ground tell me that Iraqi

forces can defend their freedom, our troops will come home

with the honor they have earned.'' One sign of the political

pressure on the Administration to prepare for a withdrawal

came last week, when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told

Fox News that the current level of American troops would not

have to be maintained ``for very much longer,'' because the

Iraqis were getting better at fighting the insurgency.

A high-level Pentagon war planner told me, however, that he

has seen scant indication that the President would authorize

a significant pullout of American troops if he believed that

it would impede the war against the insurgency. There are

several proposals currently under review by the White House

and the Pentagon; the most ambitious calls for American

combat forces to be reduced from a hundred and fifty-five

thousand troops to fewer than eighty thousand by next fall,

with all American forces officially designated ``combat'' to

be pulled out of the area by the summer of 2008. In terms of

implementation, the planner said, ``the drawdown plans that

I'm familiar with are condition-based, event-driven, and not

in a specific time frame''--that is, they depend on the

ability of a new Iraqi government to defeat the insurgency.

(A Pentagon spokesman said that the Administration had not

made any decisions and had ``no plan to leave, only a plan to

complete the mission.'')

A key element of the drawdown plans, not mentioned in the

President's public statements, is that the departing American

troops will be replaced by American airpower. Quick, deadly

strikes by U.S. warplanes are seen as a way to improve

dramatically the combat capability of even the weakest Iraqi

combat units. The danger, military experts have told me, is

that, while the number of American casualties would decrease

as ground troops are withdrawn, the over-all level of

violence and the number of Iraqi fatalities would increase

unless there are stringent controls over who bombs what.

``We're not planning to diminish the war,'' Patrick

Clawson, the deputy director of the Washington Institute for

Near East Policy, told me. Clawson's views often mirror the

thinking of the men and women around Vice-President Dick

Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. ``We just want

to change the mix of the forces doing the fighting--Iraqi

infantry with American support and greater use of airpower.

The rule now is to commit Iraqi forces into combat only in

places where they are sure to win. The pace of commitment,

and withdrawal, depends on their success in the

battlefield.''

He continued, ``We want to draw down our forces, but the

President is prepared to tough this one out. There is a very

deep feeling on his part that the issue of Iraq was settled

by the American people at the polling places in 2004.'' The

war against the insurgency ``may end up being a nasty and

murderous civil war in Iraq, but we and our allies would

still win,'' he said. ``As long as the Kurds and the Shiites

stay on our side, we're set to go. There's no sense that the

world is caving in. We're in the middle of a seven-year slog

in Iraq, and eighty percent of the Iraqis are receptive to

our message.''

One Pentagon adviser told me, ``There are always

contingency plans, but why withdraw and take a chance? I

don't think the President will go for it''--until the

insurgency is broken. ``He's not going to back off. This is

bigger than domestic politics.''

Current and former military and intelligence officials have

told me that the President remains convinced that it is his

personal mission to bring democracy to Iraq, and that he is

impervious to political pressure, even from fellow

Republicans. They also say that he disparages any information

that conflicts with his view of how the war is proceeding.

Bush's closest advisers have long been aware of the

religious nature of his policy commitments. In recent

interviews, one former senior official, who served in Bush's

first term, spoke extensively about the connection between

the President's religious faith and his view of the war in

Iraq. After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the

former official said, he was told that Bush felt that ``God

put me here'' to deal with the war on terror. The President's

belief was fortified by the Republican sweep in the 2002

congressional elections; Bush saw the victory as a purposeful

message from God that ``he's the man,'' the former official

said. Publicly, Bush depicted his reelection as a referendum

on the war; privately, he spoke of it as another

manifestation of divine purpose.

The former senior official said that after the election he

made a lengthy inspection visit to Iraq and reported his

findings to Bush in the White House: ``I said to the

President, `We're not winning the war.' And he asked, `Are we

losing?' I said, `Not yet.'' The President, he said,

``appeared displeased'' with that answer.

``I tried to tell him,'' the former senior official said.

``And he couldn't hear it.''

There are grave concerns within the military about the

capability of the U.S. Army to sustain two or three more

years of combat in Iraq. Michael O'Hanlon, a specialist on

military issues at the Brookings Institution, told me, ``The

people in the institutional Army feel they don't have the

luxury of deciding troop levels, or even participating in the

debate. They're planning on staying the course until 2009. I

can't believe the Army thinks that it will happen, because

there's no sustained drive to increase the size of the

regular Army.'' O'Hanlon noted that ``if the President

decides to stay the present course in Iraq some troops would

be compelled to serve fourth and fifth tours of combat by

2007 and 2008, which could have serious consequences for

morale and competency levels.''

Many of the military's most senior generals are deeply

frustrated, but they say nothing in public, because they

don't want to jeopardize their careers. The Administration

has ``so terrified the generals that they know they won't go

public,'' a former defense official said. A retired senior

C.I.A. officer with knowledge of Iraq told me that one of his

colleagues recently participated in a congressional tour

there. The legislators were repeatedly told, in meetings with

enlisted men, junior officers, and generals that ``things

were fucked up.'' But in a subsequent teleconference with

Rumsfeld, he said, the generals kept those criticisms to

themselves.

One person with whom the Pentagon's top commanders have

shared their private views for decades is Representative John

Murtha, of Pennsylvania, the senior Democrat on the House

Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. The President and his

key aides were enraged when, on November 17th, Murtha gave a

speech in the House calling for a withdrawal of troops within

six months. The speech was filled with devastating

information. For example, Murtha reported that the number of

attacks in Iraq has increased from a hundred and fifty a

week to more than seven hundred a week in the past year.

He said that an estimated fifty thousand American soldiers

will suffer ``from what I call battle fatigue'' in the

war, and he said that the Americans were seen as ``the

common enemy'' in Iraq. He also took issue with one of the

White House's claims--that foreign fighters were playing

the major role in the insurgency. Murtha said that

American soldiers ``haven't captured any in this latest

activity''--the continuing battle in western Anbar

province, near the border with Syria. ``So this idea that

they're coming in from outside, we still think there's

only seven per cent.''

Murtha's call for a speedy American pullout only seemed to

strengthen the White House's resolve. Administration

officials ``are beyond angry at him, because he is a serious

threat to their policy--both on substance and politically,''

the former defense official said. Speaking at the Osan Air

Force base, in South Korea, two days after Murtha's speech,

Bush said, ``The terrorists regard Iraq as the central front

in their war against humanity. . . . If they're not stopped,

the terrorists will be able to advance their agenda to

develop weapons of mass destruction, to destroy Israel, to

intimidate Europe, and to break our will and blackmail our

government into isolation. I'm going to make you this

commitment: this is not going to happen on my watch.''

``The President is more determined than ever to stay the

course,'' the former defense official said. ``He doesn't feel

any pain. Bush is a believer in the adage `People may suffer

and die, but the Church advances.' ``He said that the

President had become more detached, leaving more issues to

Karl Rove and Vice President Cheney. ``They keep him in the

gray world of religious idealism, where he wants to be

anyway,'' the former defense official said. Bush's public

appearances, for example, are generally scheduled in front of

friendly audiences, most often at military bases. Four

decades ago, President Lyndon Johnson, who was also

confronted with an increasingly unpopular war, was limited to

similar public forums. ``Johnson knew he was a prisoner in

the White House,'' the former official said, ``but Bush has

no idea.''

Within the military, the prospect of using airpower as a

substitute for American troops on the ground has caused great

unease. For one thing, Air Force commanders, in particular,

have deep-seated objections to the possibility that Iraqis

eventually will be responsible for target selection. ``Will

the Iraqis call in air strikes in order to snuff rivals, or

other warlords, or to snuff members of your own sect and

blame someone else?'' another senior military planner now on

assignment in the Pentagon asked. ``Will some Iraqis be

targeting on behalf of Al Qaeda, or the insurgency, or the

Iranians?''

``It's a serious business,'' retired Air Force General

Charles Homer, who was in charge of allied bombing during the

1991 Gulf War, said. ``The Air Force has always had concerns

about people ordering air strikes who are not Air Force

forward air controllers. We need people on active duty to

think it out, and they will. There has to be training to be

sure that somebody is not trying to get even with somebody

else.'' (Asked for a comment, the Pentagon spokesman said

there were plans in place for such training. He also noted

that Iraq had no offensive airpower of its own, and thus

would have to rely on the United States for some time.)

The American air war inside Iraq today is perhaps the most

significant--and underreported--aspect of the fight against

the insurgency. The military authorities in Baghdad and

Washington do not provide the press with a daily accounting

of missions that Air Force, Navy, and Marine units fly or of

the tonnage they drop, as was routinely done during the

Vietnam War. One insight into the scope of the bombing in

Iraq was supplied by the Marine Corps during the height of

the siege of Falluja in the fall of 2004. ``With a massive

Marine air and ground offensive under way,'' a Marine press

release said, ``Marine close air support continues to put

high-tech steel on target. . . . Flying missions day and

night for weeks, the fixed wing aircraft of the 3rd Marine

Aircraft Wing are ensuring battlefield success on the front

line.'' Since the beginning of the war, the press release

said, the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing alone had dropped more

than five hundred thousand tons of ordnance. ``This number is

likely to be much higher by the end of operations,'' Major

Mike Sexton said. In the battle for the city, more than seven

hundred Americans were killed or wounded; U.S. officials did

not release estimates of civilian dead, but press reports at

the time told of women and children killed in the

bombardments.

In recent months, the tempo of American bombing seems to

have increased. Most of the targets appear to be in the

hostile, predominantly Sunni provinces that surround Baghdad

and along the Syrian border. As yet, neither Congress nor the

public has engaged in a significant discussion or debate

about the air war.

The insurgency operates mainly in crowded urban areas, and

Air Force warplanes rely on sophisticated, laser-guided bombs

to avoid civilian casualties. These bombs home in on targets

that must be ``painted,'' or illuminated, by laser beams

directed by ground units. ``The pilot doesn't identify the

target as seen in the pre-brief''--the instructions provided

before takeoff--a former high-level intelligence official

told me. ``The guy with the laser is the targeteer. Not the

pilot. Often you get a `hotread' ''--from a military unit on

the ground--``and you drop your bombs with no communication

with the guys on the ground. You don't want to break radio

silence. The people on the ground are calling in targets that

the pilots can't verify.'' He added, ``And we're going to

turn this process over to the Iraqis?''

The second senior military planner told me that there are

essentially two types of targeting now being used in Iraq: a

deliberate siteselection process that works out of

airoperations centers in the region, and ``adaptive

targeting''--supportive bombing by prepositioned or loitering

warplanes that are suddenly alerted to firefights or targets

of opportunity by military units on the ground. ``The bulk of

what we do today is adaptive,'' the officer said, ``and it's

divorced from any operational air planning. Airpower can be

used as a tool of internal political coercion, and my

attitude is that I can't imagine that we will give that power

to the Iraqis.''

This military planner added that even today, with Americans

doing the targeting, ``there is no sense of an air campaign,

or a strategic vision. We are just whacking targets--it's a

reversion to the Stone Age. There's no operational art.

That's what happens when you give targeting to the Army--they

hit what the local commander wants to hit.''

One senior Pentagon consultant I spoke to said he was

optimistic that ``American air will immediately make the

Iraqi Army that much better.'' But he acknowledged that he,

too, had concerns about Iraqi targeting. ``We have the most

expensive eyes in the sky right now,'' the consultant said.

``But a lot of Iraqis want to settle old scores. Who is going

to have authority to call in air strikes? There's got to be a

behavior-based rule.''

General John Jumper, who retired last month after serving

four years as the Air Force chief of staff, was ``in favor of

certification of those Iraqis who will be allowed to call in

strikes,'' the Pentagon consultant told me. ``I don't know if

it will be approved. The regular Army generals were resisting

it to the last breath, despite the fact that they would

benefit the most from it.''

A Pentagon consultant with close ties to the officials in

the Vice-President's office and the Pentagon who advocated

the war said that the Iraqi penchant for targeting tribal and

personal enemies with artillery and mortar fire had created

``impatience and resentment'' inside the military. He

believed that the Air Force's problems with Iraqi targeting

might be addressed by the formation of U.S.-Iraqi transition

teams, whose American members would be drawn largely from

Special Forces troops. This consultant said that there were

plans to integrate between two hundred and three hundred

Special Forces members into Iraqi units, which was seen as a

compromise aimed at meeting the Air Force's demand to vet

Iraqis who were involved in targeting. But in practice,

the consultant added, it meant that ``the Special Ops

people will soon allow Iraqis to begin calling in the

targets.''

Robert Pape, a political-science professor at the

University of Chicago, who has written widely on American

airpower, and who taught for three years at the Air Force's

School of Advanced Airpower Studies, in Alabama, predicted

that the air war ``will get very ugly'' if targeting is

turned over to the Iraqis. This would be especially true, he

said, if the Iraqis continued to operate as the U.S. Army and

Marines have done--plowing through Sunni strongholds on

search-and-destroy missions. ``If we encourage the Iraqis to

clear and hold their own areas, and use airpower to stop the

insurgents from penetrating the cleared areas, it could be

useful,'' Pape said. ``The risk is that we will encourage the

Iraqis to do search-and-destroy, and they would be less

judicious about using airpower--and the violence would go up.

More civilians will be killed, which means more insurgents

will be created.''

Even American bombing on behalf of an improved, well-

trained Iraqi Army would not necessarily be any more

successful against the insurgency. ``It's not going to

work,'' said Andrew Brookes, the former director of airpower

studies at the Royal Air Force's advanced staff college, who

is now at the International Institute for Strategic Studies,

in London. ``Can you put a lid on the insurgency with

bombing?'' Brookes said. ``No. You can concentrate in one

area, but the guys will spring up in another town.'' The

inevitable reliance on Iraqi ground troops' targeting would

also create conflicts. ``I don't see your guys dancing to the

tune of someone else,'' Brookes said. He added that he and

many other experts ``don't believe that airpower is a

solution to the problems inside Iraq at all. Replacing boots

on the ground with airpower didn't work in Vietnam, did it?''

The Air Force's worries have been subordinated, so far, to

the political needs of the White House. The Administration's

immediate political goal after the December elections is to

show that the day-to-day conduct of the war can be turned

over to the newly trained and equipped Iraqi military. It has

already planned heavily scripted change-of-command

ceremonies, complete with the lowering of American flags at

bases and the raising of Iraqi ones.

Some officials in the State Department, the C.I.A., and

British Prime Minister Tony Blair's government have settled

on their candidate of choice for the December elections--Iyad

Allawi, the secular Shiite who served until this spring as

Iraq's interim Prime Minister. They believe that Allawi can

gather enough votes in the election to emerge, after a round

of political bargaining, as Prime Minister. A former senior

British adviser told me that Blair was convinced that Allawi

``is the best hope.'' The fear is that a government dominated

by religious Shiites, many of whom are close to Iran, would

give Iran greater political and military influence inside

Iraq. Allawi could counter Iran's influence; also, he would

be far more supportive and cooperative if the Bush

Administration began a drawdown of American combat forces in

the coming year.

Blair has assigned a small team of operatives to provide

political help to Allawi, the former adviser told me. He also

said that there was talk late this fall, with American

concurrence, of urging Ahmad Chalabi, a secular Shiite, to

join forces in a coalition with Allawi during the post-

election negotiations to form a government. Chalabi, who is

notorious for his role in promoting flawed intelligence on

weapons of mass destruction before the war, is now a deputy

Prime Minister. He and Allawi were bitter rivals while in

exile.

A senior United Nations diplomat told me that he was

puzzled by the high American and British hopes for Allawi.

``I know a lot of people want Allawi, but I think he's been a

terrific disappointment,'' the diplomat said. ``He doesn't

seem to be building a strong alliance, and at the moment it

doesn't look like he will do very well in the election.''

The second Pentagon consultant told me, ``If Allawi becomes

Prime Minister, we can say, 'There's a moderate, urban,

educated leader now in power who does not want to deprive

women of their rights.' He would ask us to leave, but he

would allow us to keep Special Forces operations inside

Iraq--to keep an American presence the right way. Mission

accomplished. A coup for Bush.''

A former high-level intelligence official cautioned that it

was probably ``too late'' for any American withdrawal plan to

work without further bloodshed. The constitution approved by

Iraqi voters in October ``will be interpreted by the Kurds

and the Shiites to proceed with their plans for autonomy,''

he said. ``The Sunnis will continue to believe that if they

can get rid of the Americans they can still win. And there

still is no credible way to establish security for American

troops.''

The fear is that a precipitous U.S. withdrawal would

inevitably trigger a Sunni-Shiite civil war. In many areas,

that war has, in a sense, already begun, and the United

States military is being drawn into the sectarian violence.

An American Army officer who took part in the assault on Tal

Afar, in the north of Iraq, earlier this fall, said that an

American infantry brigade was placed in the position of

providing a cordon of security around the besieged city for

Iraqi forces, most of them Shiites, who were ``rounding up

any Sunnis on the basis of whatever a Shiite said to them.''

The officer went on, ``They were killing Sunnis on behalf of

the Shiites,'' with the active participation of a militia

unit led by a retired American Special Forces soldier.

``People like me have gotten so downhearted,'' the officer

added.

Meanwhile, as the debate over troop reductions continues,

the covert war in Iraq has expanded in recent months to

Syria. A composite American Special Forces team, known as an

S.M.U., for ``special-mission unit,'' has been ordered, under

stringent cover, to target suspected supporters of the Iraqi

insurgency across the border. (The Pentagon had

no comment.) ``It's a powder keg,'' the Pentagon consultant

said of the tactic. ``But, if we hit an insurgent network in

Iraq without hitting the guys in Syria who are part of it,

the guys in Syria would get away. When you're fighting an

insurgency, you have to strike everywhere-and at once.''

Mr. Chairman, will the gentlewoman yield?

Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of the amendment.

Recent news reports have underscored the tragic cost inflicted by aliens who have taken lives while driving drunk or while intoxicated.

Two cases from North Carolina have highlighted this problem. In each, the alien driver has been charged with drinking and killing another driver. Authorities have alleged that a Gaston County teacher was killed in July by an illegal Mexican national with five previous DWI charges. That alien has been charged with DWI and second degree murder. The police have also reported that a UNC Charlotte student was killed in November by an illegal Mexican national who reportedly had two prior impaired-driving arrests and had drunk six beers before the accident. That alien, who had previously been sent back to Mexico 17 times, was also charged with second-degree murder.

Despite the risks posed by drunk drivers, this offense is not currently a ground of removal. The bill I introduced that we are considering today requires the deportation of aliens convicted of three or more drunk driving offenses.

The bill establishes a policy of three strikes and you are out for all noncitizens who are convicted of drunk driving--removal without exception. Representative Myrick's amendment provides for the mandatory detention and removal of illegal aliens who are convicted of drunk driving.

Second, the amendment mandates the detention of any deportable alien who is apprehended for drunk driving.

Third, the amendment makes a conviction of drunk driving a deportable offense for any alien, but still leaves open the availability of cancellation of removal by an immigration judge.

Fourth, if a local law enforcement officer apprehends an illegal alien for drunk driving, DHS shall reimburse the local agency for the costs of transporting the alien to Federal custody.

Finally, State motor vehicle administrators shall share with DHS and other States and the national criminal information center database information about aliens who have been convicted of drunk driving.

Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of the gentleman's amendment.

One of the primary mechanisms for the flagrant abuse of our immigration laws is the use of counterfeited immigration documents, the perpetration of identity fraud, and lying under oath in immigration applications.

This amendment significantly strengthens criminal penalties for all of these crimes and will therefore act as a strong deterrent to aliens considering immigration fraud.

The amendment also provides that if an illegal alien commits a violent crime or a drug trafficking offense, that the alien should receive a criminal sentence at least 5 years longer than he or she would have received otherwise.

If such an illegal alien had previously been ordered deported for having committed another crime, the alien will receive a sentence at least 15 years longer than he or she would have received otherwise.

These are extremely important provisions. It is bad enough for an alien to come illegally to the United States. But for such an alien to come here illegally and then perpetrate a serious, if not deadly, crime takes the offense to a whole other level. And for such an alien to return again and commit yet another offense must simply not be tolerated.

These aliens deserve to see their prison sentences dramatically increased. This is what the amendment does, and I urge my colleagues to support it.

Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of the amendment.

International traffickers and smugglers of human beings are the most barbaric of immigration violators. They force women and children into sexual slavery and aliens into indentured servitude. They place their human cargo in extremely dangerous circumstances and often abandon them and leave them to die in the rugged terrain along much of our southwestern border.

This amendment ensures that Federal authorities can use all the powerful tools of our money laundering statutes against the money laundering activities that these persons engage in as part of their criminal enterprises.

If we can make it more difficult for them to launder their profits, and we can more easily seize their profits, we will be much better able to combat this scourge. Just as money laundering by drug dealers and organized crime demands a powerful response by law enforcement, so does money laundering by human traffickers and smugglers.

I urge my colleagues to support this amendment.

Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of the Westmoreland amendment.

I support this amendment, which sets caps on employer sanctions penalties and provides an exemption from penalties for initial good- faith violations.

H.R. 4437 establishes very significant minimum levels for civil penalties, but sets no cap. The new minimums in H.R. 4437 for first-, second-, and third-time offenses are $5,000, $10,000, and $25,000, respectively, per alien.

This amendment would create what I believe are reasonable caps on these penalty levels, giving employers some level of certainty as to the consequences of hiring an illegal alien while still maintaining a strong deterrent effect through significant penalties.

The caps would be $7,500 for a first offense--per alien involved-- $15,000 for a second offense, and $40,000 for the third and higher offenses. These are certainly penalties that send a necessarily strong message to employers contemplating cutting corners.

This amendment also clarifies that an employer who makes a mistake in good faith in complying with the employment eligibility verification system would be spared civil penalties.

Finally this amendment provides a safe harbor for contractors whose subcontractors employ illegal aliens. This provision clarifies current law. Under section 274A(a)(4) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, an employer may be held liable for the actions of a subcontractor if the employer knows that the subcontractor is hiring illegal aliens.

In other words, employers who have no knowledge as to whether the subcontractor's employees are work-authorized cannot be held liable or penalized. This amendment makes that protection clearer, and should help to put employers at ease that they will not be held responsible for the misdeeds of subcontractors.

This amendment improves the bill and I urge my colleagues to support it.

Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to the amendment.

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Chairman, this amendment increases civil penalties against employers who do not comply with the Employment Eligibility Verification System to such fantastically high levels that they could easily bankrupt companies for first offenses. When companies are bankrupted, everybody who works at that company loses their job.

The amendment would raise penalties to not less than $50,000 for each violation for each alien. Penalties of this magnitude are not merely a deterrent; they would make almost every violation into a capital offense. And I thought the Democrats were against the death penalty.

Let me say first that the underlying legislation already dramatically increases the civil penalties for employers who knowingly hire illegal aliens or who fail to comply with the Employment Eligibility Verification System. I did this because current penalties are so low they are not a deterrent. This bill raises penalties for first-time offenses from $250 to $2,000 per alien for a first-time offense to not less than $5,000 per alien; penalties for second-time offenses are raised to no less than $10,000 per alien; and for employers with two or more previous offenses the penalty is not less than $250,000 per alien.

The penalty levels in this bill are quite sufficient to act as a deterrent for employers who might otherwise hire illegal aliens or ignore the verification requirements. In fact, they have been attacked by practically every employer association in Washington. The amendment goes just too far in order to make a political point; thus it is not a serious amendment.

The amendment designates the proceeds of the penalties to States and localities, which would be required to use the funds to provide services to illegal aliens. When penalties are funneled back in this matter, it sets up an incentive to use immigration as a fund-raiser for States and localities. That should not be the goal. We should not be using Federal funds to pay for services to illegal aliens. Money collected from civil penalties should be deposited into the Treasury.

Mr. Chairman, I urge my colleagues to oppose this amendment.

Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Chairman, this really is an overkill amendment. I think that the increases that are contained in the underlying bill will be sufficient to act as a deterrent. I think we all know as far as the border security situation is concerned, we have to put more efforts on the border to prevent illegal aliens from coming across. We also have to turn off the magnet of employment of illegal aliens in the United States. The employer verification system turns off the magnet. The increase in the fines for not using the employer verification system or hiring illegal aliens are sufficient to act as a deterrent.

I can tell you that our courts are going to be tied up horrendously because everybody who gets a citation for violating the law under Mr. Gonzalez's amendment is going to ask for a trial by jury, and I doubt we will ever be able to get very much of the money that he thinks we are going to collect.

I think what is in the underlying bill is able to do the trick. I would like to challenge those who are making the argument that we have got to get tough on the border and we have got to get tough with employers to turn off the magnet. When the time comes to vote for passage of the bill, vote ``aye.''

Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding me time.

Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of this amendment, which requires the Department of Homeland Security to report to Congress on the implementation of the employment eligibility verification system which this bill expands economy-wide.

One of the key components of this bill is a mandatory, national employment eligibility verification system. By checking the work authorization status of each person working in the U.S., we will finally be able to flush out the those working illegal.

We are expanding the Basic Pilot Program, which has worked extremely successfully as a voluntary program for 10 years.

Employers who use the Basic Pilot to conduct employment eligibility checks clearly like the system and that it is easy to use. A 2001 report found that ``an overwhelming majority of employers participating found the basic pilot program to be an effective and reliable tool for employment verification''--96 percent of employers found it to be an effective tool for employment verification; and 94 percent of employers believed it to be more reliable than the IRCA-required document check.

The system is available to employers both over the internet, and through a toll-free telephone number. Employers may use whichever option is more convenient.

As this system is expanded to a much larger scale, I am committed to working with the Department of Homeland Security and the business community to ensure that it works well and meets the needs of America's employers. I believe it is important that the verification process is user-friendly for all businesses--large and small.

This amendment would require DHS to report to Congress after the first and second years of implementation, and specifically address the concerns of businesses. These reports will assist Congress in monitoring the progress of the program.

I urge my colleagues to support this amendment.

Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding me time.

My, how times have changed. I was here in 1993 and I was the principal Republican author of a bill called the Brady Bill, which in part required the establishment of an automated system to check out whether somebody who was trying to purchase a firearm was eligible under the law to purchase and possess that firearm.

That had an automated system to verify the eligibility of the prospective firearm purchaser against the database that was maintained by the Department of justice. Lo and behold, the people that were pushing the Brady bill, and there were many more on that side of the aisle than the side I serve on, said this system is going to be a foolproof system in order to make sure that convicted felons or adjudicated mental incompetents will never get a firearm in their hands by purchasing it from a licensed firearm dealer. So if it was good enough then to check out people who might not be eligible to possess a firearm because of a felony conviction or a mental incompetency adjudication, then the same type of system ought to be good enough to check out whether somebody who is asking for a job is legally entitled to work in this country.

There is a 2-year delay in implementing the verification system in this bill. That is a little bit more than we heard on the Brady bill. But I think that telling the Department of Homeland Security that they got have to get this thing up and running in 2 years to be able to verify the new hires and then, 4 years later, the existing hires is plenty of time to be able to check out, in a manner that does not create a national identification card, whether somebody is eligible to get a job.

This is a good amendment. It requires progress reports on how the Department of Homeland Security is doing. What is wrong with that? We ought to pass the amendment.

Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to the amendment. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Chairman, I reluctantly oppose this amendment for a couple of reasons. I do not think it is workable, and it will cause huge problems on the northern border that will result in a lot of jobs being lost both in the United States and Canada.

First of all, we have got about 20,000 detention beds that ICE has got under

its control; and about 80 percent of those detention beds are currently filled by criminal aliens, and they are subject to mandatory detention. If there are more people that are put into the detention system without more beds being created by ICE, the courts will not allow for overcrowding of detention facilities. And all of a sudden, there are going to be criminal aliens that are going to be either released on the street or not being put in detention simply because there are not the slots that are available. And that is going to result in the misallocation of resources.

Now, I certainly am all for internal enforcement, but given the fact that there are a half million aliens that illegally enter the United States every year, the requirements here do not match up with the facilities and the infrastructure available. And the deadlines that the gentleman has in his amendment are going to be simply unworkable, and it is going to end up resulting in the agency shifting its resources from what it is doing now, which is concentrating on the criminal aliens and the drug smugglers and the human trafficking smugglers, to other people.

Now, I would also like to talk a little bit about the northern border. What this amendment does is that it has a requirement that there be a mandatory biometric universal processing through the automatic entry-exit control system, which is the US-VISIT program with the fingerprint scans for aliens. We do not have the facilities on the northern border to do that at the present time.

The amendment says, not later than January 1 of 2008 that this infrastructure will be in place. But what this will require is that everybody who does not prove they are a United States citizen or a permanent resident of the United States get out of their car and have a fingerprint scan and wait for the data to come up on the screen of the immigration inspector on the northern border.

Now, when 9/11 occurred and there were hours and hours of waiting to get across the border between the United States and Canada, there were a lot of businesses, and the auto business simply did not get the goods that they needed to be able to conduct their business on the dock in time for the first shift to be able to use that raw material or to use their parts. And that kind of an obstruction along the northern border is going to mean huge unemployment in those border-sensitive communities where manufacturing, particularly, is intensely reliant on the products arriving on the dock in time.

It is not going to be just in our country, but it is going to be in Canada as well. The amendment is a good intention, but it is going to cause all kinds of enforcement problems, as I have described; but it is going to cause a lot of innocent people to lose their jobs along the northern border and should be opposed.

Mr. Chairman, I yield 30 seconds to the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Jackson-Lee).

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself the balance of the time.

Mr. Chairman, I described that this amendment is unworkable. We will have a reallocation of resources. I would not want this bill to cost thousands of people in the northern border communities, legitimate, honest, hardworking American citizens as well as their counterparts on the Canadian side of the border to lose their jobs simply because goods cannot get across the border.

I appreciate the thought behind the gentleman's amendment, but it really is not a workable one, and it should be rejected as a result of that.

Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of the amendment. Let me say the significant point the gentleman from Kansas has made is that last year the Congress prohibited the Department of Homeland Security from using appropriated funds to change the oath. Because it is an appropriation bill, the Congress would have to renew that prohibition year after year after year. This will save us some work in the future by making the change permanent law. I support the amendment.

In 2003, the Department of Homeland Security proposed changes to the oath which every naturalized citizen must take which would have significantly weakened the oath and demeaned its historical significance. Due to strong public opposition, those changes were never implemented. However, since the oath is not set forth in federal statute, but only in regulation, the agency can modify its language at any time in the future in a similarly inappropriate way.

The Oath is the fundamental statement of allegiance to the United States and our Constitution, and this allegiance is what unites Americans of all backgrounds and provides for our commonality.

We are not a nation based upon race, creed, or religion--we are a nation based upon our loyalty and allegiance to our country and her principles. As the gateway into U.S. citizenship, the Oath should be protected by Congress.

The Oath of Allegiance has historic roots in the language of the founders. We should protect this historical statement of national unity and support the Ryun amendment. We have already set the precedent in an appropriations bill of requiring that no appropriated funds could be used to amend the Oath of Renunciation and Allegiance as it currently is memorialized in federal regulations.

I urge my colleagues to support this amendment.

Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of the amendment.

The amendment acknowledges that immigration fraud has become endemic and, even more seriously, that internal corruption at U. S. Citizenship and Immigration Services threatens the national security and erodes the integrity of our immigration system.

The extent and seriousness of the problem was brought to light in a closed bipartisan session of the Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security and Claims of the Judiciary Committee earlier this year. Although the serious allegations and investigations discussed there cannot be discussed in the open, I urge my colleagues in the strongest terms to pass this important amendment.

The ease with which unscrupulous immigration officials can be tempted to issue visas or benefits in return for money, goods, or favors was brought to light a month ago with the issuance of a Government Accountability Office report on consular malfeasance. In that report, it was revealed that the Diplomatic Security Service had investigated 28 cases of visa selling by State Department employees in the last few years. Those were only the cases that were discovered in the some 200 consular sections located abroad. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services conducts its application processing in the United States, and yet thousands of allegations of misconduct, some involving criminal acts and foreign influence, have yet to be investigated because of lack of focus, resources, and confusion of sub-agency jurisdiction.

This amendment would ensure that an internal law enforcement division within U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services would receive, process, and investigate allegations of misconduct and internal corruption in a timely manner. To fund this office, a $10 fee will be charged to all visa applicants.

The amendment would also provide that the Director of the division would have the authority to subpoena documents, reports, and data, and to appoint such officers as necessary to carry out the internal affairs functions.

I urge my colleagues to support this very important amendment.

Mr. Chairman, I claim the time in opposition to the motion to recommit.

Mr. Speaker, securing our Nation's borders is an imperative, and this bill does it. Turning off the magnet that brings people into the United States to work illegally is an imperative. This bill does it.

This 149-page motion to recommit, which we received a couple of minutes before the author made his motion, we have been able to look at enough of this 150 pages to see that it does not provide one bit of enhancement to the employment verification system. That is the big hole in this bill. So there is no way that employers will be able. There are no enhancements to employer verification.

Mr. Speaker, throughout this debate, both yesterday and today, my friends on the minority side have been doing their best to try to make this bill unworkable, one of which was their almost unanimous support for keeping the penalties for illegal presence in the United States as a felony. Let me tell you that even though my amendment to reduce those penalties was voted down largely by people on the other

side of the aisle, when this bill gets to conference, those penalties will be made workable. You can count on that.

Keep immigration reform on track. To secure our borders and to have a secure employer verification system, pass this bill. Vote against the motion to recommit.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from New York.

Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, I strongly urge defeat of the motion to recommit and passage of the bill.

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Chairman, I cite to the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Shadegg) that I do not think there would be a divide on your legislation, because all of us believe that criminals should have a fast track to a point where they are not doing others any harm.

But I do have problems with this legislation. It poses a number of problems. It creates three new mandatory-minimum criminal penalties and one new death penalty. But I think the biggest concern that I have is the fact that they are in the country and the fact that they have been able to get in the country because we failed as a Federal Government to do the job that we are supposed to do.

We have already received Ds and Fs from the 9/11 Commission's report on the work that we should be doing. For your information, we already have a criminal offense for immigrants who enter the country illegally. But there is no enforcement, because there are no resources.

So to try to enhance it from the back door, with new mandatory minimums, with death penalties, with 5-year mandatory minimums, with 15-year mandatory minimums, just simply says, we failed. We are not going to stand here and advocate for drug dealers and those who use fraudulent documents, and might I just say that I thank the gentleman from Wisconsin (Chairman Sensenbrenner) for joining me in supporting an amendment that was offered about fraudulent documents and creating a singular database.

But frankly, I wish that we could join together in comprehensive immigration reform so that the enforcement against those who enter illegally would start where it was supposed to be, which would be at the border.

Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Chairman, I respect the gentleman's argument, but I think that the American people would be somewhat surprised that a prosecutorial system, a Federal system, picks and chooses who they will prosecute. We have laws on the books to prosecute these individuals. We have laws on the books to prevent them from coming into the United States.

It is all a question of resources. How do we use our resources? In this bill, we do not have sufficient dollars for prosecutors, for court systems, for detention systems and for jails. And are the American people asking for us to bear the burden of undocumented criminals that will be here for 25 years and how many long years and we pay the bill for them? I think not.

We should be focusing today on comprehensive immigration reform. We should be focusing on putting resources at the border, the northern and southern border, so that, in fact, as we do so, we prevent these people from coming into the United States. I believe that the best defense is offense.

And I believe that homeland security starts at the border. Here we are talking about closing the barn door after the fact. And so, yes, I agree with the gentleman. We all should be against those who perpetrate crimes of violence, those who are drug traffickers and, unfortunately, happen to be illegal aliens.

But ask the Federal Government whose responsibility it is, the Justice Department, the Homeland Security Department, why they have been ineffective in enforcing our laws at the border and internally in terms of individuals who have perpetrated crimes?

These mandatory minimums are burdensome. They are expensive to us, and we do not have the system in place to

prosecute. But I would admonish our prosecutorial system that it is certainly unfortunate to tell Americans, as the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Shadegg) has said, that we pick and choose how we prosecute, and so we let people go when we should be prosecuting.

Maybe we might save lives if we would prosecute. Mandatory minimums are extremely expensive. And just as an example, as I close, the cost of fighting crime in the United States for police, prisons and courts rose to a record $167 billion in 2001, $20 billion more than was spent on the criminal justice system in 1999.

My only point is that this will go up and up and up, and now this gentleman is adding more cost. I hope my colleagues will recognize that we are interested in crime fighting as well, but we need to put the blame where it needs to be put. We have failed in the immigration process and enforcement, and that is where we need to put more resources.

Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

The Acting Chairman. The question is on the amendment offered by the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Shadegg).

Mr. Chairman, I rise to claim the time in opposition, though I will not oppose this amendment.

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I rise in support of this amendment, which would add human trafficking, human smuggling to the list of predicate acts under the Federal money laundering statute.

Let me just say that what Mr. Shadegg has just articulated is a plague on our society across America. I have worked extensively on human trafficking issues and see them often repeated in our own jurisdictions in Texas. It is actually 20th-century human bondage. And the tragedy is that many of these individuals are women, young women, who are forced to come to the United States and are abused and utilized not only in areas of prostitution but also areas of hard work where they are not able to receive adequate compensation.

According to the State Department, the State Department estimates between 15,000 and 20,000 people are trafficked into the United States every year. Worldwide there are approximately 600,000 to 800,000 people trafficked across international borders every year. Victims of human trafficking are often forced into prostitution, hard labor, child soldiering, and

other forms of involuntary servitude. In effect, they become slaves.

It is shameful to say that this occurs in the United States. It is shameful to say that it is still going on in the 21st century. But I believe if we cut off the money supply of human traffickers, charging them with money laundering, it is a reasonable step to take in addressing this problem.

This is not the same offense, but we have seen the devastation of alien smuggling when we lost large numbers of those undocumented individuals who came here for an economic reason who lost their lives at the hands of unscrupulous smugglers. This is similar, where we bring people in under false pretenses and we hold them as human slaves.

So I think this amendment has the purpose of helping to diminish that very vicious set of circumstances.

Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, it seems we are both asking for the support of this amendment.

Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. Berman), distinguished member of the Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Immigration.

Mr. Chairman, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the distinguished gentlewoman from California (Ms. Zoe Lofgren), distinguished member of the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Immigration.

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, let me just say to Mr. Westmoreland, frankly, I wish that we could have worked together on the underlying problems of this legislation, which is comprehensive immigration reform. But the problem here is there were no caps in the underlying bill. We had no hearings. We do not know if these are the best numbers. They could be stronger.

I wish you would join me on Protect American Jobs, using some of these resources to provide training for American workers, to be able to outreach to American workers. This is a cap with no hearings, no standards, not knowing whether this is punitive enough. And certainly the inequity between big companies and small companies makes this amendment somewhat doubtful.

Mr. Chairman, I ask my colleagues to vote ``no'' on the amendment.

Mr. Chairman, my simple point is to suggest to the distinguished author of the amendment that even aliens have a form of due process. What he simply is trying to do is to get the young man who is the painter who has a wife and family at home and then he is immediately arrested with no rights of due process. In addition, the distinguished chairman of the Judiciary Committee has made a very good point: we do not have an exit program right now in the US-VISIT program. We do not have the resources; we do not have the space for the lanes. I would simply say we are unable to do such.

Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the distinguished gentlewoman from California (Ms. Zoe Lofgren).

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I agree with my distinguished colleague, it is a solemn time; it is a time of commitment. Many of us who have participated in these oaths of allegiance taken by throngs of new citizens in our jurisdictions have seen the emotion, the tears, the commitment, the celebration, the family commitment and the commitment to this Nation.

There has been no evidence that my good friend can show to suggest that the allegiance as it is now written and stated is not sacred. There is no evidence in purpose for it to be codified in law because it has fragility to it, if you will.

I raise the point with my colleagues, when we have friendly nations like Israel, are we to suggest that their commitment to the United States is any less, that they would refuse to fight alongside any Americans to defend our honor? Is there a reason to deny them the commitment to a homeland that may have a particular uniqueness to them, their family heritage, but yet they are here in the United States and they would not refuse to fight for our honor and dignity?

This amendment seems to be without purpose, and certainly for those countries where the person who is renouncing their citizenship is then given to be allowed to have their name notified at that embassy, what happens to those members or their families left behind?

I think that the gentleman may have good intentions, but, frankly, I do not

think that we have found any, if you will, problem with the existence in the process of the oath of renunciation and allegiance; and I would just offer to say that when you go and see the new citizens not only pledge to the flag of the United States but pledge allegiance, you know that they are committed to the virtues and values of this country.

Mr. Chairman, I reserve my time.

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I just want to remind my colleagues that we are a Nation of immigrants and a Nation of laws. I think it is important when we pass legislation that we have a basis, a purpose. I do not think the gentleman can document that anyone who has taken this oath and because they have a dual citizenship that they have been any less a citizen. John F. Kennedy said everywhere immigrants have enriched and strengthened the fabric of American life.

I think this oath stands on its own merits, and, frankly, I believe that we jeopardize our friends, those who have come to this country with good intentions, when we cause them to have to be reported to their embassy and jeopardize their families' lives. I would hope we would be sensitive to that, and I would ask my colleagues to consider that as they consider this amendment and vote ``no.''

Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Chairman, I appreciate the gentleman's intent on trying to fix a problem that clearly needs to be fixed. We do not dispute the idea that individuals applying for and receiving an immigration benefit should be properly vetted and screened and that any and all allegations of fraud should be thoroughly investigated, as I indicated earlier when I thanked Mr. Sensenbrenner for joining me in an amendment that would create a single database for fraudulent documents and have reports made back to Congress on the trends.

I believe that individuals should be vetted and screened and that any and all allegations of fraud should be thoroughly investigated, but the problem is various agencies involved have been incredibly negligent in ensuring that the checks and investigations are performed in a timely fashion. Moreover, their respective databases are ripe with erroneous information, and for the most part, they are still inoperable.

That speaks to the increasing need of resources to improve our technology and to encourage and push the Federal Government to do its job. This amendment, however, seeks to address the problem from the wrong angle. Penalizing aliens by keeping them in limbo is no solution to the problem. Indeed, our national security is further compromised by the government's failure to timely vet these individuals.

I would like to work with the gentleman on increasing the resources and giving a protracted time frame for these issues to be worked out. Background checks are important, and the attendant investigations are important to enable our government to identify and pursue the tiny handful of immigrants and visitors who wish to do us harm. We want to keep those who want to do us harm out; and those who are in, we want to catch them and prosecute them and penalize them. We want to separate them from the overwhelming majority who wish only to contribute to this country, who come here for economic reasons and to support themselves and their families.

So I would just suggest to the gentleman, if he wants to reform the process, the solution is to require that the multiple agencies involved put in place a workable system for conducting background checks and fraud investigations in a manner that is timely, accurate and secure and to provide them with the necessary resources to do so.

The gentleman's amendment has good intentions, and I support generally the amendment, but it has a number of problems, and so I would ask the gentleman to reconsider it.

Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I hope that we will be able to join with the gentleman on his purpose to vet and to ensure that those who are receiving immigration benefits are vetted and screened properly and that any allegations of fraud be investigated. I do not think anyone has come to this floor to divide on the question of ensuring that the homeland is protected. That means that we are screening more carefully the visas as individuals are requesting to come into the country.

We have implemented a number of new efforts to ensure that we are in fact keeping terrorists away from the United States. But, again, the concerns that I have are clearly that the resources are not there in order to do the vetting that the gentleman is speaking of. And the question is whether or not benefits will be held up while we are attempting to vet without the necessary resources.

I would hope as this amendment makes its way through the Congress that we will find a way to also push the Department of Homeland Security, push the Federal Government to comply with the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission and put in place the procedures and the dollars that it takes to make the system work. As I indicated to you, background checks and the attendant investigations are important. It is important for the government to identify and pursue the tiny handful of individuals who really come to do us harm. But we have to separate the overwhelming majority who wish only to contribute to this country.

We want reform. We have to reform the process. But the solution is to require the multiple agencies involved to put in place a workable system. That is my concern with the gentleman's amendment. But I would simply hope that, as we look for solutions, we can work together for a workable solution and a working system to make his plan work.

Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the co-author of the amendment, the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. McIntyre).

Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Spratt).

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I will support this amendment, and I was very sad to hear about the tragic situation that the Members have spoken of where a family was so devastated.

I would just like to note that when you look at the current Immigration Nationality Act, that individual should have been deported anyhow.

I do not mind changing law, even if it is redundant. I have never fallen prey to the argument that a redundancy is necessarily wrong. But I think it points out some of the discussions we had yesterday. We are working on a law here, but the real issue is the failure of the Bush administration to enforce the current law.

If we had the institutional removal program operating the way it used to, this person who killed people while driving drunk would not have been in this country. That person would have been deported.

So as I say, I do not object to the amendment. I appreciate the clarification because I think that was an important clarification, but it does once again point out the real ineptitude of the Department.

I remember watching just stunned after Hurricane Katrina came and devastated Louisiana and saying how inept is FEMA. I hate to admit it, but many of the elements of the Department of Homeland Security are just as inept as what we saw at that time, and the immigration functions are prime among them.

I worry that there are some things in this measure that are completely wrong-headed and there are some things in the bill that make some sense. The things that make sense will not be accomplished because the administration is so poor, they are so inept, they are so pathetic that they actually cannot administer the law.

As I say, I commend the gentlewoman and my colleague for bringing this amendment. I will vote for it. But, again, this will not solve the problem, which is basically incompetence in the administration.

Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I think it is important to note that in the underlying bill, there are no caps at all. I would direct the attention of the Members to page 152, 153, and section 706 of the underlying bill. There are no caps.

I would just like to note once again that we have a failure of administration. Last year, employers were sanctioned for hiring illegal immigrants only three times. So even if we were to change the law, the ineptitude of the administration does not mean that anything will change.

I object to this amendment for another reason in addition to what my colleague, Mr. Berman, has indicated. In the underlying bill, there is at least an effort to make some fairness for little companies versus big companies in terms of making a reduction for small companies. But in this case, in this amendment, Wal-Mart would have the same penalty structure as Joe's Pizza. And it seems to me that Wal-Mart and megacompanies, I would just like to note, in the paper Wal-Mart appears to be one of the biggest offenders, going out and hiring large numbers of undocumented people and, by the way, not treating them very well. They would have their sanctions capped, and they would be treated just the same as Joe's Pizza. So I think of this as the Wal-Mart amendment. Let them go ahead and do their dirty deeds with impunity. They will not have to worry. And I will tell my colleagues for a company as big as Wal-Mart, capping the fines at this level is just the cost of doing business.

And I thank the gentlewoman for yielding me this time.

Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

I do.

Mr. Chairman, the amendment requires the Department of Homeland Security to report to Congress on the problems caused by the automated employment verification system. However, I want to point out that this amendment will not fix the problems with the Employment Eligibility Verification System, even though this underlying bill will require all employers and employees to use the system.

The GAO has already told us, at the request of Mr. Sensenbrenner as a matter of fact, that the basic pilot program is not ready for widespread use,

that the DHS system is badly flawed, that it is unable to detect identity fraud; and this report, after the fact, is not going to change that.

Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Chairman, I would just note that the GAO report identifies at tremendous length the problems with this system in the administration of the system. I would further draw the attention of all my colleagues to this report.

Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I am listening carefully. I am trying to work in a bipartisan manner on this, but the underlying problem here with this bill and this amendment as well is the poor administration of our laws by the Department of Homeland Security.

I mentioned earlier today the pathetic performance of DHS during the Katrina disaster. And one of the things just that is seared in my memory is the, ``good job, Brownie,'' comment. And I think we have the same problem in the Department of Homeland Security and ICE.

The chairman, I am sure, will recall that when we worked on reorganization, he insisted, I did not agree at the time but I now understand why he did, that any applicant for the head job have a minimum of 10 years experience in managing a large and complex organization.

What ended up in the law was a 5-year minimum requirement in managing a large organization. Well, the President's favorite Democratic senator, Senator Lieberman, in opposing the new ICE director, Julie Myers, noted that, with over 20,000 employees, ICE is not only a big agency, it is a vital one. And Ms. Myers has virtually no immigration experience and also does not meet the minimum requirements.

We now have a crony in charge of the immigration service. She may be a lovely person, I do not know, but she worked for a Federal prosecutor for 2 years. She worked for Ken Starr when he was special assistant. Her husband is the chief of staff to Mr. Chertoff. And her dad is a general, General Myers, who we all know of and think is a very good guy, but these are not the qualifications asked for in the statute nor expected by America.

We need to move beyond cronyism into competence. And the fact that we have only had three enforcement actions in unlawful employment; that over 100,000 people have been cited and released and then failed to appear, and the department just continued to do that over and over again in the face of that failure-to-appear rate; the fact that we have not actually followed through on the institutional removal program which requires the immigration function to go out to county jails and to State prisons and to take individuals who have been convicted of crimes and deport them, that has not happened either. Those individuals instead in many cases were simply released because the Federal Government dropped the ball. The Bush administration has dropped the ball at the border.

We have not put the staff forward. We have no technology to implement not only the bills and this amendment but the underlying law. And why? It is competence.

I think it is a sad thing that this bill has been proposed. There are some good things in it. There are a lot of bad things in it. But it is really just to cover the fact that there has been a massive failure of administering current law by the Bush administration. If current law were adequately administered, we would not be here today. Perhaps the amendment is good. Maybe the gentleman has convinced me to support it. But it will not solve the problem.

Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, just two points. I go to the swearing in of the new citizens all the time, and I will say that when the oath, the part that comes ``renounce absolutely any abjure absolutely foreign prince potentate,'' it is pretty clear that they do not know what a potentate is, and I will bet you a lot of Members of this body do not know, either. So to freeze this language, I think, is a mistake.

Number two, there is another issue. To report back to governments when they get citizenship is going to be a risky venture for some. If we have to tell the Cuban Government that one of their former citizens has become one of our citizens, we put their relatives at risk to the Castro regime.

I would like to also note that there are some countries that permit dual citizenship. Among them, Israel. I really do not want to be part of an effort to tell Americans who also have Israeli citizenship that they have to renounce that. I thank the gentlewoman for yielding.

Mr. Speaker, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I might consume.

(Mr. SHADEGG asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

This amendment is simple and straightforward. It does two things. First, it increases the penalty for document fraud, and, second, it imposes a mandatory minimum sentence on any illegal alien convicted of either a crime of violence or a drug trafficking offense.

Mr. Chairman, document fraud is a key component of the activities of human smugglers and human traffickers. These smugglers, many of them present in trafficking through my State of Arizona, create false Social Security cards, false green cards, visas and a variety of other fraudulent documents as an essential part of their smuggling activities.

Yet, under current law, the penalty for these crimes is insufficient to deter this type of activity. The amendment increases the penalties for document fraud, first, committed to facilitate a crime of international terrorism by imposing a minimum sentence of 25 years. It also increases the penalty for document fraud committed to facilitate drug trafficking, and it increases the penalty for document fraud; that is, the creating of these type of documents fraudulently in connection with other activities, including human smuggling.

It is widely reported that many Mexican organized crime syndicates have shifted much of their activity from drug smuggling to human smuggling and human trafficking, specifically because the penalties for human smuggling and human trafficking and for the related offense to which this amendment is directed, document fraud, are much lower, yet they can achieve the same profit.

The penalties for committing these offenses, for creating these false crimes, must be significant, and they must be sufficiently high to deter this type of activity.

Second, the amendment imposes minimum-mandatory sentences of 5 years on any illegal alien convicted of either a crime of violence here in the United States or drug trafficking.

Under current law, there is no additional penalty for someone who enters the United States illegally and then commits either a crime of violence or a drug trafficking offense. They simply come under the same penalty as we have in current law.

What this amendment does is add a minimum mandatory sentence to be imposed on top of the sentence for the crime. It is unacceptable for somebody to come to our country illegally and then prey on an American citizen and not receive a severe penalty. We must send a very clear message that if you enter our country illegally and then you commit one of these offenses, you will be dealt with harshly and you will pay a heavy price for your conduct.

I would like to thank Chairman Sensenbrenner and Chairman King for their work on this legislation. I urge my colleagues to support it.

I yield to the gentleman from Wisconsin.

(Mr. SENSENBRENNER asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Chairman, I appreciate the gentlewoman's argument, but I believe it misses the mark. Quite frankly, the current law has resulted in the circumstance where the penalty imposed for document fraud on average in this country is 8 months.

An American prosecutor is not going to go to trial and pursue a criminal offense where someone fraudulently creates a document and then gets, on average, 8 months. Indeed, it probably takes longer than 8 months to get to trial on a crime of this nature.

If the penalty is insufficient, we simply encourage this conduct. I know the gentlewoman makes a valid point about our failure to enforce our borders. Certainly that is our responsibility. But the point of this amendment is to say two things: Number one, the penalties connected with those who are really exploiting people, it is important to understand that human smuggling is the conduct of bringing across people who largely want to come across, but they are still being exploited; and human trafficking, the second offense, realize are people who are brought across, misrepresented and then, once they are here, become essentially indentured slaves. That is, they must work and work perhaps in a job they do not want at a sub level of pay in conditions that are unacceptable to them to pay off a huge debt for having brought them into the country.

Integral to those offenses, as a key part of those offenses, is creating these fraudulent documents, a false Social Security card, a false green card, all types of identity that they use in this country to get the job. And the smugglers do the exploiting. The smugglers create those documents. It is unacceptable to have these kinds of fraudulent schemes perpetrated on essentially victims from other countries and have the penalty for those that are victimizing them be insufficient.

In addition, I do not believe the gentlewoman means to oppose this, but it seems to me, if you come to this country and you victimize people in this country and you commit crimes here, we want to send a message that if you want to commit crimes, commit it back home; do not come here and commit it. And if you do come here and commit it, we are going to send you a very clear message. Because if someone comes here to victimize an American, they ought to get an additional penalty. So I urge the passage of the amendment.

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

(Mr. SHADEGG asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. Chairman, let me begin by thanking again Chairman Sensenbrenner for his hard work on this legislation. I think it is important to this country. I appreciate the openness of the debate. I also want to thank the gentleman from New York (Mr. King), the chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, for his work.

This amendment adds two laws, human smuggling and human trafficking, to the list of specified unlawful activity under the Federal money laundering statute.

Mr. Chairman, under today's law, human smuggling and human trafficking rings are highly sophisticated and organized crime operations. According to testimony here in the United States Congress before the subcommittee of my colleague, the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Souder), these organizations are a complete one-stop operation.

They recruit customers from deep inside countries outside of the United States. They arrange transportation to the United States border. They provide housing at the border. They then conduct the illegal aliens across the country where prearranged vehicles meet them and transport them to a nearby large city, often a city such as Tucson in my State of Arizona or Phoenix or Los Angeles.

They also provide transportation in these cities and housing, and then they provide travel from those cities to the interior of this country, perhaps to Chicago or Philadelphia or New York. Once the illegal arrives at one of those cities, they are met by yet another agent of this sophisticated organization who provides transportation to a safe house where they are met. They are again provided housing, and they are provided the kind of documents that we just talked about, a fraudulent Social Security card, a fraudulent green card or some other documentation which will enable them to get a job.

Often they advertise, what city do you want to go to? What kind of job do you want to find? Then these sophisticated operations find them employment in the area they are interested in. An integral part of these sophisticated human smuggling operations and the human trafficking operations is money laundering. They money launder the proceeds of these crimes. Yet unfortunately, at the present time, neither human trafficking nor human smuggling, which victimize people outside of this country and bring them here and enslave them in some instances, neither of those crimes are predicates for our Federal money laundering statute.

That is to say one can engage in that crime, but that key statute of money laundering cannot be used to get after those people. Mr. Chairman, this simply adds those two statutes so that we say clearly when we want to get after these smugglers who are smuggling or trafficking human beings into this country, we can use our sophisticated statutes, including our money laundering statute, to get at these individuals.

Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for his support, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I simply want to thank the gentlewoman for her kind remarks and support. I appreciate that very much.

Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.