Securing America's Borders Act

Mr. President, there is an order of speaking locked in. I believe I am entitled to speak in about 5 minutes. Is it appropriate for me to begin at this point?

I thank the Chair.

I rise to address the starting point of any discussion of comprehensive immigration reform, which is security at the border, and then move on to the other significant security aspects of this issue. I believe we need comprehensive immigration reform, which essentially boils down to four things: security at the border; security in the interior of the country, including at the workplace; a temporary worker program to accommodate our employment needs; and a way to deal with the people who are here illegally today. All of those issues need to be addressed. Ideally they should be addressed at the same time, but almost everyone agrees that the starting point is security at the border. What I wish to do today is to describe some of the reasons why it is so important for us to focus on that and then to discuss the underlying legislation which significantly deals with that problem.

As a result of including provisions of the majority leader's bill and provisions of the Cornyn-Kyl legislation in the Judiciary Committee's base bill with respect to border security, we have a good start on getting a handle on border security. It is only a start, and it takes years to build out the fencing, to build up the Border Patrol, to add the new aircraft, the UAVs, to install the sensors and cameras, to build the detention space and all the other things that have to be done in a mosaic to gain control of the border. This bill offers a good next step in that regard.

I thank the chairman of the Budget Committee, Judd Gregg, who as chairman of the subcommittee on Appropriations has ensured over the last several months that there is additional funding available for more Border Patrol agents, more infrastructure at the border and the like. We have actually already started on this problem, but this legislation takes the next step in a significant way.

There are a lot of things going on on the border right now that I don't think Americans who are not from a border State would appreciate. I wish to start by talking about those.

While it is true that part of the issue before us is the millions of people who have crossed our borders illegally to come here to work, that is only part of the story. Today the border is a violent, crime- prone environmental disaster with people in jeopardy and even our military suffering as a result of illegal immigration. Let me explain.

Because we have added more Border Patrol, we are beginning to contest territory that the smugglers used to call their own. They are fighting back. The U.S. Attorney from Arizona testified before my Terrorism and Homeland Security Subcommittee about a month ago that assaults at the border were up 108 percent over last year. Those assaults include not just rock throwing, which bashes people's heads in, but also assaults with weapons, including automatic weapons. I will get later the number of people who have been killed as a result of these assaults. I don't have that with me. But we have had people die in the line of duty trying to protect our borders from this increased violence.

Now criminals are coming into our country by horrendous numbers. Last year something like 150,000 criminals entered the country. These are not petty criminals. These are murderers and rapists and child molesters and drug dealers of the worst kind. Now about 10 percent--in fact, somewhere even between 10 and 15 percent--of the people apprehended at the border have significant criminal records.

Think about this for a moment: If the usual rule of thumb is that at least three people are able to cross the border and do so successfully for every one who is apprehended, think of the number of violent, vile criminals who are entering our country because we have failed to secure the border. This is a serious problem for the United States. It is estimated now that in some places over half of the population of prisons is illegal immigrants.

In addition to the crime that is occurring at the border and the criminals coming across the border, it is also true that the people who are illegally coming to the United States for a better life are prey to the coyotes and other criminal elements. They are raped, robbed, beaten, held hostage for ransom. They represent value that can be collected from their relatives back home. They are mistreated in the most horrible way. Many die because of the way they are being transported or not transported. We are all aware of the increasing number of deaths, most of which occur in my State and which were a record number last year.

There is also huge environmental degradation. To look at the Arizona desert from the air is to want to cry. Thousands of paths where thousands--indeed, millions--of illegal immigrants have trod crisscross the border. It was pristine, but it takes centuries for this very fragile ecosystem to revive after it has been trampled. Vehicles coming across by the hundreds, sometimes left behind because they get stuck in the sand or ran out of gas, but the trails can be seen all over. Tons and tons of trash left behind, fires started, vegetation trampled. It is an ecological disaster.

I mentioned the military. Because the Barry Goldwater Gunnery Range is located on the border with Mexico and is one of the largest areas for our pilots to train regardless of the service, that area is of great value to the United States for our defense preparedness. Two years ago--I don't have the numbers from last year--there were something like 400 to 500 missions that had to be aborted because pilots had their planes gassed up, ready to go, with the bombs ready, or maybe had even taken off, but when they got close to the range, the radio call came back that there are illegal immigrants in the area. Turn back. Don't drop your bombs. This is an area where strafing and bombing occurs on a regular basis. The Marine Corps is responsible for the western half of this gunnery range. They go out on a weekly basis and try to clear the area of illegal immigrants. But frequently, after they have cleared the area and radioed that it is OK for the mission to come in, they find there is somebody there and they have to abort. There were hundreds of flying hours that were lost 2 years ago and I am sure last year as a result of this phenomenon. Military training is being sacrificed.

The same thing is occurring on the proving ground, the Yuma proving ground, which is a pathway for illegal immigration. The point is, there are a lot of reasons to control our border beyond dealing with the problem of illegal immigrants. That is a huge problem. With at least half of the illegal immigrants coming through my State on an annual basis, it represents particularly a huge problem for my State. But I haven't mentioned one of the key elements, and that has to do with securing our borders as a sovereign country, particularly in a time where there is a potential terrorist threat. It is not hard to transport contraband material across our border. The drug war is going on full blast on our borders. Methamphetamine is not made or manufactured so much in at least our State, and I understand other States now, because it is easier to bring it across the border where it is manufactured by the ton in Mexico and then brought over in backpacks, one backpack of value anywhere from a quarter to a half million dollars.

These kinds of things are coming across the border every day. If they can come across, then so can a backpack full of material for a radiological weapon, for example, or a biological weapon, and so can a terrorist. We now have 165,000 other-than-Mexican illegal immigrants apprehended. Remember the rule of thumb that for every one you apprehend, perhaps at least three more are not apprehended. These are people from countries other than Mexico. So when they are apprehended, they can't be returned to Mexico as we do with Mexican citizens. They have to be processed and put on an airplane back to their country of origin. I was told by the Director of Homeland Security that there are over 39,000 Chinese citizens in the United States, having come here illegally, who need to be returned but that only a few hundred are being returned every year. In other words, the problem is getting bigger and bigger every year.

There are not enough detention spaces for all of these people. As a result, they are released on their own recognizance. Do they show up when they are asked to? No, of course not. These other-than-Mexican illegal immigrants are caught and released, allowed to meld into our society. A large number of them are criminals. Many of them come from so-called countries of interest, meaning countries from which terrorists come. Yet we can't hold them and return them because we don't have the detention space to hold them and their countries won't take them back quickly, if at all. Some countries won't even take them back.

The Department of Homeland Security has announced a plan to end catch and release, but that is only possible when we have the detention beds to put them in, pending their departure. There is money in this bill for that purpose, but not enough. The point is, it will take years.

I hope I am beginning to create some picture of the magnitude of this problem beyond just the problem of illegal immigrants wishing to come here for a better life. This issue is frequently portrayed as nothing but that. It is far more than that, far more complicated, far more dangerous, far more destructive. We have to get control of our borders. If we don't, we are not a sovereign nation, we don't have control over our own destiny, and there are threats to our existence far beyond whatever problems illegal immigrants who want to work here may create.

There is another aspect of enforcement that has received far too little attention. We talked about enforcement at the border but also enforcement in the interior. Illegal immigrants know if they get a few miles north of the border, they are home free. Border Patrol doesn't even operate 60 miles north of the border for the most part. As a result, there is no or very little enforcement in the interior of the country. There may be the occasional border checkpoint, but they are usually much closer to the border, the occasional Border Patrol officer in an airport to try to discourage illegal immigrants from transporting themselves by airline, which they have done for years, but very little enforcement.

There is essentially no enforcement of the law against hiring illegal immigrants, a law that was written several years ago which has essentially never been enforced. The reason is because, A, it is not enforceable and, B, we don't have the will to enforce it. Employers are told they are supposed to check documents. The documents are all easily forged. Everybody knows that. The employer has a good idea when he is hiring the individual that that individual is an illegal immigrant, probably can't speak English and clearly comes from another country. And yet the employer can't do anything about it because the driver's license or passport or Social Security card looks like the one you and I have. The counterfeiters are very good at this.

So everybody pretends the law can be enforced when they know it can't. The Government doesn't do anything about it, the employers don't do anything about it. America sees that and Americans say: What happens to a country that isn't enforcing its laws and apparently doesn't have the will to do so? And, importantly, why should we believe that you in the Senate can create a workable, comprehensive immigration program with temporary workers and a way to deal with the illegal immigrants who are here today? Why should we believe you will be able to do that and enforce it when you haven't enforced the ones that are on the books today?

We are all familiar with the 1986 amnesty, 3 million people, but then we were going to enforce the law so it would never occur again. In 1996, once again, we provided for enforcement at the workplace, as I described it. It didn't happen. It is kind of like Lucy and the football. After about three times, Charlie Brown ought to start getting the idea that when he goes up to kick the football, Lucy is going to pull it away from him. That is the way the American people look at us. They ask: When are you going to assure us this will be done?

I dare say neither the administration, the previous administration or the current one, or the Congress has given the American people much to peg confidence on.

The administrations have not asked for enough money. The Congress has added money to the situation but has still not added enough. Our law enforcement doesn't seem to be willing to go after the employers who are clearly violating the law. Indeed, it would be hard because, in a sense, they are being precluded from asking questions about the documents that are given to them.

This all points the way toward the second and equally critical part of the legislation we are going to have to deal with. If we don't enforce the law in the interior, this whole exercise is a fraud, it is a deceit, it will not work, and the American people will react very negatively, I predict.

Now, it is relatively simple to make this work if we have the willpower to do it. You have to have a verification system that is pegged to a valid database, electronically verified and audited. The Social Security system has numbers that are assigned to everybody, but it is full of bad numbers today. It needs to be cleaned up. I believe we will have an amendment that will provide for the cleaning up of the database, for its maintenance in a proper way, and for an employer verification system that depends upon a Social Security number being typed in electronically and sent back to the headquarters in Washington, or wherever it is, verifying whether the number is valid.

That is half of the situation. OK. The number you have just been given is a valid Social Security number, it doesn't appear to be being used by somebody else, it has been validly issued by somebody with the name of John Doe, and the person standing in front of you claims to be John Doe. How do you know it is John Doe? I can go to an employer and rattle off a number and put it into the system, and he says: That is a valid number; what is your name again? I happen to know the number because I saw the card or asked my neighbor his name, or whatever the situation. Well, you have to have a way of tying the person in front of you to the number. This will also have that kind of system. They are working right now on exactly what kind of number to attach to that to make that work. Eventually, the REAL ID Act, which is based upon good documents, will connect the individual standing before you to the number, and therefore you will be able to validate identity in that way.

This is somewhat costly. It will take some period of time to put into place. Once it is put into place, it can operate efficiently. Employers will be mandated to use it. But it will be easy to use. So we should not be asking employers to be the cops here. It is an impossible job for them. If the Government has determined in advance who is legally employable and who is not, then the employer doesn't have to worry about it. All he or she has to worry about is when the number electronically comes back and it says ``valid,'' you are home free. If it says ``invalid number,'' don't hire the person or you will be in big trouble.

This legislation will provide a way to clear up any problems, so if for some reason the number doesn't compute, and you say: That is really me and that is my number, you can straighten that out. The bottom line is that if we don't have a valid verification of employment, whether the individual is verified as a citizen, a temporary worker, a green card holder, or whatever the status is, if you are validly able to get employed, great. If you are not, then you won't be employed. Unless we have that kind of system, this entire thing breaks down.

In the legislation Senator Cornyn and I developed, this is a critical component, and it answers one of the questions that is frequently asked: How do you know people will eventually come out of the shadows and participate in a temporary worker program--or seek a green card, in any event--that they will eventually leave the United States in an illegal status and will come back in a legal status? The answer is: With a good validation of employment, verification of employment eligibility system, nobody is going to be able to get a job illegally.

So within a couple of years, it is not going to be possible to be in the United States, if you want to work, and be illegal. You are going to have to get legal and come in on a temporary worker status, if that is what you want to do. That is part of the answer as to what will cause people to comply with the law. They are not going to be able to get a job if they don't.

It is theoretically possible that an individual could go live with somebody else and remain in the shadows; that possibility could exist. Although, as the documents become better, it is going to become harder to do anything, in terms of purchasing or bank transactions or driver's licenses and the like, if you don't have valid documentation for your status in the United States.

These are the two key things which we refer to when we talk about enforcement of the law: securing the border and securing the interior, including the workplace. These two factors must be a part of any legislation we pass. The House focused only on the first part of that, primarily. There are others who think we should do that first and wait until we do the rest of the bill. I don't believe that is a good idea. We need to try to do all of these things together. But I support the idea that until these systems are locked in, until the American people can see that we have been serious about it, that a year or two has gone by and we have funded them and the administration is enforcing them, some of the rights that attach under various bills should not finally attach. In other words, let's make sure we are doing these things before future rights to citizenship or something like that come into play.

What do Americans think about this issue of illegal immigration, and what would they support in terms of what I have been talking about? This is according to a variety of surveys.

Time magazine, earlier this year, said 63 percent believe illegal immigration is an extremely or very serious problem. Another one says they see immigration first as a security problem, then an economic issue, and finally a civil rights/humanitarian issue. Again, the Time poll says they believe that illegal immigrants, overall, hurt the economy, 64 to 26 percent.

In a Quinnipiac poll, in February, they opposed allowing illegal immigrants to obtain driver's licenses, 72 to 25 percent.

In a New Models poll, 58 percent to 37 percent say they would like to see military troops be used for border security.

The American people want serious action. I believe that illustrates how concerned they are that we have not been able to control the borders so far.

They favor a proposal to build a 2,000-mile security fence by a 51- to-37 percent margin. That is a Fox News/Opinion Dynamics poll.

I don't think it is realistic to put a fence along the entire border. What you need is troops on the ground and fences. You can put up a fence, but if nobody checks it for 3 or 4 days, they can cut a hole in it and come through. You have to have boots on the ground to control the territory, as we have seen in Iraq. We are talking about controlling our own territory. Fences are a key part of that, but so are people--Border Patrol agents who can continually patrol and make sure the fence is doing its job.

Again, from the Quinnipiac University poll in February of this year, they support requiring proof of legal residency to obtain Government benefits by an 84 percent to 14 percent margin.

There are other polls. Let me cite a couple. There is a Gallup poll of March 27, just recently, where 80 percent of the public wants the Federal Government to get tougher on illegal immigration; 62 percent oppose making it easier for illegals to become citizens; 72 percent don't even want illegals to be permitted to have driver's licenses.

A Time Magazine poll found that 75 percent favor ``major penalties'' on employers of illegal immigrants.

An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll: 59 percent oppose a guest worker proposal.

I might say, there are different numbers on that. I think part of that depends upon how you ask the question. Nonetheless, there is an extreme amount of cynicism there.

An IQ Research poll done on March 10 found that 92 percent are saying securing the U.S. border should be a top priority of the White House and the Congress.

So the American people are pretty clear on this issue. They want us to act, and they want us to act to enforce the law.

We are going to be talking about a lot of other things here soon.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent for another 2 minutes.

Mr. President, we will have more to say about a lot of other aspects of the pending legislation and what we need to do. I wanted to take this time at least to lay the groundwork for the discussion of why it is important to enforce the law.

The final point I will say is this: We are, it is often said, a nation of immigrants but a nation of laws. What do we mean by that? We mean that when we go to an intersection and the light is green, what do we know? We know we can drive on through because the people who have the red light will obey the law. We do that with everything in our society. We have contracts with each other that are very loose because we have a rule of law that if anything goes wrong, we have a way of resolving that legally. Everything we do, we do because of trust with each other based upon the rule of law. That is the way it works in our society. When everybody obeys the law, we can get along great. Once people disobey the law, bad things happen. You need more and more laws and enforcement, and you get into a situation like we are with illegal immigration. That is why we have to get back to the rule of law. People in America have to have confidence in their Government, in the businesses, in their fellow citizens, and they will if they know everybody is operating within the rule of law.

What happens if they begin to see that nobody appears to be adhering to the law? Remember what Mayor Rudy Giuliani proved in New York City: When little things begin to happen that are violations of law, soon it is bigger and more and more, and pretty soon you have a lawless society. If people understand that even the smallest things have to be within the rule of law, then you have a much better society.

We have to get back to the rule of law with respect to our employment practices, the internal operation in our country, and the security of our borders for all the reasons I have indicated.

I look forward to discussing some of the other significant issues relative to this entire issue. I hope we can agree that border security and enforcement of the law at the workplace are critical elements of any legislation we adopt.

Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, pending somebody else wishing to speak, I can quote for the record about 3 statistics I think are meaningful with respect to this debate.

I did not give a precise number on the number of illegal immigrants who died last year while crossing the United States-Mexican border. According to the most recent Border Patrol statistics, the number who died in 2005 was 473. That is the highest number since the Border Patrol began tracking such deaths since 1999.

Another statistic is that last year, the U.S. Border Patrol apprehended 1.2 million illegal immigrants, which is roughly 1 person every 30 seconds. According to the Pew Hispanic Center, the estimate is that there are about 12 million illegal immigrants in the United States today, and about 56 percent of them are Mexican citizens.

Another statistic: The busiest U.S. Border Patrol station right now is the Yuma Border Patrol station. Last year, 138,460 immigrants were caught coming through that station.

I see my colleague from California. The Senator from California was very concerned about the lawlessness right near San Diego and the environmental degradation, crime on both sides of the border, and illegal immigration through there, as well as drug smuggling. As a result, as we all know, a fence was constructed in that area.

It is interesting, the fence clearly helped to prevent crossings. Right where the fence is, I am told, nobody has crossed illegally, and in that sector, the number of people apprehended declined from a peak in 1986 of 629,650--just in that one area, which is phenomenal to me; that is astounding--from almost 630,000 just in the San Diego sector, it is now down last year to 126,000 illegal immigrants were caught near San Diego. That is still a lot of people. We can see the fencing in that area has clearly had a significant impact.

There are other statistics, but if the Senator from California is ready, I will withhold.

Mr. President, I have an amendment at the desk.

I ask unanimous consent the reading of the amendment be dispensed with and that this be designated the Kyl-Cornyn amendment.

Mr. President, Senator Cornyn and I introduced this amendment, which is very simple in its terms but we think very important. The essence of it is to say that criminals should not participate in the temporary worker program and path to citizenship program that is allowed for under the bill that passed out of the Judiciary Committee.

It seems rather elemental that whatever program we have for immigrants to this country, that they be people who have worked hard and played by the rules, as some people characterize it, that they be hard-working people who, other than perhaps coming into the country illegally, have been law-abiding citizens. That seems fairly elemental.

As a matter of fact, in the 1986 law that many have described as amnesty and few think worked very well, there was a specific prohibition of that law applying to people who had been convicted of a felony or three misdemeanors. That is the exact term that our amendment provides for. If you have been convicted of a felony or three misdemeanors, you are not eligible to participate in this program.

In addition, if you have been ordered by a judge to depart the United States and you have violated that court order, you would not be permitted to participate in this program. Those are the two key points.

There is one other element to it, and that is having to do with prior convictions of crimes and posing a threat to the United States. If the Department of Homeland Security Secretary determines that you have been convicted by final judgment of a serious crime and you constitute a danger to the United States or that there are reasonable grounds to believe you have committed a serious crime outside of the United States before you arrived or that you are a danger to the security of the United States, then you would not be able to participate in this program either.

Now, as I said, this seems rather straightforward. Why would we allow criminals to become citizens of the United States? Why, indeed? Why was this provision left out of the underlying bill? Whatever the reasons, it shouldn't have been. This amendment fixes that.

Why is it important? For one reason, we have an awful lot of criminals that have either come into the United States or people who have illegally entered the United States and then committed serious crimes, serious enough that they have had to be imprisoned in U.S. prisons. In fact, one of the exercises we go through every year around here is to try to get Federal funding under SCAAP, which is called the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program, SCAAP funding, to reimburse States and local governments for housing illegal-immigrant prisoners.

In the past, we felt that since it is the responsibility of the Federal Government to control the border and that has not been done, that when one of these people commits a crime and is convicted of that crime and imprisoned, the Federal Government ought to at least pay part of the expenses. It has usually been in the neighborhood of a fourth to a third of the expenses.

Part of what Senator Cornyn and I propose is that we would increase the amount of Federal support for the State and local governments for housing these criminal illegal immigrants.

How big is the problem? Of the 1.5 million State and Federal prisoners in 2004, over 91,000 were foreign nationals. Think about that: 91,000 criminals in prison were foreign nationals. About 57,000 in State prisons, about 34,000 in Federal prison.

The SCAAP funding gives us some idea of the number of these people. As I said, it has paid roughly about a third of the expenses when we spend about $600 million a year; unfortunately, last year we only funded $305 million. Even if it were funded at $700 million, it would represent about a third of State costs. That gives some idea of the magnitude of expense associated with the housing of these illegal immigrants.

With regard to the provision that deals with the so-called absconders, people who went before a judge and the judge said, for whatever reason, you must depart the United States, you are under court order to leave, but they don't, they just meld back into society, the Bureau of Immigration Customs Enforcement estimates that there are more than 400,000 such absconders and 80,000 fugitive criminal aliens with outstanding final orders of removal who are hiding in the United States. These are people who have committed serious crimes. There is no way that these people should be allowed to get on this path to citizenship or participate in this worker program.

The Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement estimated earlier this month that the number of fugitive aliens in the United States is about 465,000. Fugitives are foreign nationals who have been ordered removed by a Federal immigration judge but failed to comply with the order.

From March 1 through September 30, 2003, which is when ICE began tracking fugitive apprehensions, there were 3,409 fugitives with final orders of removal who were apprehended. In the same period, 2004, they apprehended 7,239 fugitives with final orders of removal, which was an increase of 112 percent over that period in 2003.

The point is that there are more and more criminal aliens coming to the United States or people committing crimes while they are here or people who are being given orders to depart and who are not doing so.

I noted before that between 10 and 15 percent of the apprehensions of illegal immigrants today are people who have criminal records. And they are serious criminal records. We are talking about murder, homicide, kidnapping, drug offenses, rape, assaults, and the like. These are serious criminals.

In Arizona, my own State--the most recent figures are about a year old--almost one in six inmates is a Mexican citizen. I don't mean to suggest by this that Mexican citizens are somehow more prone to be committing crimes. I don't have the statistics for foreign nationals of other countries. But the bottom line is, from only one foreign country, we have almost one in six inmates in Arizona prisons of this one foreign country. If you add the others, the number, obviously, will be larger.

In March of 2005, Phoenix jails housed 1,200 criminal aliens who by law should have been deported. And even when deportation is ordered, according to a FOXNews report, about 60 percent of those orders are ignored. So you still have a huge number of people who are unaccounted for.

In Los Angeles, in that same period, 95 percent of all outstanding homicide warrants and 60 percent of outstanding felony warrants were for illegal aliens. This is according to a FOXNews report. Let me repeat that statistic. If you want to know why we have offered this amendment, in L.A., a year ago, 95 percent of all outstanding homicide warrants and 60 percent of outstanding felony warrants were for illegal aliens. That is an astounding figure.

So while it is true many people come to this country to work and provide a better living for their families and the only crimes they have committed are coming into the country illegally and using fraudulent documents for employment and other purposes, it is also true a large amount of crime is associated with this phenomenon of illegal immigration.

One of the first things we should do when we talk about enforcement of the law is to ensure we are not adding those criminals to the group of people who would be authorized to participate in what is going to be a very humane program of temporary worker, and for some a pathway to citizenship.

Let me cite two other statistics, and then I would like to yield to my colleague from Texas.

In September of 2004, of the 400,000-plus illegal immigrants who were ordered to be deported, 80,000 had criminal records. Now we do not know their whereabouts, including the countries from which they came. The point here is that many were from countries that we call countries of interest; that is to say, countries where terrorists come from. We know there are tens of thousands of illegal immigrants today who are apprehended coming from those countries and probably three times as many who are not apprehended. So in addition to people who have committed crimes in the United States, there is a significant possibility some of these people pose the kind of threat this amendment would go to as well.

Considering this group of so-called other than Mexicans, people who cannot simply be repatriated to Mexico who have to be sent to their home country, this number has increased dramatically. In 2000, the number was only 28,598, although that is a lot of people. In 2004, it was 65,000. In the first 8 months of 2005, that number grew to over 100,000. And we are told that the end result from last year, if my recollection serves me correctly, was about 165,000.

So the bottom line is that, No. 1, there are illegal immigrants who are criminals coming into this country. There are people who are illegal immigrants who, once they get here, are committing serious crimes. There are people who clearly could be suspected of being a danger to the United States. And finally, there are close to half a million people who have been ordered by a judge to leave the country for one reason or another under our laws that constitutes a serious enough offense that they are required to leave--who are absconders; they have decided to ignore the court order--and have not done so.

These are not the kind of people we want to become U.S. citizens. These are not the kind of people we want caring for our lawns or caring for our children or doing any of the other work that has been discussed here earlier today.

The bottom line is, there are plenty of people who can do those jobs. We do not want to be adding to the problems of crime in this country by accepting on an equal footing, with the other kinds of folks whom we are happy to have here working with us on a temporary basis, known criminals, people who should not be in this country under any circumstances, certainly not under the generous provisions of the bill before us. I hope when we have a chance to vote our colleagues will agree that, whatever else, criminals should not be participating in this program.

Mr. President, will the Senator yield for a couple questions.

First, does our amendment criminalize anything that isn't already criminalized?

So nothing in our amendment makes any new kind of conduct a crime. It simply deals with people who have already committed crimes?

Mr. President, I think that is a very important point. I know there are many people who were concerned about the House bill. Much of the marching that was done last week was against the House bill on the grounds that it was creating new crimes and even felony crimes. Nothing in either the legislation that Senator Cornyn and I have introduced nor in this amendment creates any felony offense, nor does this amendment create any misdemeanor offense. It simply says people who have already committed crimes should not participate in this program or who have violated a court order of removal.

There are millions of people who have come to the United States illegally but who otherwise, other than perhaps using false documents, have worked hard and abided by the rules. It is not in their interest to violate our laws. Yet when the subject is discussed, it is easy to roll all of the people up in one group and suggest that good and decent people are no better than people who have committed crimes, and they ought to all be treated the same. And some people have even said they ought to all be made criminals and thrown out of the country.

While we may not like the fact that we have permitted people to come into this country illegally, I believe it does a great injustice to people to assume they are all alike and to bunch them up into the same group. We need to extract out of this group of people who all of us intend to try to treat in the most humane and responsible way we can, however, the ultimate framework of a guest worker program or other programs are developed, we need to separate that group of people from those who have committed crimes, people whom we don't want to be here. That is the purpose of our amendment. We have decided it is important for us to distinguish between the people who do not deserve to be automatically eliminated from consideration for whatever program is going to be adopted here, those people who have actually committed crimes and whom we would not want to bring into the country if we had a choice in the initial instance, in other words, people who would be admittable in the country, certainly people who would be deportable for having committed these kinds of crimes. So clearly if they should not be admitted into the country or they should have been deported for committing certain kinds of crimes, it wouldn't make any sense to allow them then to participate in a guest worker program or to put them on the path to citizenship.

That is the essence of our amendment. Of all of the things we disagree about--we understand there are many--we think it is important to distinguish between that group of people who otherwise have been law-abiding people and the group of people who have committed crimes. And ironically, most often the crimes these people are in jail for are committed against other immigrants, frequently illegal immigrants. They rape them. They rob them. They beat them up. They hold them for ransom. In all of the big cities in the Southwest, the largest number of crimes are committed by illegal immigrants against primarily illegal immigrants. So to help those who are otherwise innocent from being further preyed upon, we need to remove from this country, not allow them to participate in the program, to remove those people who would continue to prey upon the innocent. That is what our amendment would do.

I hope when it comes time to vote, our colleagues will recognize that whatever other disagreements there are, these are the people who should not be allowed to participate in the program.

We are all ears.

Mr. President, there is one more thing I wanted to say this evening about the amendment Senator Cornyn and I offered, an amendment which provides that criminals cannot participate in the program that we adopt here--whatever that program is--in terms of being temporary workers or being put on the path of citizenship, or however this body ultimately defines what happens to immigrants who have come here illegally, or so-called future flow workers. I think almost everybody can agree it shouldn't apply to criminals, or to people who have violated a court order to depart the country.

I made the point earlier, and I want to reiterate it, that it is important to separate out the group of people who have come here, albeit illegally, to do hard work and not otherwise violate our laws, except perhaps using fraudulent documents. Those people end up being the primary targets of other illegal immigrants who commit heinous crimes against them.

So one of the reasons for denying these criminals the right to participate in the same program is to get them away from the people who are most susceptible to being preyed upon.

We talked to chiefs of police, to sheriffs, to the Border Patrol, to other law enforcement officials, and they have different statistics, but by and large they all agree that predominantly the serious crime in their communities, particularly large communities, is immigrant on immigrant and it is mostly illegal immigrant. And the crimes that are committed would just break your heart.

There are stories like this. Immigrants pay a couple of thousand dollars, roughly $2,000 is the going price now, to a coyote to be smuggled into Arizona from Mexico. They may have had to pay different people along the way on the bus up to Altar, where they could then come across, or wherever. But the fee is probably in the neighborhood of $2,000.

Before they come across somebody comes and says it is now going to cost you an additional $500 or, I am sorry, we can't do it. So they have to somehow communicate to somebody else in their family or a friend to come up with some more money.

They then attach themselves to the coyote who brings them across the border. A lot of different things can happen. First of all, another group vies for that group of illegal immigrants because they are all worth money. We had a shootout on Interstate 10 between Tucson and Phoenix involving two vehicles with illegal immigrants in them with two different coyote gangs. They were having a shootout on the freeway, and people were killed and injured, over who was going to control the load of immigrants because that is value. You could hold the illegal immigrants here in a safe house and tell them that until they come up with another $1,000, let's say, they are going to be held hostage, basically, or the coyote or his friends will call the police or Border Patrol if they don't come up with the money.

Women are forced to commit improper acts. There are assaults, sexual assaults. There is a great deal of crime perpetrated on these illegal immigrants. If they have not been beaten or raped or robbed or held ransom for more money, then what happens is they are waiting in the safe house and the Phoenix Police Department shows up at the safe house because they have gotten a call of a disturbance in a house.

It wasn't a disturbance at all. It was the coyote calling the Phoenix police because he has another load coming in that night and he needs to get rid of these people. He has gotten all he can out of them. He sucked them dry. They don't have any more money. He has taken all they have. They don't dare go to the police. Now he has called the police and said there is a disturbance. They show up at the house and pick up these illegal immigrants. If they are from Mexico they are put on a bus back to Mexico.

That is what can happen to these people. These are the ones who do not die in the desert and who are not abused some other way. We cannot allow the criminal element here, people who have committed crimes, who are criminals, to continue to prey on these people. It is one of the reasons our amendment says that criminals cannot participate in this program.

There is another reason. Citizenship in this country is a tremendous privilege. Anyone who knows immigrants who have come here or who has participated in a swearing-in ceremony knows how much legal immigrants value this privilege. As I said before, my grandparents came here and they were so proud of their American citizenship. They felt so privileged to have been able to come here. It is not fair to them or for the millions who are waiting in some country, waiting to come here and who have to attest to their good character. They have abided by the laws. They have committed no crimes. To then see somebody else who has not only entered the country illegally but also in some other way has committed crimes or has refused to depart after a judge's order, to then be able to participate in a legal program allowing them to become a temporary worker or be on a path to citizenship--what kind of a signal does that send? It cheapens American citizenship. It cheapens legal permanent residency.

It is wrong to simply say that because we have a hard time with the amount of people who have come here illegally, we are not going to differentiate among them in any way, we are just going to take them all in and let them all get on this path to citizenship. That is wrong. I do not think the American people will allow us to permit that kind of individual to participate in this program.

That is what the underlying bill allows. There are a lot of things wrong with this underlying bill. This is just one of them. But I hope with each of these things that we point out, our colleagues will come to realize that there is an answer here somewhere, but it is not every provision of this bill. So, piece by piece, we will focus attention on this bill to try to determine where we can make changes so at the end of the day we have a good product--comprehensive immigration reform, enforcement, and an opportunity for people our society needs to work here on a temporary but legal basis.

If we can do that, we will have succeeded. But if we simply pass a bill that has a tremendous number of flaws in it, we will have failed. I hope we can correct this first flaw with the amendment that Senator Cornyn and I have offered to at least ensure that criminals can't participate in this program.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I would say to the Senator from Alabama, that is exactly the case. I would cite two parts of the testimony before our Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Homeland Security.

We had the U.S. attorney for Arizona testify that just from last year, the number of assaults at the border has gone up 108 percent. It is not just on law enforcement officers, but a lot of the assaults are perpetrated against them. I intended to get the statistics on the number of homicides. But there are homicides and then there are an awful lot of other kinds of assaults. The border, in many places, is becoming a very violent place.

There is one good news element that was confirmed by the testimony that was taken in the committee. The reason for this increased violence, they said, was that the Border Patrol was actually improving its ability to control territory. Territory that previously had been the sole jurisdiction of the cartels and the coyotes was now being contested by law enforcement. So naturally they were fighting back.

The bad news, of course, is they fight back with high-caliber weapons. They are organized. It is a very dangerous place. As a result, our officers are seeing assaults every day.

The other thing that this testimony confirmed was that it is not just nice people coming across the border, it is over 10 percent who are criminals. I mean, if you stop and think about it, if you have 600,000 people coming into the country illegally who are apprehended, so it is maybe three times that many who are coming in who are not apprehended, and over 10 percent of them are criminals, you are talking about tens of thousands of people who have decided that this is a good way to get into the United States, come in as an illegal immigrant. These are not the kind of people we want in our country.

When you look at the type of crimes that the people who have been apprehended have been accused of committing or have been convicted of committing, it is homicides, it has been rapes, serious assaults, drug crimes--serious crimes. So not only is the border becoming more violent, but the people coming into the United States are an increasingly criminal element, and they are continuing to commit crimes in our cities, in particular against other illegal immigrants. That is why we believe it is very important that at least one group that ought not to be able to participate in whatever program we adopt is this group of criminals. That is another reason our first effort should be to get control of the border.

Forget the problem of people coming here to work. If for no other reason, you want to keep the people from terrorist countries out, keep out the people smuggling methamphetamine into the country, and keep people with criminal records out of this country.

That is why many of us think the first thing we ought to do is get control of the border.

I went on a little long in answering the question.

I would say to the Senator from Alabama, this is what we have been briefed. The President was at the border. He was briefed likewise on this phenomenon. Sheriff Larry Dever from Cochise County, Sheriff Ralph Ogden from Yuma County, they both told me this. The chiefs of police in Tucson and Phoenix told me this, the Chief of the Border Patrol in both the Tucson and Yuma sector, all of them agree that methamphetamine is now the No. 1 drug coming across and, by the way, also underneath--in some of these tunnels. We need to make that a crime as well. It is not even a crime to dig a tunnel under the border. But we have an amendment that hopefully will cure that. But now a backpack of methamphetamine is said to be worth, by these law enforcement officials I identified to you, to be worth between a quarter of million and a half million dollars. You can take a poor, illegal immigrant, many of them in a group, and put this backpack on each of them and give them $10,000--more money than they have seen in a long time--and say: You scoot across the border and you'll be met by XYZ. That is a cheap way to get it across. They are not making it as much in Arizona, in fact, anymore. It is all coming across the border, as you pointed out.

Mr. President, I say to the Senator from Alabama, I have to summarize this answer because welling up in my chest is a big complaint about the Congress, about the Clinton administration, about the Bush administration. Let's be honest. Nobody has done their job completely here.

We authorized.

That is right. Senator Feinstein and I got an amendment passed in 1996 to double the number of Border Patrol agents. It passed the Judiciary Committee, passed the Congress. It is an authorization. Do you think that in 5 years we had double the Border Patrol agents? No.

We couldn't get the administration to ask for enough funding in the budget, and, of course, if it is not asked for, then Congress is loathe to appropriate. So it took us about, as I recall, 7 years or maybe 8 years to get the number of agents doubled. We have succeeded in doubling them and adding another 2,000 or 3,000 on top of that. But it took far longer than it should have.

We have authorized SCAAP--the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program--that reimburses the jails and prisons in your State, my State, and other States for the criminal aliens housed in those prisons. The program is authorized. This administration this year requested in the budget exactly how much money for this program? Zero, nothing; same as last year. Congress had to find the money. And we ended up appropriating about $300 million, which is less than half of what we should have. Had we done $700 million, we would have reimbursed the States about one-third of their expenses. We only did $305 million, as I recall.

Mr. President, the bottom line is that many things we have authorized--additional Border Patrol agents, additional equipment, additional aircraft, radar, UMVs, cameras--neither the President nor the Congress over the years has seen fit to provide. We have gotten a lot more in recent years than we have in the past. But the bottom line is merely because we authorize something doesn't necessarily mean it is going to be appropriated.

It is not just a matter of money. Sometimes it is a matter of enforcing laws that we have on the books--such as the employers who find it very difficult to differentiate fraudulent documents and, therefore, they end up hiring illegal immigrants. But we don't enforce that law. It is hard to blame the employer, but the Government isn't trying to enforce it, either. Simply authorizing something doesn't necessarily mean it will happen.

Mr. President, I say to the Senator, my perception is that having passed the law, one reason people referred to it as amnesty is because it was not enforced. There was a commitment to enforce it. I don't know the reasons why it wasn't enforced, but in many respects it was not.

The key thing we need to do here, since the American people are skeptical of our ability and our commitment to enforce the laws, in order to be able to adopt the guest worker program and deal with the people who are here illegally and have a work program, in the future we are going to have to demonstrate to them we have the ability and we will make the commitment to enforce whatever law we end up adopting.

Mr. President, we are a Nation of immigrants. There are so many great stories of people who have come to this country and enriched our Nation and benefited their families and had great life experiences. There is no dispute about that. I don't think there is a single Member here who would deny that.

But there is a suggestion that those who do not support the Kennedy bill--or whatever you want to call the bill that came out of the Judiciary committee, of which I am a Member and the Presiding Officer is a Member--if you don't support that bill, you want to run everybody out of the country and you want to lock them up and prosecute them. If you don't support this bill, you have bias against them and you don't believe in immigration. You don't believe in the great freedoms of our country. Nothing could be further from the truth. That is not right.

What we are trying to do is to develop a system to deal with the immigration crisis that we have that is consistent with our values as Americans, that is consistent with the rule of law in this country, that treats people who do the right thing better than it treats people who do the wrong thing. That is what this debate is all about. We are trying to set policy for the future about the people who are allowed into our country, how many and under what circumstances. A Nation surely has a right to decide how many people it allows to come in. We are one of the most generous nations in the history of the world in allowing people to come here. But we have a right to decide how it should be done.

Under this bill, we have provisions that actually allow a virtually unlimited number of unskilled workers to come in, but limits the amount of skilled workers that come in. How weird is that?

This legislation came together in a most hasty way and violates a number of principles. One thing I would mention, the Presiding Officer, Senator Coburn, has been involved in these discussions. I know he and I share a common view about it. I thought we all agreed we would not have amnesty. The President, as much as he believes in bringing people into this country, as

much as he believes in allowing workers to come here who want to work, has said: No amnesty. Our Democratic colleagues have said: No amnesty. This morning I said: The truth is, this bill is amnesty. It is exactly like the 1986 bill, and everybody said that was amnesty. They didn't even dispute it.

I have the definition from ``Black's Law Dictionary,'' the one law students use to get legal definitions, and it uses the 1986 bill as an example of ``amnesty.'' Of course it was. And the bill that came out of the Judiciary Committee is the same thing.

I have to tell you, Senator Specter's bill that we started with in the Judiciary Committee was not amnesty. Senator Frist's bill is not amnesty. But the bill that we came out with was. That is just a fact. I am going to go into some detail about that because Senator Kennedy has said it is false for me to say this is amnesty. We are going to talk about it. Senator Leahy said it is not amnesty. Why are they saying this now? I'll tell you what is going on.

They are over there talking with the President and they are trying to get a compromise. They are trying to come up with something so they can come back and say it is not amnesty. They will claim that they moved in this direction and now they want to pass it.

We are going to have to read this bill, and we are going to have to think about it because it is a major issue facing our country today. It really is. We need to do the right thing, and we can do the right thing. I am actually optimistic about our options and our capabilities of coming up with something that will work. But this bill is not it. It is absolutely not it.

I want to say a couple of things first. We are going to pass legislation dealing with the entry of people into our Nation. We are going to pass legislation, and I will favor properly drafted legislation that will increase the number of people who come to our country lawfully. We want to pass legislation that treats fairly and decently and humanely the 11 to 20 million people who are here illegally. But I hope and trust we won't pass amnesty which gives the full benefits of legal entry into our country to those who come illegally.

That is really what we are talking about, because what we learned in 1986 was that when you do that, before the ink is dry on the bill, other people come in illegally because they expect we will be right back here again in this Congress giving them amnesty again. So we need to reestablish the principle of law. That is all I am saying. We can treat people in a good way. We will not have to remove all of these people from America. They would not have to be prosecuted and put in jail. How silly is that? That can't be done. Nobody is proposing that.

What we are working on is legislation that can bring law, bring principle, and bring integrity to our immigration system, and I believe it is within our grasp to do so. But I am not going to support the legislation that is before us now. It is just not good.

The question about amnesty and where we are arises from the nature of the provisions in the bill that passed the Judiciary Committee. I don't know what to call it. I guess it is the Kennedy-Specter bill. Senator Specter's bill, though, that he offered and we began with, did not do the unprincipled things that this compromised bill does.

Senator Frist, the majority leader, has offered legislation that does not create a direct path to citizenship for the entire illegal alien population. His bill didn't do that. The original Specter bill did not create a new or direct path to citizenship for illegal aliens. Before the committee markup, the Specter bill would have given illegal aliens working in the United States a temporary work permit, renewable every 2 years as long as the individual was working.

We still don't have the language that passed out of the Judiciary Committee. I know Senator Coburn has been around Congress for some time, and he serves on the Judiciary Committee with me. We still don't have the language we voted on Monday. I don't know for sure exactly what it is, but we sure should not be passing a piece of legislation when we haven't even had a chance to read it.

But in the committee, a complete amnesty program was adopted for the illegal alien population and large, new permanent immigration programs were created for low-skilled workers. The committee bill, as reported, creates a direct pathway to citizenship for aliens who have broken our laws.

You will hear claims that this bill is earned adjustment, earned citizenship. Those are descriptions, but they are misnomers. This bill really is--in the sense that we have been talking about it for several years now as a part of an American dialog, in every sense of what people mean by amnesty--it is amnesty. If it is not amnesty, it is the same thing as amnesty. That is what it is.

There are four different amnesty provisions in the bill. These four amnesty programs are what you are voting for or against when you vote on the Judiciary Committee bill. Let me clearly describe to you the breathtaking enormity of the four programs that I believe clearly constitute amnesty in the Judiciary Committee bill.

Element No. 1, the committee bill takes every illegal alien in the United States who pays $1,000 and was employed before January 7, 2004-- whether full time, part time, seasonally or self-employed--and puts that person on a direct path to citizenship. The family of the illegal aliens, their spouse and children, would also be given amnesty, even if they are not already in the United States. They would now be able to come and come legally.

How will it be given out? How do you get on this direct path to citizenship? What is required of the person who seeks it? The truth is that other than illegal presence in the United States, very little is required.

We have been following very carefully the draft of the bill that we were provided and that we had as we voted on this legislation in Committee. The final passed version, however, is still being cobbled together, but I am confident that what I'm saying is accurate with regard to these issues.

All illegal aliens present in the United States before January of 2004, who have worked illegally here since then for any amount of time, will first be given an H-5B nonimmigrant status, good for 6 years. They are made legal for 6 years. Their spouses and children will be given the same status. After 6 years and another $1,000 fine, the aliens and their families will get green cards if the alien has been ``employed in the United States, either full time, part time, seasonally, or self- employed, or has met educational requirements.''

The education requirement is as broad as being in a 1-year vocational work program at ``an institution of higher education.''

These requirements are very broad.

A self-employed person could be someone who worked 1 day a year, and there is no limit on that definition. A person who meets the work requirement through education has to prove that they had full-time attendance in as little as a 1-year educational program, not that they completed any educational program.

Additionally, the work requirement and education requirement for the green card are completely waived if the alien is under 21. After getting the green card, illegal aliens will be able to apply for citizenship like any other lawful permanent resident. They are put in the same status as the people who came here legally.

To satisfy the work requirement of being employed in the United States, either part time, seasonally, or self-employed, the bill states that an alien can conclusively establish his work history in the United States either by, one, presenting records maintained by one of the following: Social Security Administration, IRS or any Federal, State or local government agency or employer, a labor union, a day labor center, and ``organizations that assist workers in matters related to employment,'' or presenting two of the following: bank records, business records, sworn affidavits from nonrelatives or remittal records.

However, the documents listed that conclusively establish work history are not even really required.

Later on, the bill states that the burden of proof that the alien must meet to qualify is even lower than that. It says: ``The alien has a burden of proving by a preponderance of the evidence that the alien has satisfied the requirements. An alien must meet such burden of proof by producing sufficient

evidence to demonstrate such employment as a matter of reasonable inference.''

Reasonable inference? That is not a proof standard. It is a situation that allows everyone to qualify.

Why would we want to do that?

The bill then states: ``It is the intent of the Congress that the work requirement be interpreted and implemented in a manner that recognizes and takes into account the difficulties encountered by aliens in obtaining evidence of employment due to the undocumented status of the alien.''

It is not that hard to prove you have worked. If you work for an employer, you can get the employer to provide a statement that you worked for them even if you don't have pay stubs. It is not that hard.

This basically obviates any requirement of proof and allows anybody to qualify.

I am just telling you that is what is in the bill. I wish it were not so. I am not making this up. I am reading to you what is in the bill.

The work standard is not a work standard at all. In fact, the bill basically says that Congress is telling the Department of Homeland Security to accept pretty much anything as proof of work.

This is an open invitation to fraud and will prevent Department of Homeland Security from vetting out fraudulent applications.

It is a perfect example of why our immigration laws are so messed up.

We have placed so many difficult obstacles in front of agencies that are required to enforce them that they have become utterly unenforceable.

We say that we have a work requirement, and then we say it can be seasonal, it can be part time, and it can be self-employed. Then we say just about any records you can produce, or that you conjure up will be sufficient. But if you do not have records and you have a reasonable inference that you worked, they must let you qualify.

Basically, that is what the Department of Homeland Security office is going to do. They are going to accept anybody's application. There is no way you could object to it. This standard appears to be a standard but is not one at all.

What about waiver of the work requirement? What if you have not worked since January of 2004 and did not work before then. Does this bill leave you out? Does it mean you can't be a citizen now? Can you qualify for this type of amnesty? The answer is still yes.

Even if you are an illegal alien who has never worked in the United States and cannot produce any evidence to reasonably infer that you have worked illegally in the United States, you and your family can get on the bill's direct path to citizenship. You get automatic amnesty, no requirement to prove work.

If you have full-time attendance at an institution of higher education--graduation is not required--full-time attendance at any secondary school, as defined by State law, or you are a minor under the age of 21, what does qualifying for amnesty get you?

The mere filing of an application for amnesty triggers the following things: Employment authorization for the alien, the alien's spouse and children, permission to travel abroad and return to the United States, protection from being detained, determined inadmissible or deportable or removed pending final adjudication of the alien's application for adjustment of status.

Only future conduct or a criminal conviction removes these protections.

Additionally, if you have already been ordered removed from the United States or if you are subject to mandatory detention for a criminal conviction, the Department of Homeland Security has to give you the opportunity to show you are eligible for amnesty before you can be removed.

This will simply freeze the entire detention and removal operation of the Department of Homeland Security.

If you are legally here in January of 2004 because you got a work visa before you came to the United States, you will not get the benefit of this amnesty.

Repeat that: If you are legally here because you got a valid work visa or permit before January of 2004, you do not get the benefit of this amnesty. This amnesty benefits you only if you came here illegally.

So we are only giving you a direct path to citizenship if you first broke our laws. If you came here the right way and did not break the law, you are out of luck. No new path to citizenship for you.

They say this is a guest worker program.

The second major part of Specter-Kennedy substitute amendment--that was an amendment that was substituted for the original Specter bill in the past--is a new program for bringing low-skilled workers into the United States, in addition to illegal aliens already doing these jobs. The program puts them on a direct path to citizenship. It is a new program.

The new program would bring 400,000 low-skilled workers per year into the United States on a 3-year work visa. This visa is renewable for 3 years. It is essentially a guaranteed entry for 6 years to work in the United States.

This 400,000-per-year cap is supposed to be limited, they say to 400,000. This is several times what the cap is today. I am mistaken-- several times this 400,000 is how many will be allowed to come in under an illegal system. But the cap that purports to be is completely artificial. If the cap is reached and actually 400,000 come in that year and an additional 80,000 visas can be given out that year, the cap will go up automatically the next year as much as 20 percent. By the sixth year this program will immigrate 2.4 million new low-skilled workers, at a minimum, into the United States.

On day one, when the worker arrives in the United States, the employer can sponsor the alien for a green card. It gives them legal permanent status. Normally the employers or family members sponsor the alien before they have the right to permanent entry and a green card. But this is a major change. The person can sponsor himself and make his own application. So after 4 years of work, the new immigrants can self- petition for a green card and then be eligible for citizenship.

Normal grounds for inadmissibility, except for the most serious crimes on national security grounds, can be waived for a fee of $1,500. All legal permanent residents are eligible for citizenship after 5 years. All legal permanent residents, green card holders, after 5 years, are eligible for citizenship. If they have not been convicted of a felony, if they have basic English skills, they can become a citizen automatically. People all over this country and all over the world are waiting and hoping to be able to be selected to be able to come to the United States following the laws and rules.

To be eligible to come to the United States under this low-skilled immigrant worker category, the alien is merely required to pay a $500 application fee, undergo a medical examination, and show they are capable of performing the labor or services required, and have evidence of employment from ``employers, employer associations or labor representatives.'' Those are probably some of the people who have been leading these protests the last few days.

Under the bill language, you can qualify for this new program and come to the United States as a low-skilled immigrant even if you were in removal proceedings and signed a voluntary departure agreement but never left, or you were already removed from the United States and illegally reentered. If you had been removed and illegally reentered, you are eligible.

One might ask, why does this program cover these people? I thought the program was for people who wanted to come to the United States to work in the future, not for those who are already here. This provision is specifically designed to make sure that illegal aliens who are not covered by the bill's amnesty provisions because they did not work in the United States prior to January of 2004, or because they were not legally present in the United States on that day, are not left without a direct path to citizenship also.

This bill covers everybody. It should be called ``no illegal alien left behind.'' I am not exaggerating. It is fixed so that if they are not covered under this ``magic'' date, January 7, 2004, they are covered under the new exemptions of the 400,000 people per year.

Element three, the Dream Act. That was brought up several times. It never moved in the Senate. But boom, in 2 minutes, Senator Durbin offered the

Dream Act and we voted on it in committee Monday afternoon as an amendment to the bill. It took him less than 2 minutes to get it in the bill as an amendment.

The Dream Act does two things. It grants amnesty to an unlimited number of illegal alien minors who graduate from a high school and enroll in college or the military for at least 2 years, or who perform hours of volunteer work, or who can show ``compelling circumstances for the inability to do any of those three,'' and, two, eliminates United States Code section 1623 which I will describe below, thus allowing all illegal aliens enrolled in college to receive in-State tuition rates.

This means that while American citizens from Tennessee, Georgia, South Carolina, Massachusetts, have to pay out-of-state tuition rates if they send their kids to the University of Virginia or the University of Alabama, people who have illegally immigrated into this country do not.

How much sense does that make, to have people here illegally and they have more benefits than those who are here legally? Instead, they receive educational benefits paid by the taxpayers of Virginia and Alabama for in-State residents. I do not mean to suggest in any way there are not good kids out there. We need to figure out a way to accommodate them and work with those who have come here illegally. Maybe they came here a long time ago. Maybe they came here illegally as a junior or senior in high school. They came across the border and now they want to be on a direct path to citizenship.

I am not saying we should not wrestle with how to treat them in a generous way, but should we give them more rights than we give to American citizens? When you do too much of this and you work at it too hard, pretty soon you end up with a mockery of law, an unprincipled bill that cannot be defended, and we are in the situation of wondering why would you want to bother to try to come into the country legally. Why not come illegally?

So the Dream Act establishes a seamless process to take illegal aliens directly from illegal status to conditional permanent resident status, to legal permanent resident status, to citizenship.

First, the illegal aliens who came here before age 16 and have been here for 5 years will be given conditional permanent residence through cancellation of removal if they have been admitted to college or have a GED or a high school diploma. So if you get your high school diploma or get yourself into college somewhere, whether you are passing or not, then you qualify for cancellation of removal.

Step two, after 6 years, the alien will then be eligible to apply for a green card if they have attended 2 years of higher education, served 2 years in the military, performed 910 hours of community service for an organization that receives funds under the Combined Federal Campaign, or prove an extreme and unusual hardship, and you have good moral character and do not have a deportable offense. It is a guaranteed step forward if you do not do something wrong and get yourself convicted of a felony.

After 5 years, those green card holders can apply for citizenship and cannot be denied if they meet the basic standards of English and have no criminal history. Current law provides ``that an alien who is not physically present in the United States shall not be eligible on the basis of residence within a State or a political subdivision for any postsecondary educational benefit unless a citizen or national of the United States is eligible for such benefit in no less amount, duration and scope, without regard to whether the citizen or national is such a resident.''

That is basically the law we passed several years ago, I think before I came to Congress. It said if you are here illegally, you do not get in-State tuition.

We are going to reverse that. Congress just passed it 8 or 10 years ago. The DREAM Act would eliminate this provision and allow illegal alien college and university students to be eligible for in-State tuition without affording out-of-State students the same opportunity. Thus, the University of Alabama could offer in-State tuition to illegal alien students while requiring citizens residing in Mississippi to pay a much higher tuition rate. In fact, that is being done probably in violation of law in some areas right now.

Allowing all the illegal aliens enrolled in college to receive in- State tuition rates means that while American citizens from the 49 other States have to pay out-of-State tuition rates to send their kids to the University of Alabama or Virginia, people who have illegally immigrated into this country might not. Out-of-State tuition rates range from 2 to 3\1/2\ times what in-State tuition rates are. It has always struck me that one of the things you do to encourage people to come here legally and abide by the law, is not give benefits to those who come illegally. It is one thing not to prosecute them; it is one thing not to take them out of the country; but to give them benefits that people who do the right thing get? We should not do that. It is bad policy.

So what about loans in the DREAM Act? I think this is still in the bill. We have not had a chance to see all of language. This was in the DREAM Act originally. I do not know if it is still in there under the Judiciary bill, but I assume it is. Under title IV of the Higher Education Act of 1965, as amended, legal permanent residents and certain other eligible noncitizens receive Federal student financial aid, including Pell grants and Stafford student loans. That is part of the 1965 act.

The committee bill will add illegal students, illegal alien volunteers, and illegal alien military members to the list of people eligible, by changing their immigration status to that of a legal permanent resident. This change in status would make them eligible for Federal financial aid. Pell grants and Stafford loans currently comprise 85 percent of postsecondary student aid available to citizens and eligible noncitizens. In fiscal year 2002, 8.8 percent of the individuals receiving Pell grants were eligible noncitizens over 380,000 people.

We want to help people and be generous. But if you are in an illegal status, I do not see why there is an obligation to give the same extra benefits that you do to those who are lawfully here.

Pell grants. The Federal Pell Grant Program is the single largest source of grant aid for postsecondary education funded by the Federal Government. There is already a current fiscal year Pell grant shortfall of over $2.5 billion. We have done a lot of different things to try to get money as high as we can get it this year. The fiscal year 2003 estimated program costs are approximately $12.5 billion. The annual appropriations is $11.4 billion. Now we want to open up Pell grants to illegal aliens?

Although Pell grants are a discretionary program, the cost of increasing the number of eligible recipients in an award year is considered direct spending, when the appropriations and maximum grant award for that year are already set in law and a payment schedule is published. Thus, we could be facing a budget point of order with this bill. In other words, since in a number of these instances the right to have a Pell grant for qualifying persons is an entitlement, making more people eligible for this entitlement could subject this bill to a budget point of order.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that 58,500 additional Pell grants would have been given within 1 year if last year's DREAM Act had passed, with an average grant being $2,420. How many people do not get a dime who try to send their kids to college, out of State maybe, people who have worked hard all their life, middle-class Americans? They do not get a dime. But somebody who is here illegally gets $2,400? I do not think that is fair. I do not think that is being insensitive to legitimate interests of people who want to come to America, who want to participate in the American dream, or is inhumane in any way.

What about Stafford loans? The Congressional Budget Office estimated under last year's DREAM Act--the one that was offered last year but did not pass--65,000 would enroll during the first year and meet all other criteria. Because 1 in 10 students borrow student loans, the student loan costs would increase by $22 million per year over the 2003-to-2012 period.

While we were going about our business in committee, the AgJOBS bill was offered as an amendment. Well, we had a big fight on the AgJOBS bill last year. It was offered on the floor of the Senate. Senator Saxby Chambliss of

Georgia, chairman of the Agriculture Committee, opposed the bill, offered a number of important amendments that I thought made it far more sane, far more appropriate, and the bill did not pass, after a great deal of debate.

Well, in about 15 minutes, in the committee, Senator Feinstein offered the AgJOBS bill to the Specter bill, the committee bill. It was a 106-page amendment. It put 1.5 million illegal alien agriculture workers on a direct path to citizenship--just like that.

How does it do it? After the Feinstein amendment, 1.5 million illegal alien workers who pay a $500 fine and demonstrate they worked in agriculture for 150 workdays in the last 2 years will be given blue cards and will be allowed to stay in the United States. Because a workday is defined as 1 hour of work per day, an alien who worked in agriculture for only 150 hours--there are 168 hours in a week--over 2 years will qualify. So if you work 150 hours over 2 years, you qualify.

Spouses and children of illegal alien agriculture workers also get legal status and work permits, and they are not limited to working in agriculture either.

The blue card holder is eligible for a green card in two ways: after 3 years of 150 additional workdays--1 hour per day is all that is required--per year or after 5 years of 100 additional workdays per year.

Then, what about citizenship? For these who come here illegally, and they work 150 hours, what happens as to their citizenship? Even though they came here illegally, are they put on the path to citizenship? Yes. All legal permanent residents become eligible for citizenship after 5 years.

On May 18, 2004, the Washington Times published a column by Frank Gaffney, president of the Center for Security Policy, titled ``Stealth Amnesty'' dealing with the AgJOBS bill when it came up back in 2004. The article correctly summarized the AgJOBS bill when it said this:

By the legislation's own terms, an illegal alien will be

turned into ``an alien lawfully admitted for temporary

residence,'' provided they had managed to work unlawfully in

an agricultural job in the United States. . . .Once so

transformed, they can stay in the U.S. indefinitely while

applying for permanent resident status. From there, it is a

matter of time before they can become citizens. . . .

If any were needed, [the AgJOBS bill] offers a further

incentive to illegals: Your family can stay, as well.

Alternatively, if they are not with you, you can bring them

in, too--cutting in line ahead of others who made the mistake

of abiding by, rather than ignoring, our laws.

What about the safe harbor provisions? Under the AgJOBS bill, which was added to this committee proposal without much debate, an illegal alien is undeportable as soon as the amnesty paperwork is merely filed. So if you file your amnesty paperwork and you are otherwise deportable, it automatically stops. No adjudication of the application is necessary to kick start the legal status of the illegal alien.

Once an alien receives a temporary work visa, it never expires unless the worker is otherwise deemed deportable or applies for permanent residence and is denied. There is nothing temporary about a single temporary work visa lasting indefinitely. It is not temporary. The alien's blue card status can only be revoked if the alien is determined to be deportable, the blue card was acquired through fraud, the alien is convicted of a felony, three or more misdemeanors, or an offense which involves serious bodily injury or damage to more than $500 of property.

What about all the legal stuff that gets involved with this? How do you prove all this stuff? The AgJOBS amendment even goes so far as to provide free legal counsel to illegal aliens who want to receive this amnesty. The AgJOBS amendment specifically states that recipients of ``funds under the Legal Services Corporation Act'' shall not be prevented ``from providing legal assistance directly related to an application for adjustment of status under this section.''

Not only will the AgJOBS bill give amnesty to 1.5 million illegal aliens, it would have the American taxpayer pay the legal bill of those 1 million illegal aliens.

We are going to work on something here. We are going to pass some legislation--if not this year, soon--that will work through all these difficult human issues and treat people in a fair and just way. Nobody is proposing that we do not. I mean that. There is a consensus in this Congress that it is time for us to fix this problem, to deal with the 11 million people here illegally, to allow more people to come legally, and to shut down the border and stop people from coming illegally. But this legislation does not do that.

People say: I want to vote for something. I want to fix it.

Don't vote for this bill. It will not fix it. Not only does it give amnesty to 1.5 million illegals, it would have the American taxpayer pay the legal bills of the 1 million illegal aliens.

What about the H2A farm workers? The sponsors of the AgJOBS bill will have you believe that farmers want the AgJOBS bill. They say: This is for agriculture. It has to be done. If you don't do this, the country is going to collapse. Maybe that is the case in the District of Columbia where the national groups get to write the letters and speak for their farmers and come in and tell us what farmers want, regardless of what the individual farmers have to say. One of those people talked to me about it.

I said: That may be your opinion, Mr. Farm Leader, but if you took a poll of the farmers I know in my home State or the Presiding Officer knows in his home State, I will bet you 80 percent of them would agree with me that this is not a principled way to do business. This is not the right way to do business. We are not here to serve agribusiness. We are here to promote the national interests of the United States, to create an immigration system consistent with our generous values, and a legal system that will work, not to reward those who violate the law but provide the benefits to those who follow the law.

Last year when we debated this bill, I received an open letter from the Southern Farmers Coalition. The letter is signed by a list of organizations and individuals who participate in the H2A program. The letter says: Overwhelmingly, the majority of H2A program users in this country--the list of signatories is expansive, including the North Carolina Growers Association, the MidAtlantic Solution, Georgia Peach Council, Ag Works, the Georgia Fruit and Vegetable Growers Association, the Virginia Agricultural Growers Association, the Vidalia Onion Business Council--I like Vidalia onions--and the Kentucky-Tennessee Growers Association. They all signed this letter. The cover page of the letter, contrary to what some national agricultural experts say, says this:

Farmers in the southern United States are opposed to S.

1645--

the same bill being offered as an amendment today, as part of this bill--

introduced by Ted Kennedy and Larry Craig. It is an amnesty

for illegal farm workers. It does not reform the H2A program.

Please oppose this legislation.

These are the farmers who are supposed to be helped by it. That is what they say about it: ``Please oppose this legislation.''

The text of the letter, which asked me to stand up and fight against this legislation, states:

Ag JOBS is nothing more than a veiled amnesty.

I am reading this letter from the farmers themselves.

Ag JOBS is nothing more than a veiled amnesty. While

everyone, it seems, agrees that the H2A program desperately

needs reform, this legislation does not fix the two most

onerous problems with the program--the adverse effect wage

rate and the overwhelming litigation brought by legal

services groups against the farmers using the H2A program.

That is what the farmers told us. The letter goes on to say:

The Craig-Kennedy-Berman reform package provides a private

right of action provision that goes far beyond legitimate

worker protections and expands legal services attorneys

ability to sue growers in several critical areas. These

lawyers, who have harassed program users with meritless

lawsuits for years, will continue to attack small farmers

under the new statute. Supporters of the Craig-Berman

legislation have endorsed this alleged reform, believing, in

a misguided fashion, that it will bring stability to the

agricultural labor market. It will not. It will create

greater instability. As the illegal farm workers earn

amnesty, they will abandon their farm jobs for work in other

industries. Many of the attached signatories have been

actively involved in negotiations surrounding this

legislation. The following groups have broken ranks with the

American Farm Bureau, the National Council of Agricultural

Employers, the Agricultural Coalition for Immigration Reform,

and the American

Nursery and Landscape Association to oppose the legislation

because those groups have decided an amnesty is more

important than legitimate H2A reform. You are likely to hear

that the majority of agriculture supports this bill. The

industry, in fact, is split. History has demonstrated that

the amnesty granted under the Immigration Reform and Control

Act of 1986 was a dismal failure for agriculture employers.

Farm workers abandoned agricultural employment shortly after

gaining amnesty and secured jobs in other industries.

Of course, they did. So why should we pass this Judiciary bill, what I guess we can call the Specter-Kennedy package?

Who supports the amendment? I know who supports the amendment. The national lobbying groups are really out of touch with the desires of the American people and the desires of farmers and the desires of those who want to see a good and decent system created.

I don't believe I am out of touch on this issue. I believe I know what average American citizens and farmers want. They want real immigration reform that guarantees the laws we pass will be enforced and that people who do not honor our immigration laws will be punished, not rewarded with worker visas and green cards. So I strongly oppose the Specter-Kennedy bill that came out of committee, and I hope my colleagues will join in that.

Now, earlier, Senator Leahy said that the 1986 bill Congress passed was amnesty. He said it was amnesty, and he admitted it was. ``Blacks Law Dictionary'' says that the 1986 bill was amnesty. It is the very definition of amnesty.

By the way, when we passed that bill, it was supposed to fix the immigration problem. As I explained and talked about this morning, that is a very important concept. So the deal in 1986 was that we were going to give amnesty to 1 million people who we thought were here illegally. We now think there are 11 million here illegally. We are going to give amnesty to those, and we are going to create a legal system that encourages people to come legally and we won't have this problem again. Those who were dubious about it said: No, this amnesty would encourage more people to come illegally, but the pro-amnesty crowd won out and they passed the legislation and it became law.

Well, what happened immediately afterward? It wasn't 1 million people who showed up to claim amnesty; it was 3 million--three times as many. I don't know how many will show up this time. Will it be 11 million or 33 million? Probably not 33 million, but I would not be surprised at all, based on our history, if we would have a good many more show up and claim amnesty.

Six years after the bill passed, the Congress, in a very unusual action, voted to form a commission to review the legislation to see if it worked. The commission, a bipartisan professional commission, did a study and said it was a failure. It did not work, did not do what it was supposed to do.

Well, the Citizenship and Immigration Services tried to say that 1986 was not amnesty. But everybody has agreed it was. CIS later explained what the 1986 bill did. I would like to go over it with you because this current bill does the very same things. It is just not disputable. So if we have any understanding of what an amnesty program is, we have the 1986 act to give us a guide. It says:

The legalization program was not amnesty, but a targeted

program that balanced the offer of legalization with

stringent requirements.

This is how they defended this problem.

Legalization of applicants had to: prove to INS

adjudicators that they had resided in the U.S. since January

1, 1982--

I went over with you how this bill said you had to be here since January 2004. If you came after 2004, you could still get in. That is a real stringent standard. You had to prove you resided there before that day--

pay a $185 fee--

We upped it to $1,000--

for principal applicants, $50 for each child, with a $420

family cap; accept ineligibility for most public benefits for

5 years after application--

We don't even do that in this bill. It says you could not go on welfare for at least 5 years. We did that in 1986. That is not in this bill today--

and complete an 18-month period of temporary residency. After

that, and only after successfully completing an English

language and civics requirement within a year-long one-time

window--

Which is a very low-grade test for the most part--

and the payment of an $80 fee per applicant (with a $240

family cap) they were eligible to apply for permanent

residency. In exchange, the applicant would be authorized to

work, travel, and after becoming a permanent resident,

petition for the immigration of certain family members.

They could bring family members in from out of the country to join them. Then, of course, once you become a permanent resident, it is a matter of 5 years to become a citizen, if you have not been convicted of a felony and you can speak English. I don't want to be demagogic and say this is amnesty, amnesty, amnesty, and vote against the bill. I am saying that everybody agreed that 1986 was amnesty, and it did not work.

Everybody I hear publicly talking about this bill says it is not amnesty. Senator Kennedy, I think, used the word ``lie'' after I said it was amnesty this morning. I think I have demonstrated that it is precisely the same scheme that was used in 1986, which we proved didn't work. If that is not amnesty, what is? Senator Leahy defended the bill and said it is not amnesty. President Bush said he doesn't believe in amnesty. All he believes in is immigration, and he wants us to do better and be as generous as we can possibly be. But he doesn't believe in amnesty.

Scott McClellan, yesterday at the press briefing he does for the President, said that the President believes that a direct path to citizenship is amnesty, and he opposes that.

This bill provides a direct path to citizenship for people who came to this country illegally. That is just the fact. If we want to have people say it is not so, we will keep talking about it every day this week. That is all I am saying. I wish it weren't so. It is not necessary that we do that. We can provide a humane and decent way to give people full opportunities to live and progress in our society without giving the people who come here illegally benefits over those who wait in line and come legally. That is what it is all about.

So I will just say that, in this rush to move a bill through and to prove that we care, we have not thought it through. We spent 5 days in markup in the Judiciary Committee, and about 4 of those days we really spent some time dealing with enforcement and border issues. We talked about them in some depth. We went over the wording of the statutes with some care. We debated single words. Senator Durbin, who is here, is a great lawyer. He made some points, being the skilled lawyer he is. We changed words and did all kinds of things.

But when we got to the last day, Monday, they offered an AgJOBS bill, with over 100 pages, in about 15 minutes, and it passed. We still had not seen the draft of it. During the debate in our committee on how to handle the 11 million people in a decent, fair, and just way, to not remove them or make them all leave this country in a permanent way or to abuse them or prosecute them, but how to handle this in a logical, sane way--we spent almost no time on it.

I urged the committee to stay with the enforcement matters like the House did. Let's start hearings immediately and get the best minds in America. Let's find out who these 11 million people are, their desires and wishes; what would be a good and principled way to deal with them; who we should let into our country in the future; what standards should we use; should we have unlimited numbers come in for low-wage jobs and have limits on the high-wage people? Is that logical, what we want to do?

How many more people do we want to allow into our country legally? This bill will allow every year, annually, at least 400,000, and that number can increase every year, forever.

I wish to make one more point, and this is where the American people have to watch this Congress. If we pass this amnesty legislation, if we pass the legislation that makes all these status changes and makes them into law and they become law, that becomes a permanent decision of this U.S. Congress.

But what about the promises that we are going to have enforcement? I offered an amendment in committee that was accepted to add 10,000 detention beds. That probably is not nearly enough, but it would make a big difference. That was accepted. I offered an amendment to increase the number of Border Patrol agents. It probably is not a large enough number, but it would ramp it up faster than the plan was, and that was accepted.

Then it hit me. I have been in the Senate long enough, and I should have been more alert. This is an authorizing committee. The Judiciary Committee is an authorizing committee. We know what happened in 1986. They granted amnesty, they gave everybody amnesty, and they promised in the future they were going to fund an enforcement mechanism, but they didn't do it. It was the bait and switch.

So what did we get? We got an authorization to step up enforcement on our borders, but we didn't get the money to do it. We don't have it yet. Who is to say we won't have a slowdown in the economy next year, and they will cut the money, we will never get the enforcement, and we will still have large numbers coming into the country illegally. That is a big concern to us.

We need to tie this issue down so that we know and the American people can have confidence that the enforcement mechanisms will work and will be funded. That is why the House took the approach they did.

I again say it is not true that those of us who oppose this bill oppose immigration. It is not true. We actually, at least as far as I am concerned, need to increase the numbers that come here legally. It is not true that we want to prosecute people.

What is true is that it is important for our Nation to create a humane, fair, and just way to deal with the people who are here illegally and to make positive and thoughtful decisions about how we want to handle immigration in the future. I do not believe this bill does that job. It is not something I can support. I hope the Senate will not support it. We will see a number of amendments that can make it better. I hope our Senate colleagues will study the legislation and inform themselves of the great issues at stake so we can fix it.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, I understand the majority leader may be coming soon and, if he does, I will suspend my remarks so he may be recognized and hope that after he is recognized, I can continue with my remarks.

This week, the Senate begins an overdue reform of our immigration laws. The Chair has been in the middle of that and is making contributions to it. Because nearly 10,000 illegal aliens cross the United States border every day, more than 3 million a year, we

should start--start--with border security. But then, once we secure the border and can uphold our limits on immigration, we should get quickly back to the American tradition of creating a legal status for those whom we welcome to temporarily work and study in the United States and who, by doing so, enrich our diversity and spur our economy. But my purpose today is to make sure we don't stop there, that we don't overlook, as Paul Harvey might say, ``the rest of the story,'' the rest of the immigration story; that is, helping prospective citizens who are legally here become Americans.

Joined by Senators Cornyn, Isakson, Cochran, Santorum, Frist, and McConnell, I have introduced S. 1815, the Strengthening American Citizenship Act that is indispensable to any comprehensive immigration bill. This legislation I plan to offer as an amendment at the appropriate time during this debate would help legal immigrants who are embarked on a path toward citizenship to learn our common language, to learn our history, and to learn our way of government by the following steps:

No. 1, providing them with $500 grants for English courses; No. 2, allowing those who become fluent in English to apply for citizenship 1 year early; that is, after 4 years instead of 5; next, providing grants to organizations to offer courses in American history and civics; next, authorizing a new foundation to assist in these efforts; next, codifying the oath of allegiance, which new citizens swear when they are naturalized. It is an oath of allegiance that is very much like the oath of allegiance George Washington and his officers took at Valley Forge in 1778, about which I am going to have more to say.

In addition, our amendment would ask the Homeland Security Department, working with the National Archivist and others in our Government, to carry out a strategy to highlight the ceremonies, such as the one the President attended this week, in which immigrants become American citizens; finally, our amendment would establish an award to recognize the contribution of outstanding new American citizens.

Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington has written that most of our politics is about conflicts among principles that unite us as a country. More than any other subject we might discuss, this immigration debate will involve the basic principles of what it means to become an American. That is why we begin the debate with border security, not because we are pro-immigrant or anti-immigrant. That is not what we are talking about. We begin the debate with border security because as Americans we believe in the principle of the rule of law.

It is hypocritical for us in the United States of America to preach to the world about the rule of law, yet thumb our nose at the 12 million people who live here illegally. It is hypocritical and it is dangerous to our security not to control our own borders.

There is no apology to be made for us as Americans insisting on the principle of the rule of law, just as there should be no other hesitancy about other principles, such as welcoming those who temporarily work here and study here. So the principle of the rule of law is not the only principle that is at stake in this debate. We create a legal status for those from other countries whom we welcome to temporarily study and work here because of the principle, first, of equal opportunity, because we are a nation of immigrants; that is a part of our character, and because we founded our economy upon the principle of laissez faire. In other words, we are a free market economy.

So there are three more principles we need to throw into the mix along with the rule of law: equal opportunity, a nation of immigrants, laissez faire.

We may be outsourcing jobs, but for years we have won our wars and built our economy by ``insourcing'' brain power. Wernher von Braun and his colleagues from Germany helped us in the space race against the Soviets. Sixty percent of the American winners of Nobel Prizes in physics are immigrants or children of immigrants. Sixty percent of the postdoctoral students at our universities in America are foreign students. There are 572,000 foreign students studying at colleges and universities in the United States. While they are here, these students and researchers from other countries help create a higher standard of living for us Americans, and when they go home they export our values better than any foreign aid ever has.

In addition, many of the workers our economy needs to grow come from neighboring countries. I asked my staff to see if I could get an estimate of how many visas we have on the books today for workers coming to the United States from other countries. As best we can tell, we have about 500,000 visas of different forms that may be issued each year, of one kind or another, to unskilled and skilled people who come to our country. Add that to the 572,000 foreign students who study in our country and we have today a large number of people from other parts of the world who are here, enriching our country and improving our standard of living.

I ask unanimous consent that this list of visas for workers coming to the United States from other countries each year be printed in the Record following my remarks.

Mr. President, these temporary students and workers have helped us create an economy that last year produced 30 percent of the world's wealth for us Americans alone, who constitute just 5 percent of the world's population. It makes no sense for us to have an immigration system that makes it easy for unskilled workers to come here illegally and harder for the brightest people to come here legally. That is why it is my hope this comprehensive immigration bill we are considering will have in it the ideas that would make it easier, modestly easier, for a larger number of highly skilled people to come here and help us create better jobs.

For example, there are two recommendations that were made in the document called ``Rising Above the Gathering Storm,'' by the National Academy of Sciences panel, headed by Norm Augustine. This was a set of 20 recommendations that was made to us in Congress by this distinguished panel last summer in answer to our question: What should we do to keep our advantage in science and technology so that our good- paying jobs don't go to India and China?

They told us 20 things to do. Two of the things to do had to do with making it easier for the most intelligent people in the world to work and study and do research here. One of the ideas would be to give a green card, a permanent residency card, to any student from overseas who earns a doctorate in mathematics, engineering, technology, or the physical sciences. Those persons could stay here and help improve our standard of living.

For example, at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, the largest science laboratory in the United States of America, the director, the assistant director, and the head of our United States effort to recapture the lead in supercomputing in the world--those jobs are all filled by people from other countries who have green cards, who are here helping us improve our standard of living. So we are glad they are here, and we should make it easier for such people to come.

Craig Barrett, the head of Intel, estimates if we were to adopt this provision, that would mean perhaps 12,000 to 15,000 additional doctoral students in math, engineering, technology, or physical sciences, once they earn their degree, can stay in the United States.

The other provision was at one point in the Judiciary Committee mark. It may still be there. But it takes the cap off some categories of highly advanced people who have earned an advanced degree in science, technology, engineering, and math. It is simply in our own interest to do that. It continues a long tradition and is one more example of why we already have a tradition of welcoming workers and students who temporarily work here.

So we have at least four principles at play that I have talked about: The rule of law, equal opportunity, laissez faire, and we have the characteristic of our country being a nation of immigrants. But there is another principle that I believe is the single most important principle we have in this debate and it is the one that is engraved above the chair of the Presiding Officer. It is the motto of this country: E pluribus

unum. Our work will not be complete until we help prospective citizens become Americans because our country's greatest accomplishment is based upon that principle. That is, we have united people from many different backgrounds into one nation based upon the belief in a few ideas, rather than upon race, ancestry, or background.

Of all the principles we will be debating in these next 2 weeks, none is more important than that one chosen as our national motto, the one carved in stone above the desk, E pluribus unum: one from many.

We are not here dividing sides up on who is pro-immigrant and who is anti-immigrant. We are here saying we have 5 important principles we all believe in that unite us as Americans, from rule of law to equal opportunity to E pluribus unum. We are trying to put those together in a sensible way. That is what our politics is about. That is most of what we do in the Senate and that is what the people expect us to do today. Each year we welcome about 1 million permanent new legal residents, many of whom go on to become citizens. I am now talking about people who are legally in the United States of America.

To become an American is a significant accomplishment. First, you must live in the United States as a legal permanent resident for 5 years. Next, you must learn to speak English, our common language. Next, you must learn about our history and Government. Since we are united by ideas rather than the color of our skin, one has to learn these ideas to become a citizen. Next, you must swear an oath and renounce the government of the country from which you came and then swear allegiance to the United States of America.

Those are pretty strong words--renounce the government of the country from which you came and swear allegiance to the country to which you are going. Where does that come from? This is where it comes from. This oath dates back to May 12, 1778, when General George Washington and the general officers at Valley Forge signed an oath very similar to the one taken by the 30 citizens the President swore in on Monday, the oath that more than 500,000 new American citizens took last year in hundreds of naturalization ceremonies all over America.

Here is a portion of the oath Washington and his general officers swore:

I, George Washington, Commander in Chief of the armies of

the United States of America, do acknowledge the United

States of America to be Free, Independent, and Sovereign

states, and declare that the people thereof owe no allegiance

or obedience to George the Third, King of Great-Britain; and

I renounce, refuse and abjure any allegiance or obedience to

him; and I do swear that I will to the utmost of my power,

support, maintain and defend the said United States of

America. . . .

Those were remarkable words then. Those were remarkable words on Monday, when those 30 new citizens stood up and said the same thing.

The language in the oath immigrants take today comes from that oath in 1778. It says in effect: I may be proud of where I come from, but I am prouder of where I am. In both the last session of Congress and in this session, Senator Schumer and I introduced legislation, S. 1087, to put the wording of the oath of allegiance derived from this into law, giving it the same dignity as the Star Spangled Banner and the Pledge of Allegiance.

Becoming an American is also a unique experience because it has nothing to do with ancestry. America is an idea, not a race. We are united by principles expressed in our founding documents, the very principles we are debating in this immigration legislation, not by our multiple ancestries.

Americans enjoy more rights than the citizens of any nation on the face of the Earth and our Founders recognized, as every citizen and prospective citizen must, that along with those rights come responsibilities. The new citizens, like those who came before, must appreciate this simple but fundamental truth: In a free society, freedom and responsibility go hand in hand.

Some have suggested our diversity is what makes our country great.

To be sure, diversity is one of our great strengths, but diversity is not our greatest strength. Jerusalem is diverse. The Balkans are diverse. Iraq is diverse. The greatest accomplishment of the United States of America is that we have molded that magnificent diversity into one nation, based upon a set of common principles, language, and traditions.

That is why the words above the desk of the Presiding Officer say one from many, not many from one. And that is why a comprehensive immigration bill is not complete unless we help prospective citizens who are legally here become Americans.

We could look to Great Britain and France to remind us of how fortunate we are to have had two centuries of practice helping new citizens become Americans. Last August, when he announced a number of measures regarding British citizenship, Prime Minister Tony Blair said:

People who want to be British citizens should share our

values and our way of life.

These new rules were spurred by the terrorist attack in London in which four young men, three of whom were the British-born children of Pakistani immigrants, bombed the London subway system.

France is facing a similar period of self-examination on integrating immigrants and the children of immigrants following violent civil unrest this last November.

According to the French Ambassador:

These teenagers feel alienated and discriminated against

both socially and economically. They don't want to assert

their difference. They want to be considered 100 percent

French.

It is hard to imagine becoming French or becoming British or becoming Japanese or Chinese or German, for that matter. On the other hand, to be a citizen of this country, one must become an American. We should be wise enough to take a lesson from the difficulties of our friends overseas and redouble our effort to help new citizens become Americans. This is, of course, one more reason to control our borders--so that we know who is coming from other countries and can help those who legally choose to stay here to become Americans.

We Americans have always understood that perhaps the most important limit on how many new citizens our country can successfully absorb depends upon how many can be assimilated as Americans. Robert Putnam has written in the book ``Bowling Alone'' how at the beginning of the 20th century, when America experienced an influx of foreigners about as great in terms of percentages as that of today, the Nation took seriously the issue of assimilation. It was during this time that civic organizations such as the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts and the Rotary Clubs were launched. Many industries had programs that taught English and history to foreign workers. The most important agent of assimilation was the common school, what we call today the public school.

The late Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said the public school was created largely ``to teach immigrant children reading, writing, and arithmetic--and what it means to be an American.''

Yet today U.S. history is not as important a part of the school curriculum as it once was. As a result, high school seniors score lower on U.S. history than on any other subject. I have worked with Senators Kennedy, Byrd, Reid, and a number of others to help put the teaching of American History and civics back in its rightful place in our schools so our children can grow up learning what it means to be an American.

But while we are teaching our children more about what it means to be an American, we should also be stepping up efforts to help the 500,000 to 1 million permanent legal residents who are living legally among us and who will this year become American citizens.

During these next 2 weeks, we should enact legislation to secure our borders. That honors the principle of the rule of law. Then we should create a legal status for the workers and the students we welcome here to help increase our standard of living, as well as to support our values. That honors the principle that we are a nation of immigrants, that we believe in equal opportunity, and that we believe in a free market, laissez faire. But we should not complete work on a comprehensive immigration bill without remembering why we have placed that three-word motto above the Presiding Officer's chair,

without remembering that our unity did not come without a lot of effort, without noticing lessons from overseas that remind us that it is more important today than ever to help prospective citizens become Americans.

In the spring of 2002, 4 years ago, when Senator Fred Thompson decided not to run for reelection, my job then was on the Harvard faculty at the Kennedy School of Government. I was teaching a class I created there called the American Character and America's Government. Matt Sonnesyn, who is my senior policy adviser today, was my course assistant at the time.

In that course, we looked at the kinds of issues that Senators might deal with. I had no idea at the time that I might be a Senator. We tried to identify the principles that each of the problems raised. In other words, we recognized that since we are a nation united by principles, we wanted to be able to understand the principles and have a principled discussion when we got issues like school choice or support for faith-based institutions.

Perhaps the issue that created the most discussion in our class that semester was a question that was presented in this way: Should illegal immigrants in the State of Illinois have State driver's licenses?

The President of Mexico, Vicente Fox, had come to Chicago and asked the Illinois legislature to do that.

If one of my students had stood up and said: I have a pro-immigrant or an anti-immigrant solution to this problem, that student would probably have earned an F because I asked them to identify the principles that this issue raised. This was a typical university class of pretty smart students in an area where more of the students are to the left, I would say. There were several refugees from the recent Clinton administration, there were some international students, and there were students from all over our country of many races and backgrounds.

But the first issue this class raised when considering the question of driver's licenses for illegal immigrants in Illinois was the principle of the rule of law. Then we went right through the other principles that I have just discussed today. And a little bit to my surprise, this class came down very hard on the idea that, of all the principles considered, the principle of rule of law required no driver's licenses for people not legally here.

They came to that conclusion quickly. But they also came quickly to the conclusion that in a country that always values equal opportunity, laissez faire, and a nation of immigrants, that we should have clear rules for welcoming people who are temporarily working here and temporarily studying here, that there should be generous allotments for that, that it was in our interest. They also spent a lot of time talking about those three words above the Presiding Officer's chair, about how can we help all those who were here legally to learn what it is to be an American.

I was very impressed with the way our class 4 years ago at that university dealt with the issue of immigration. It had a similar problem to the one we are facing. They considered all the principles. It was not considered to be a pro-immigration or anti-immigration result. It was a discussion about principles in which we all agree, which collide, and it was up to the students in that class to come to a solution which was principled.

That is our job in this body. We need to let the American people know that we honor each of the principles that we talk about today. We should not step back one inch from honoring the principle of the rule of law, but we shouldn't be hesitant for one minute to welcome those who work here and study here because we also honor the principle of equal opportunity, being a nation of immigrants and the free market economy that we are.

I hope before we are through in these 3 weeks that we will do as the students did 4 years ago and realize that above all, when we talk about immigration, about people coming to this country, that what is distinctive about America, what is our greatest accomplishment, is not that we can figure out a way to create laws and virtual laws to control our borders, not that we can come up with some mathematical number of people who can work and study here, but what we have been able to do that France has not done, that Great Britain has not done, that China and Germany have not done--no country in the world has ever done the way we have--is that we have taken people from all different backgrounds and said we are the United States of America. And to become an American you believe in ideals, and it doesn't matter where you come from, what your race is, what your background is.

It is important that we keep that up front, that we honor our diversity but more important that we can be proud of where we come from but prouder where we are; that we honor the oath of allegiance that our amendment will seek to make law, where George Washington and his officers said we put aside where we came from--we may honor it, we may be proud of where we may go to reunions and talk about it, but we are Americans.

That is the most important subject for an immigration debate, and this bill will not be complete without it.

I look forward to offering an amendment at the appropriate time that adds to our discussion of helping prospective citizens become Americans. This would be the only country in the world in which such an amendment would have that kind of meaning.

Exhibit 1

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Senator Frist and Senator McConnell be added as cosponsors to S. 1815, the Strengthening American Citizenship Act.

Mr. President, I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, on behalf of the leader, I ask consent that at 3 p.m. today, the Senate proceed to vote in relation to the Frist amendment at the desk related to a study on deaths on the border; provided further that no amendments be in order prior to that vote.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the time before the vote be allocated as follows: the next 30 minutes beginning at 1:20 be under the control of the Democratic leader or his designee; the following 30 minutes be under the majority control; the next 30 minutes be under the control of the Democratic side; and finally that the remaining time before the vote be equally divided between the two sides.

Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I see Senator Bingaman. I will be brief in my remarks because I assume he wants to speak. If I could say to the chairman, who was here earlier, I hope very much we can begin to move to votes. I spoke earlier today about an amendment which I filed which is amendment No. 3193. It is filed at the desk. It already has the cosponsorship of Senators Cornyn, Isakson, Cochran, and Santorum. I ask unanimous consent that Senators McConnell and McCain be added as cosponsors.

The majority leader, Senator Frist, is also a cosponsor.

While I do understand and am disappointed by the fact that we are not going to be moving to votes tonight, this is not a new idea that I have made in my amendment. My first speech on the floor of the Senate in 2003 was about the importance of becoming American, how in our country we are unique because we do not base our backgrounds on race or ancestry but on a set of ideas, and how important it was for us to put the teaching of American history back in its rightful place in our schools so our children can grow up learning what it means to be an American.

Senator Reid, the Democratic leader, joined me on that. Senator Kennedy joined me and Senator Reid. He and I are working together to create Presidential academies for students and teachers of American history. We are trying to take the National Assessment of Educational Progress and make sure that it includes another way of putting the teaching of American history back in the right place in our curriculum.

The reason we do that is because our common schools were created to help immigrant children learn the three Rs and what it means to be an American. Because if you don't know the principles upon which our country is based, it is difficult to become an American. We have this advantage over other countries in the world who base their nationality on race or on the color of their skin or their ancestry. We don't do that. It is important to become an American by understanding the principles of our country. We agree on that. It is those principles that we debate here.

This is not a debate about who is pro or anti-immigrant. We are all pro-immigration because that is an important part of our character. But we have more than one principle at issue here. The first one is the rule of law. We are all for the rule of law because people who come to this country don't come to a country where we don't stop at stop signs and we don't observe contracts and we don't follow the law. We follow the law here or there are consequences. We have those principles. And we have the principle of equal opportunity. And we have the principle of a free market or laissez faire. We have the principle above the President's desk of E Pluribus Unum. Our great achievement is that we have taken this magnificent diversity and forged it into one country. We are the United States of America, not the United Nations.

Therefore, the amendment that I had filed today and is ready to be voted on tonight or tomorrow or Monday, whenever we are ready, ought not to be very controversial. It is simply to help the half million to a million people from other countries who are legally here and ready to become citizens, to help them become Americans. It does that by providing them with $500 grants so they can learn our common language. It doesn't make them learn it; it helps them, if they want to learn it. It says to those who become fluent in English that they may become citizens in 4 years instead of 5. It doesn't penalize them. It gives them rewards. It gives grants to organizations to help them learn our history. It codifies the oath of allegiance George Washington and his troops took and that millions of Americans have taken which basically says I am not Scotch-Irish anymore, which my family was. I am an American. I am proud of my Italian heritage, but I am proud to be American. That has been our history.

Senator Schumer and I in two Congresses have introduced legislation making that oath a law, not just some administrative dictum that someone could mess around with, but put it right up there with the Star-Spangled Banner, the National Anthem, and other great symbols of America.

My amendment establishes a reward to recognize the contributions of outstanding new citizens. It asks the Department of Homeland Security and the National Archives to develop ways to dignify and celebrate these wonderful ceremonies such as the one the President attended on Monday where 30 people stood up and said: I have been here 5 years. I have demonstrated good character. I have learned English, and I am proud of where I came from. But I am prouder to be American. I swear allegiance to this country, the same oath George Washington and the officers took at Valley Forge in the year 1778 and which new citizens have taken in this country ever since then.

We could talk about border security. It is important, and that is the rule of law. We can solve that problem. We know how to do that. We can agree on that. We can talk about how many guest workers we want. We already authorize 500,000 or more work visas a year. Perhaps we need more. We can figure that out. The distinguished Senator from New Mexico and I have been working for a year with the National Academy of Sciences to make certain that we in-source brainpower so we can keep our jobs from going to China and India. I would like, through this legislation, to make it easier for the brightest people in the world to come here and help us create our high standard of living.

I mentioned earlier in the day that the top three jobs at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, our largest science lab in America, are held by three foreigners with green cards from England, Canada, and India. The Senator and I have worked together to recapture our advantage in supercomputing in America so that America can be the leader in computing. Who runs that program? It is a citizen of India who is living here. Not only is there nothing wrong with that, but he is here helping improve my standard of living and the next person's standard of living.

I want our discussion to be a comprehensive discussion. I want us to deal with border security. That is the rule of law. But I want us to set rules for welcoming the people who temporarily work here and study here, but I also want us to make sure we do the most

important thing and remember those three words up there in the Senate Chamber, ``e pluribus unum.'' They are not there by accident. They mean that we need to devote extra effort to making sure that those who come here legally also become Americans. That is the real limit on the number of new citizens who can come here--whether they can become a part of our culture, a part of our country, and become Americans.

If we don't do that, we are nothing more than a united nations; we are not the United States of America. I think there is broad agreement in this body about that. That is why Senator Schumer and I introduced the oath of allegiance bill. That is why myself and others are working on helping to put American History back in our schools for children. I am ready to vote on this amendment tonight or tomorrow, but I certainly hope the chairman and the leaders on both sides of the aisle would allow Senator Bingaman's amendment and my amendment and others to be voted upon as soon as possible.

The American people are expecting us to deal with immigration. We are here and we are ready to do it. Let's get on with it. It is time to stop debating and start acting, and a good way to start would be to help prospective citizens become Americans. That would finish a comprehensive bill.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the pending amendment be set aside and amendment No. 3193, which I filed at the desk, be considered.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that further reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Mr. President, I express my sincerest appreciation for the leadership of Senator John Cornyn as we have attempted in the Judiciary Committee--of which we are both members--to try and help produce a bill that will actually work, that will allow legal immigration to be formal, effective, and allow more people to come into our country legally while ending the disarray which now exists. He is so knowledgeable as a former justice on the Supreme Court of Texas and former attorney general of Texas. He understands it so well, being a Member from a State that deals with this in such a consistent and continuous way. I thank the Senator for his excellent work.

One of the aspects that is most troubling to me about the process--as it has gone along, I have become even more concerned about it--is that it indicates a lack of serious thought about what we are going to do as a nation to deal with those who are here illegally now. We know there are a lot of good

people here. What are we going to do in the future?

Let me report how things went in the Judiciary Committee. We had the Alito hearings, we had the Roberts hearings, we had the PATRIOT Act debate, and we had the asbestos debate. We have been as busy as any committee has ever been on a host of important issues facing our country all year. It seems as if that is about all I do, and I am on the Armed Services Committee at a time when we are a nation at war. We have a lot of things going on, and we have worked very hard.

At the beginning of the process, I expressed concern asked that we not rush the committee into something before it was ready. The majority leader set this time for this bill to come to the floor, and he said he expected us to complete a bill if we wanted a Judiciary Committee bill to be the vehicle on the floor. So the committee tried to do it. But there was not enough time. We did not give enough thought to it, in my view. We met for 6 days in the Judiciary Committee attempting to mark up Chairman Specter's immigration legislation, a mark that he put out which is considerably better, in my view, then what is currently on the floor. His was not acceptable in some ways, but it is better than the one we produced. He put his mark out for debate in Committee.

We began to discuss it. We met on March 2, March 8, March 9, March 15, 16, and 27. Six days may sound like a lot in the committee process, but this bill is 400 pages involving tremendous national issues which many people feel strongly about and which deserve real discussion.

During the first day, we basically just talked about the bill. No amendments were offered during the markup. During the next 3 days, we talked about the enforcement provisions of the bill and simply accepted by unanimous consent noncontroversial amendments to the first two titles of the bill, two of the seven titles. We accepted some amendments.

Then we get to day four. We did not have a single vote on any amendment during those first four days of hearings. On the fifth day, we once again in committee talked about how best to proceed. No amendments were offered, and none were voted on.

During the 5 days, we did not vote on a single amendment. All the controversial issues got pushed off to Monday. We are not normally here on Monday, but we showed up on Monday because the leader said we had to have a bill out Monday night or he would bring up his own bill.

During the morning session on Monday, we spent 3\1/2\ hours talking about amendments on the enforcement provisions of the bill. We spent a good bit of time on the enforcement provisions and made some progress. I got optimistic to the point that I have said if we did just a few more things, we could create an enforcement system that would work. So we spent a little time on enforcement. But we are still now talking about title II of the seven titles in the bill.

After lunch on Monday of this week, we met for another 3\1/2\ hours and ran through the remaining five titles, five sections of the bill, with little discussion and less understanding of what the amendments were and what they amounted to. We voted on several amendments without even having language to review. In only 3\1/2\ hours on Monday, we voted on four amnesty provisions and increased the chairman's mark by over 100 pages.

Let me make this clear. We spent 5 days talking about the enforcement issues with little controversy there. In contrast, we spent 3\1/2\ hours passing out the massive amnesty provisions in the bill that is now in the Senate that will attempt to legalize and put on an automatic path, virtually, to citizenship.

We also passed legislation that increases the legal immigration in our country by at least double--probably more than that--to 400,000 per year, with little discussion of who and how that should be done. It just was offered and passed.

I believe this Senate needs to slow down and think about where we are. It is very important.

Members of this Senate have expressed deep concern that the border has become a major gateway for terrorists to have access to the United States. Senator Feinstein expressed that. Clearly, she is from California. We are pleased to have three Senators--Senator Feinstein from California, Senator Kyl from Arizona, and Senator Cornyn from Texas--who live on the border and know about it and understand it in many ways, far better than the rest of us. I share her concern and believe it can only be remedied by focusing on fixing our immigration system as a whole. It is something we can do. This is within our grasp at this point, but we are not there yet.

Securing our borders and being able to keep track of the people who come in and out of our country is essential to our security. We know that countries without secure immigration policies are a natural fit for bad actors who seek to live anonymously within their borders. A country that does not protect its borders and does not know the identity of those who come in and out of the country is laying out the welcome mat for criminals and even terrorists.

I have visited a number of times with troops and other government officials in Afghanistan. I have had the honor to meet with General Jones, our commander in Europe, General Abizaid, our commander in Central Command, and they have expressed exceedingly great concern to me about unregulated border areas. They have emphasized that there are a number of places around the globe, border areas of countries that are not very effective countries, in which criminals can gather and nobody does anything about it. It gets worse and worse, and terrorists nest there. The most dramatic example of that, of course, is this very long and very large border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, where many think Osama bin Laden hides out today. Some ask why isn't it possible for us to find him? It is a very large area. It is basically an area that has not been controlled effectively by the Governments of Pakistan or Afghanistan, and as a result, it is far more difficult.

I just came from there last week and had a briefing on this specific area. If anyone heard the briefing I had, there would be a far greater understanding of how difficult it is to control these areas.

A great nation like the United States has to do better. We cannot allow that tendency to occur in our country. I believe we can say with some integrity and honesty that tends to be what is happening here on our border.

Last night, I had an exchange with Senator Kyl in the Senate, and he talked about the increasing number of people who are involved in crime on the Arizona-Mexico border. Many are not from Mexico. Many are from further south, from other countries, who come into Mexico, but it is an area in which they operate, move drugs, extort, carry people, and it is not a healthy situation at all. It is something a great nation, if we care about the people who want to live here and come into our country legally, should be very concerned about.

The United States felt the sharp consequences of open borders and lax enforcement when our ineffective immigration policies enabled 19 terrorists to obtain visas into the United States on September 11. September 11 was not the only act of terrorism on U.S. soil, though, that has resulted from poor immigration policies.

Let's talk about the Brooklyn subway plot. People may have forgotten that. Gazi Ibrahim Abu Mezer was caught by the Border Patrol agents three times while trying to illegally cross the Canadian border. After a third apprehension, Canada would not take him back. Because the United States suffers from a severe lack of detention space for illegal aliens like Mezer, what happened to him? Canada would not take him back. He was released into the country on bail with a promise that he would show up for a hearing at which he would be deported. So he wants to come to this country, he is apprehended for the third time, Canada will not let him come back, and they release him on a promise that he will show up for a hearing on whether he should be deported. It sounds like, based on those facts, he probably was confident he would be. While waiting for his hearing, Mezer busied himself by plotting to bomb the Brooklyn subway.

Mohammad Salameh, one of the World Trade Center bombing coconspirators in the first World Trade

Center bombing attempt in 1993--more than an attempt; an explosion that did not bring down the building applied for a tourist visa to the United States. Although Mohammad Salameh overcame the presumption that he was required to overcome as a single male, young, and received a visa, he overstayed the visa and remained illegally in the United States. We passed amnesty. He applied then to be a permanent resident. It was rejected. Somebody caught it somehow and saw something there. What did he do? He applies for amnesty under the 1986 act, and they reject it. So what does that mean? Was he sent home? No, he just simply remained in the United States. Nobody bothered to come and look for him. He continued living and working here because there was no enforcement mechanism in place allowing authorities to detain and remove rejected green card applicants.

Mahmud Abouhalima, a leader of the 1993 trade bombing, was legalized as a part of the 1986 amnesty, also. It was only after he was legalized that he was able to travel outside the United States. The trips he took after being granted amnesty included several to Afghanistan and Pakistan, where he received the training he used in the bombing.

Most people who seek to stay in our country are good and decent people. They are not terrorists. We know that. But we have an increasing number of criminals from around the world seeking to enter this country, and we have the terrorist problem.

Abounalima took advantage of the amnesty. He got approved. Proper background checks apparently were not conducted, and he then, as a permanent legal resident, green card holder, was free to travel back and forth around the world and go to Afghanistan and Pakistan. That is where he got his training for the 1993 bombing.

The mastermind of the 1993 bombing was Ramzi Yousef. He did not waste time applying for a visa to come to the United States. Upon his arrival at JFK Airport, he simply applied for asylum, saying he was persecuted. There was a lack of detention space while they were trying to determine his status. They said to this man who illegally appeared at John F. Kennedy Airport--You are here illegally; we will arrest you. And he says: I claim asylum; I am here because I have been run out of my country. So he is entitled, now, to a trial or a hearing on that. But they cannot do it that day, and they do not have any place to put him, so they release him. They parole him into the country until a hearing can be held on his asylum claim. Yousef then used that time inside the United States to plan the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Tower.

Not only have our amnesty, visa issuance, and asylum policies brought terrorists into the United States, our programs have also served as a conduit for criminals and terrorists.

Hesham Mohamed Hadayet, murdered two people at the El Al counter at Los Angeles International Airport in July 2002. Less than a year after 9/11, Hadayet conducted that attack at the airport which resulted in the murder of two people.

He received legal status through the diversity lottery visa in this fashion: In 2002, Hadayet was a visa overstayer. He got a visa, came here, but he stayed illegally beyond the time he was supposed to stay. In his asylum claim, when they confronted him about it, he claimed that he was entitled to asylum, too. That is a good thing to say because that stops the works. So he claimed asylum. But a hearing was held, and the determination was that he was not entitled to asylum. It was rejected.

But with no mechanism, no will and no capacity to tell the truth, to remove him, he just stayed in the United States with his wife. Then Hadayet's wife won the diversity visa lottery. She got a green card and she was able to get one for her husband. So both of them were legalized. That is how he got into the country--not a way it should have happened. Once his asylum had been rejected, he should have been removed.

Now, we have been reading in the paper about Zacarias Moussaoui, who just confessed, apparently, to his intent to participate in the September 11 bombings in plane attacks in our country. He entered the country under the visa waiver program, and he just confessed that he was to fly a plane into the White House.

I would like to share a few more things about the ineffectiveness of our system. Most of the people who come here are not criminals. Most of the people who come here have legitimate reasons. They ought to wait until we are able to check their records and verify they are an appropriate person to come in our country. That is how the system is supposed to work. But the truth is, we are seeing a larger number of criminals coming in than we ever have before.

Criminals from other countries, and those who would commit crimes, also use the immigration system against us.

On December of 2005, Secretary Chertoff, the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, testified that the Border Patrol encountered 1.1 million illegal aliens attempting to cross the southwest border between the legitimate ports of entry illegally.

Just a few weeks ago, a Department of Homeland Security employee told us that approximately 12 percent--12 percent--of the people apprehended already had criminal records. That is 139,000 people. So for those they apprehended, they did a background check on them, and they found that 12 percent of those had a criminal record already, totaling 139,000 people.

In 2004, the Department of Homeland Security deported over 88,000 criminal aliens. Those removals accounted for over 40 percent of the people who were removed. Now, these are not simple immigration violations. They are serious offenses: fraud, drugs, extortion, or violence.

If we catch one criminal entering the country, each year, for every criminal entering the country we do not catch--and some say that is about correct--it is highly likely the United States received a net gain, in 2004, of 51,000 criminals, none of whom should have been allowed in the country if an appropriate system were operating.

A great nation does not have to accept everybody who wants to come. No nation does--not everybody. So we set standards. One of the standards is, people are not allowed in the country who have criminal records or charges are pending against them.

Now, the numbers of criminal aliens in the country is startling, I have to tell you. I wish it were not so, but I am just telling you what the numbers are. Criminal aliens now constitute a large percent of all the Federal prisoners in Federal prisons today. How many? What percent would you suspect? I will have to tell you, it is an astounding 27 percent. Twenty-seven percent of the Federal prisoners today are illegal aliens, criminal aliens.

In 2003, that means 44,000 criminal aliens were serving sentences in Federal jails. This is just the Federal jails, which probably represent 10 percent of all the prisoners in the United States. I believe those percentages could be even higher in State and local prisons. And I understand in some States it may be even higher, like in California and others.

An April of 2005 a GAO, Government Accountability Office, report found that the number of criminal aliens incarcerated in the United States increased 15 percent from 2001 to 2004. That is a steady and substantial increase.

According to the Bureau of Prisons, the cost of incarcerating criminal aliens totaled approximately $1.2 billion in 2004.

Now, again, I am not saying that we need to reject people and stop immigration and never allow anybody into our country because we are having an increasing number of people who attempt to come here who are criminals. What I am saying is, we need to make our system work so we can identify those people who have criminal histories and not allow them in and allow the good and decent people in. Isn't that what it is all about? It is a very important point.

Criminal aliens are also having a severely negative impact at the State and local level. Recently, an ICE agent--those are the immigration enforcement officers--in Alabama contacted me to tell me there is an enormous, growing problem with aliens trafficking drugs across north Alabama. Who would think that? He informed me that all of the green card holders he arrests for criminal convictions for trafficking dope were once illegal aliens but have been granted amnesty somewhere along the way.

To quote him directly, he said--this is what he told me:

[It is] because they had no respect for the law when they

jumped the river, worked illegally, and used fake documents

with false names.

That is what he said. Who can say there is no truth to that? I think there is some truth to that. Simply giving an illegal alien a green card does not suddenly make that person a law-abiding citizen. We need to make sure we have ascertained, when a person applies to come into our country by visa, or to obtain a green card, that they are law- abiding citizens who are going to contribute positively to our country.

I like to tell my friends in Texas the whole story about Alabama. Perhaps Georgia has a spin on it. It probably has a little spin on it, I say to the Presiding Officer. But the story was: If somebody got in trouble with the law in Alabama, and you went to their house, they would have ``GTT'' on the door. What did that stand for? ``Gone To Texas.'' In the old days, they did not have many prisons, and basically if you got out of town, that was fine.

I am wondering, sometimes, if people who are getting in trouble in their home countries are not finding it easier than being arrested and put in jail in their own country to just leave town. And if they leave town, maybe the local police and constabularies are happy to have them go and do not mind what happens to them. I am afraid some of that may be occurring here. I suspect in the early days, Georgia sent their people to Alabama, Mr. President. I don't know. Of course, your State was founded--I will not get into that story.

The next story from Alabama ICE agents was surprising to me. In December of last year, in the past few months, they arrested, in the north Alabama area, a leader of the MS-13 street gang--that is basically an El Salvadorian violent street gang--for possessing a stolen firearm. ICE had to release the gang member from custody a couple months later because the judge determined that he derived U.S. citizenship from his father who received amnesty in the 1990s and was naturalized when the gang member was 17. Normally, as a noncitizen, being charged with this offense, he would be deported.

A few weeks ago, just 30 days after being released from custody, the gang leader was again arrested, this time for firing eight rounds out of a car at a rival gang member in the town of Pelham, AL. Because he received citizenship through amnesty, Alabama will not see him deported.

The guy the gang leader shot at is the area leader of the Brown Pride 13 street gang, which is another street gang. ICE tells me this gang leader is also a once-illegal alien who received amnesty and a green card.

Now, we want to give amnesty to the people who deserve it. But we need to create a system that when we do that we have examined them to make sure they are the kind of people who would make good citizens. That is what we tell the American people we are going to do. That is what we tell them we are going to do. We tell them this bill sets up a lawful system for people to apply to immigrate to our country and that before they are allowed to immigrate and become a citizen, get a permanent status to stay here permanently, that we have checked them out. I am saying to you, too often we fail to do that. It is a hollow promise. ICE, in dealing with this gang leader, must wait for him to be convicted of a crime for him to be arrested.

Unlike any of us, these Federal agents are in the trenches every day working hard to enforce the law, of which most of us only hear about on the news. As this ICE agent told me, he gets aggravated that people do not realize that yet another amnesty or allowance for adjustment of status will only ensure that the Government rubberstamps more criminals into our country and allows them to receive green cards. He is worried about that.

I think if we took care and did it right, that might not be the case. I believe we can do it. But we have to be fully aware and take intentional steps or his prediction will be correct. And based on what he has seen in his experience, I have no doubt that he is somewhat cynical about the willingness of our Congress to take the necessary steps to make sure it does not happen.

Around the country we are seeing an increase in the number of illegal criminal aliens who are being apprehended, some with access to critical infrastructure and information pertaining to national security interests.

Jerry Seper of the Washington Post has written about these issues for some time. I have noted with some interest his accounts that demonstrate the gaping holes in our immigration enforcement and security policies. Let's share some examples of what he reported.

In May of 2004, John Torres, Deputy Director for Smuggling and Public Safety, of ICE, the Immigration Service, testified before the House Judiciary Committee that criminal organizations worldwide make over $9.5 billion a year smuggling foreign nationals. This is his testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, the Government official at ICE, that these criminal organizations make over $9.5 billion a year smuggling foreign nationals, illicit drugs, and weapons into the United States.

This smuggling includes as many as 17,500 people forced to work as prostitutes. We have heard about the sex slave prostitution problem. He says it includes as many as 17,500 sweatshop laborers and domestic servants. Mr. Torres testified that these well-established smuggling and trafficking pipelines serve as conduits for illegal immigrants and criminals seeking entry into the country. Many of these people are easily exploited by terrorists and extremist organizations. It is these people who will be granted amnesty under many of the proposals currently pending on the floor. This is a prime example of why we must focus on enforcement and border protection before anything else.

That is what the House decided to do. People say the House bill is harsh. The House bill is not harsh in the sense that it simply examined our enforcement procedures and found them totally lacking. They concluded the most honest way to deal with the problem was to confront border laxity and our enforcement mechanisms and get that under control. Once we have done that, then we could go to the American people with a plan to determine how many people will come in in the future, how many people are here, and how to handle those people who are here, many of them as fine and decent a people as anybody would ever want to know, working hard every day, contributing to our country. We do owe them fair and humane treatment. I will not support any bill that does not give them that. But the House said, as a first step, let's do that.

We spent most of our time in the Judiciary Committee marking up the enforcement protections in the bill. But at the last day, this Monday, we dumped in about 100 pages or more of this issue, the more serious and complex issue of the people who are here, how to handle them, and who to allow in in the future. That is why we are a bit rushed. As a matter of fact, that bill was not even printed and received by the committee members. We did not know what the language was until it was finally printed Wednesday night at 8. Now they want us to pass this legislation dealing with the historic challenges in immigration going beyond improving enforcement to the entire philosophy and policy of our Nation for many years to come. We are not ready to do that. Certainly if we are, this bill is not the vehicle to do so.

Last year in an isolated incident in Virginia, ICE agents arrested nine criminal aliens, six of whom had been previously convicted on aggravated felony charges, including child molestation, drug possession, and sexual assault. These aliens should have been deported on conviction. That is what the law says. These aliens were identified during an investigation that found they had attempted to obtain immigration benefits through the CIS, the immigration services agency, including work permits and permanent resident status. These are nine of the estimated 85,000 criminal aliens walking our streets today.

Last March, ICE agents deported 37 criminal aliens rounded up in the Washington area, two of whom had ties to MS-13, the Salvadoran gang which operates within the region. This group of criminal aliens were people convicted of theft, assault, burglary, sexual battery, and malicious wounding. From the Washington area alone in

2004, ICE deported 819 criminal aliens. MS-13 has an estimated 2,000 members in northern Virginia alone. This is not your ordinary street gang. It is a malicious, violent gang involving alien and weapons smuggling, murder, robberies, burglaries, carjacking, extortion, rape, and aggravated assault.

In May of 2005, ICE arrested 60 illegal aliens working as contract employees at a dozen critical U.S. infrastructure sites nationwide, including seven petrochemical refineries, very much potential targets, three powerplants, a national air cargo facility, and a pipeline company. What these things demonstrate, when I talk about Alabama or northern Virginia, is that the system currently is not working. We can make it work. It is not that hard. We are pretty close to getting there. We have jumped 8 feet, but the ravine we need to jump across is 10 feet wide. Let's go the extra 2 feet. Let's get out there and create a legitimate enforcement mechanism that will guarantee that we are as open and friendly as we have always been to those who want to come to this country but with a system that does not allow criminals to take advantage of us, does not allow terrorists to take advantage of us. In fact, this bill fails to prohibit the entry into our country of criminals in an effective way. That is why Senator Kyl and Senator Cornyn have offered their amendment dealing with this particular issue. It absolutely needs to be a part of it. I was pleased that Senator Cornyn talked about the similarity between the bill we are moving today and the one we passed in 1986, which everybody agreed was amnesty. Black's Law Dictionary even defines amnesty by referring to the 1986 bill in their definition. Everybody admitted in 1986, it was amnesty. People have said we are not for amnesty. We have campaigned on it. Virtually every Senator, every leader, even the President has said we are not for amnesty. But anything you try to do, they say: That is not amnesty.

Is it not an automatic path to a green card and citizenship? Why isn't it automatic? Well, they have to pay $1,000. They have to pay their income taxes. Don't you have to pay your income taxes? What is this? You have to have a job. What do they come here for? To have a job. And then only the most part-time job with the most minimal proof would establish the work requirement. Basically it guarantees anybody here a path to citizenship as long as they don't get convicted of a felony. If you get convicted of a felony before you are deported today, the chances are very good you can maneuver your way out on bail and never be deported.

A good system would take a person directly from the incarceration facility and move them directly out of the country. That is what we say we are going to do, but we don't.

I have many more examples of situations in which we have not managed our immigration system well. As a result, illegal aliens have been caught working in nuclear plants and military bases in highly secret and sensitive areas of our country. We can do better than that. We absolutely can and we must do better than that.

I join with my colleagues Senators Kyl and Cornyn in saying: We definitely need to fix this omission in the bill that came out of committee that fails to properly deal with those who would come into the country illegally who have a criminal record and who could be put on a path to amnesty if we don't work it correctly.

I urge my colleagues, let's keep an open mind on the legislation. Let's remember that our Nation has some of the finest people you could ever want living and working here, but we need to deal with them fairly and humanely. We don't need to build a barrier around our country if it does not allow people to come here lawfully. We are a nation of immigrants and we always will and should welcome immigrants into the country, but we need to gain control of our borders. That includes physical barriers, virtual fences, improved enforcement, additional detention space, technology, and also workplace areas. If we eliminate the magnet of the workplace, if we take firm, effective steps on the border, we can reach that tipping point where people move from coming illegally into our country and we don't know then whether they are criminals. We move those people from the illegal path to entry into our country to a legal path. Isn't that what we want? Isn't that what we promised the American people time and again, when we have been asked about it in our States and on interview programs? We have all said that.

The legislation before us won't get us there. If we vote for that and tell our people that it will do the job, I do not believe we will be correct. Let's fix it. Let's improve it. Then we can make it work.

I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, before the Senator from North Dakota leaves, I have been paying attention to his comments and feel strongly that he has made very good points. I am going to zero in on areas he did not cover. I suspect he will agree with many.

One point is there is an answer to stopping our perforated borders. There is a means of doing it a lot cheaper than people have talked about. And the other point is a requirement for English to be the official language. It is a rather complicated subject, but those two areas I think the Senator probably would agree with me, as I agree with most of the remarks he has made.

First, Mr. President, for some reason, I have never been sure why it is, but I have been invited to speak at more naturalization ceremonies in my State of Oklahoma than any other Members, I believe. It is always a very touching event for me because these people go through the process, the legal process, of becoming a citizen of the United States, as my grandparents had to do. They learned the language. They learned more about the history of this country than the average person you will run into on the streets of Washington, DC. And these people are so proud.

I recall one guy. He is from Vietnam. His name is Thi Van Nguyen. He is an outstanding young man, and he had worked hard to become a citizen. I happened to be a speaker at his naturalization ceremony that was taking place in one of the courthouses in Oklahoma.

After the ceremony was over, he went down and changed his name to James Thi Nguyen, instead of Thi Van Nguyen, which was the highest honor one can pay because here is a person who wanted to go through the process of becoming a citizen the right way. It appears to me anything short of a slap in the face to all these people who came here legally and did it right.

I would like to mention a couple of areas I am going to be offering in the way of amendments. One is what we call the National Border and Neighborhood Watch Program or the BRAVE Force. There is an acronym for everything. It stands for border regiment assisting in valuable enforcement.

I think we have learned one thing that probably most of us knew already. I draw from a background of having been a developer in south Texas right on the Texas border. I have been there many times, and I have been down there actually working and developing for some 35, 40 years.

It happens I am an aviator, so I would always fly my own plane down there and land at Cameron County Airport. It is adjacent to the immigration center. I would watch and see what was going on. Yes, we are taking good care of those people.

I started getting interested in it. I said: What is the negative? What are

these people facing should they be caught trying to come illegally over the border? They go into the center. So I looked over at the center and saw half were in brown jumpsuits and half were in orange jumpsuits. I said: What is the reason for that?

They said: A football team brown versus the green and basketball and other activities.

Probably the food--I went over and inspected it--is better than most people would eat in their country.

I looked at that and thought: We aren't really offering much of a disincentive for people to come in illegally.

This program we call the Brave Force Program recognizes that our borders can be closed, our borders can be strong borders, and we can stop people from coming in. I am sick and tired of people saying this can't be done or it can only be done with a certain kind of fence. There are areas with serious problems, but the answer is in numbers.

The minutemen demonstrated very clearly that if you have enough people down there and take a 35-mile area, you can stop people from coming across. I recognize the criticism of that program. I don't agree with it. Certainly there is some authentic argument against it when they say these people are not law enforcement people. They are not trained that way.

I found out something after 9/11 when we were dealing with the TSA, and that is that Federal law enforcement officers have a mandatory retirement age of 57. Since I have worked with them before, I started getting letters from them saying: Why can't we come in as sky marshals and other positions? We, as an organization, would be willing to do it just for cost, just to pay our expenses.

If we had an army down there, as my amendment calls for, these people are available. It is virtually just for the cost of sustaining these people while they are on watch. There would be an army of law enforcement officers for each trained Border Patrol agent. Then we have the neighborhood watch people who are volunteers and are not trained properly, but they can help the second tier.

There would be three tiers. We would have the trained Border Patrol people, then the retired law enforcement officers, and then, of course, the neighborhood watch people. It is a numbers game that has been very successful and has worked.

Civilian volunteers, much like the minutemen, would be able to report to those who are in a higher level of training. I think this BRAVE Force would be effective. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to see we can do something on the border. It is just we have not been able to do it.

Let me interject that as one of the high-ranking members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, I certainly don't want to get sucked into the point where we are going to have to use military people on these borders when they are already overworked. The OPTEMPO of our military right now is at an unacceptable rate. By ``military,'' I mean our standing forces, as well as the Reserve components--the Guard and Reserve. This wouldn't affect that. This would ensure we are not going to have to further dilute our military.

That is one of the amendments I am going to offer. The second one has to do with the English language. I know people get all exercised about this issue. The language is taken almost verbatim from Peter King's House Resolution 4408 by strengthening a very weak provision in the Judiciary Committee bill that will be under consideration here, that illegal immigrants currently in the United States must merely ``demonstrate an effort'' to learn English when applying for a green card.

Anyone can demonstrate an effort to do anything. You don't have to do anything to do that. So that is a meaningless phrase. There is no requirement whatsoever. My amendment would require these immigrants to learn our language by making English the official language of the United States and making all official business of the United States conducted in English, including publications, tax forms, information material, and other items.

As a matter of fact, my amendment follows what at least 26 other States already have at the State level. They have English as the official language. Half the States already have that, and there is nothing wrong with making that uniform throughout the United States.

Making English the official language would eliminate about $1 billion to $2 billion annually that we spend on providing language assistance, including Federal agencies and funds recipients, according to the Office of Management and Budget.

Studies show that those who know English get better jobs, earn more money, and are less likely to be uninsured. As a result, English decreases Government dependency.

This will come as a shock to you, Mr. President, because they think-- and I do speak Spanish. I have worked for many years in areas--I was a commercial pilot in some of the Latin American countries. I know the language fairly well, so I can communicate. But I do know this: There are a lot of immigrants in this country who support English as the language.

In 1995, there was a poll--I talked about this once before on the floor--by Luntz Research, and it said that more than 80 percent of immigrants supported making English the official language.

Eighty percent. These are the ones who are supposed to be against it. They are not against it, they are for it.

The need for official English appears in our newspapers every day-- injuries in the workplace, lawsuits over mistranslation in hospitals, people who are unable to support their families--all because they can't speak English. Making English the official language would also help immigrants assimilate, which is vitally important to becoming an American and preserving our rich heritage.

As my colleague, Senator Alexander, said yesterday--and I thought so much of this, I got his quotes--he said:

Becoming an American--

This is very significant--

Becoming an American is also a unique accomplishment

because it has nothing to do with ancestry.

In other countries, it has to do with ancestry. My family came from Germany, so we all come from different places.

He said:

America is an idea, not a race. We are united by principles

expressed in our founding documents--the very principles that

we are debating in this immigration legislation--not by our

multiple ancestries.

I am still quoting from Senator Alexander, who made this speech yesterday, which is well researched and well thought out.

Some suggest that our diversity is what makes our country

great. To be sure, diversity is one of our strengths, but

diversity is not our greatest strength. Jerusalem is diverse.

The Balkans are diverse. Iraq is diverse. The greatest

accomplishment of the United States of America is that we

have molded that magnificent diversity into one Nation based

upon a set of common principles, language, and traditions.

That is why the words above the desk--

And the desks of many of us, including mine--

say ``One from many,'' not ``Many from one.''

Clearly, as Senator Alexander so eloquently stated, our Nation is unique among the nations of the world in that we welcome people from all countries and backgrounds to become Americans. By becoming Americans, they are saying they want to adopt our laws and our way of life, and this includes speaking English. It is very much like the case I just cited to you of Thi Van Nguyen coming in so emotionally wrapped up. It wasn't enough just to become a citizen of the United States, he wanted to adopt my name.

Some of our colleagues as well as the people watching us may think this amendment is unnecessary because they mistakenly think English is our official language anyway, but it is not. I have received constituent letters insisting that the Senate do something about bilingual ballots, bilingual education, and driver's licenses in other languages.

People in my State of Oklahoma are angry, and they have good reason to be so. It seems there are those who object to immigrants learning a single word of English. This is not an exaggeration. In the April 10, 2006, issue of The Nation magazine, an article called ``Strangers in the Land'' seriously asks:

Why should linguistic competence be a factor--or acceptable

as an item for democratic debate--in determining citizenship?

As my comrade for a day in Los Angeles would attest, a

nonEnglish speaker in the United States not only can get and

hold down a job; she--

Or he--

can also turn out the vote. Why should a nonEnglish speaker

be allowed to mobilize for American democracy, not to join it

as a citizen?

Learning the language and learning something about American history was something the ancestors of nearly everyone in this Chamber accomplished as a matter of course. All of a sudden, everything is changing, and we are told that it is unfair to expect today's immigrants to do likewise. Yet if people are not encouraged to learn English, they will be dependent upon translation services for the rest of their lives. There is nothing wrong with using a translator. I have done so on my trips to Africa quite often. But it is dangerous to rely entirely upon the accuracy of any translator, especially in one's own country. The competence of any given interpreter is all too often in the eye of the beholder.

Judge Wayne Purdom told the National Law Review that once interpreters are in place, the arguments have only begun:

Sometimes one interpreter is very critical of another's

translation--right in the middle of the courtroom--and they

will interrupt and contradict each other and say the other

person's translation is inaccurate.

We have seen it happen. We have documented cases. Even the translation currently required at the polls has failed to accomplish its intended purpose: helping people cast an informed ballot.

Consider the 2000 election: In one community in New York, the Chinese bilingual ballot translated the ``Democratic'' label on all State races as ``Republican,'' while ``Republican'' was translated to be ``Democrat.'' Consequently, we know the results.

In the 1983 case of People v. Diaz--and we have talked about this before--a California court confessed, and I am quoting now from the record:

We recognize that frequently there is no single word in a

foreign language which carries the identical meaning of a

single word in the English language. We examined four

different Spanish translations of the Miranda advisement at

issue.

That was the case going on at that time.

We discovered that none of these translations was

identical.

If governments do not agree on the proper Spanish translation of the phrase ``You have the right to remain silent,'' how can they accurately translate the context of legal documents? And the short answer is, they cannot. But legal language is complex because it is meant to be exact. Translation may muddy that precision.

I can see the day when someone will go to court claiming that the Spanish translation of some piece of legislation has a different meaning than the English version does. In the absence of an official language, there would be no way to resolve that dispute.

For decades now, we have looked the other way while multilingual mandate was piled upon multilingual mandate. State and local taxpayers have shouldered much of the fiscal burden for our insistence upon welfare forms in Spanish and school documents in Cantonese. Immigrants, too, have suffered from this ``reign of multilingual micromanaging.''

The National Review just this week put the problem in a very vivid perspective, and I will quote because I want this in the Record:

I was reading Li Shaomin's account of being held in China

over long months.

Some of us will remember that.

Li recounted how the Communist security thugs taunted him

and tried to break him. Taking his passport, they said,

``This will do you no good. You may have an American

passport, but you are not a real American, and never will be.

You were born in China, and you will always be Chinese.

Every bilingual ballot and every multilingual government document sends this same message to immigrants: You are not a real American, and you never will be. This is wrong.

Thankfully, America's Hispanic immigrants are turning out this vile message that they need not bother to learn English.

Hispanic Magazine recently carried a story, ``The Next Generation of Hispanic TV is in English.'' Allow me to read a paragraph from this news story:

Most U.S. Latinos are bilingual, 54.7 percent, say Census

data, and consume media in both Spanish and English. The 2002

National Survey of Latinos by the Pew Hispanic Center found

that 46 percent of second-generation and 78 percent of third-

generation adult Hispanics speak mostly English.

The Pew Hispanic Center echoed these findings in 2004:

In one key segment of the Hispanic population--likely

voters in U.S. elections--the English language media is the

dominant source of news. More than half of Latino voters, 53

percent, get all of their news in English and 40 percent get

news from media in both languages, while only 6 percent of

likely voters get all their news in Spanish.

Statistics such as these are counter to what most people think. The idea that 80 percent of the immigrants want English to be the official language is really pretty incredible. Hispanics are learning English, they are willing to learn English and support the idea that immigrants should learn English. Only the groups which claim to represent the Hispanic people seem to have a problem with the English language. Of course, should Hispanic immigrants fail to learn English, these self- styled Hispanic leaders will benefit from their ignorance.

John Miller of National Review told The Washington Post, correctly, on May 28, 1998:

On the whole, there is an American national identity that

immigrants ought to be encouraged to assimilate into.

A recent Zogby poll confirmed that most Hispanic Americans still agree with Mr. Miller. Eighty-four percent of Americans, including 77 percent of Hispanics, believe English should be the official language. So there were two totally different polls taken at different times coming to the same conclusions. We are not doing them any favors.

I think a lot of politicians are so afraid they are not going to get the Hispanic vote in some of these highly populated Hispanic States, and they are misinterpreting. To me, it is insulting to the Hispanic community to say: You cannot be a real American unless you learn--just by sitting on the side lines. I believe they are all capable of learning it and they are able to do it and they are willing to do it.

The other polls have similar findings. Ninety-one percent of foreign- born Latino immigrants agree that learning English is essential to succeeding in the United States, according to a 2002 Kaiser Family Foundation poll. A 2002 Carnegie/Public Agenda poll found that by more than a 2-to-1 margin, immigrants themselves say the United States should expect new immigrants to learn English. These are immigrants saying that they expect to have to learn English.

My official English amendment is the only popular thing to do, the right thing to do, and it is the fiscally necessary thing to do. Multilingual government is not cheap, and translation is not free. This Nation is at war with a relentless foe. Just as a family seeking to reduce expenditures will reexamine its budget to look for needless frills, so too must the U.S. Government.

I also wish to mention the two pictures I brought with me today. As the old saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. There is nothing I could say that would be more telling than these pictures, taken of high school students in California raising the Mexican flag above an upside down American flag. This is not only disgraceful, it is disgusting and a slap in the face at everything for which this great country stands. These students are living here enjoying the benefits of the United States, not Mexico. But this is happening all over the country, it is not just California. I believe this picture demonstrates what I have been talking about--that we desperately need to seal our borders and instill ways of helping immigrants know and love this country and appreciate the sacrifices made for the liberties they would be enjoying.

So there are two amendments that I have. One would go a long way to securing the border. I know it will work; it has been demonstrated by numbers. That is the name of the game. Secondly, making English the official language of the United States of America, to do away with this type of thing.

Over 2 years ago, on January 7, 2004, after President Bush's press conference

on Fair and Secure Immigration Reform, I announced my principles regarding immigration reform:

I would oppose any program that would shortcut the current naturalization process;

I would oppose any program that rewards illegal aliens for their illegal acts;

I would oppose any program that does not further address the porous nature of our borders.

I remain true to those principles today. Let me elaborate.

I agree with the 1997 U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform which stated that measured, legal immigration has lead to create one of the world's greatest ``multiethnic nations.''

I also agree with the commission that immigrants who are ``Americanized'' help cultivate a shared commitment to ``liberty, democracy and equal opportunity'' in our Nation.

However, I cannot stand idly by and watch this great Nation collapse under the pressure of illegal immigration.

Roy Beck, executive director of Numbers USA, a nonprofit organization dedicated to immigration reform, stated that:

A presence of 8 to 11 million illegal aliens in this

country is a sign that this country has lost control of its

borders and the ability to determine who is a member of this

national community . . . a country that has lost that ability

increasingly loses its ability to determine the rules of its

society--environmental protections, labor protections, health

protections, safety protections.

Beck goes on to say:

In fact, a country that cannot keep illegal immigration to

a low level quickly ceases to be a real country, or a real

community. Rather than being self-governed, such a country

begins to have its destiny largely determined by citizens of

other countries who manage to move in illegally.

Illegal immigrants continue to flood our borders and cause a myriad of problems for our country and law-abiding citizens like you and me.

For example, according to the Center for Immigration Studies, CIS, a nonprofit immigration reform organization, some of the most violent criminals at-large today are illegal immigrants, not to mention the terrorists who have illegally entered our country or overstayed their visas.

I would like to share a personal story regarding illegal aliens who commit crimes in the United States and then flee across the border to Mexico.

Last May, my friend's son, Jeff Garrett, was tragically shot by an illegal alien while Jeff was turkey hunting in Colorado.

Ater he shot Jeff, the alien fled to Mexico where he is hiding today.

I know this story is just one among many about police officers and other innocent Americans murdered each year by illegal aliens who then find safe harbor in Mexico.

We must prevent these criminals from coming across our borders.

Not only are illegal immigrants increasing by crossing the border in droves, they are having ``anchor babies'' in rapid numbers.

These babies are helping the immigration population grow more rapidly than the birth rate of American citizens.

In fact, the Census Bureau estimates that at the time of the 2000 Census, the illegal immigration population reached approximately 8 million.

Therefore, according to this estimate, the illegal-alien population grew by almost half a million a year in the 1990s.

These numbers are derived from a draft report given to the House Immigration Subcommittee by the INS that estimated the illegal population was around 3.5 million in 1990.

In order for the illegal population to have reached 8 million by 2000, the net increase would be around 400,000 to 500,000 per year during the 1990s.

According to CIS, based on numbers from the National Center for Health Statistics, in 2002 there were about 8.4 million illegal aliens, which represent about 3.3 percent of the total U.S. population.

That same year, there were about 383,000 babies born to illegal aliens, which represented about 9.5 percent of all U.S. births in 2002.

Additionally, in the Spring 2005 issue of the American Physicians and Surgeons Journal, Dr. Madeleine Pelner Cosman says:

American hospitals welcome anchor babies. Illegal alien

women come to the hospital in labor and drop their little

anchors, each of whom pulls its illegal alien mother, father,

and siblings into permanent residency simply by being born

within our borders.

Anchor babies are, and instantly qualify for public welfare aid. Between--300,000 and 350,000 anchor babies annually become citizens because of the fourteenth amendment to the U.S. Constitution:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and

subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the

United States and the State wherein they reside.

Dr. Cosman continues:

In 2003 in Stockton, California, 70 percent of the 2,300

babies born in San Joaquin General Hospital's maternity ward

were anchor babies, and 45 percent of Stockton children under

age six are Latino (up from 30 percent in 1993). In 1994,

74,987 anchor babies in California hospital maternity units

cost $215 million and constituted 36 percent of all Medi-Cal

births. Now they account for substantially more than half.

These anchor babies are being used to enable their parents to skirt the law, cross our borders, and bring in additional, illegal aliens.

Furthermore, as the law currently stands, by allowing these children to be considered citizens, it is an incentive for more aliens to illegally cross into our country.

I am very concerned about the cost these illegal immigrants have on the U.S. economy.

Because illegal workers do not pay income taxes, it is estimated that the Federal Government could be spending $35 billion a year in unpaid taxes, according to Gear Stearns Asset Management.

This figure does not include additional costs spent on illegal immigrants for welfare, healthcare, education, and imprisonment.

In fact, according to Americans for Immigration Control, a nonpartisan, grassroots organization, the implications for these illegal immigrants in the future could cost upwards of $1,500 per year if these same illegal immigrants are granted amnesty because they would suddenly have access to many social programs for which they are not currently eligible.

This means the government could spend an additional $6 billion in welfare expenditures alone.

Taxpayers also pay for illegal immigrant's healthcare.

According to the Oklahoma Health Care Authority, illegal immigrant women living in my State gave birth to 2,600 babies in 2005. Delivery of these children cost $6.5 million, or 83 percent of all Medicaid money that is spent on healthcare for illegal immigrants in Oklahoma.

Taxpayers also pay every time an illegal alien visits an emergency room; which they often use as their primary healthcare provider.

Federal prisons are also feeling the strain from illegal immigrants.

June 2003, criminal aliens comprised 34,456 of the prisoners held in Federal prisons.

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, holding criminal aliens in Federal prisons cost taxpayers $891 million in 2002.

In Oklahoma alone, the estimated annual operating expenditure for Federal prisons was almost $12,000 per noncitizen inmate in 1999.

Additionally, elementary and secondary education is often one of the most expensive programs funded by State and local governments.

A 1982 Supreme Court ruling entitles children of illegal immigrants to taxpayer-funded government education.

Today, according to the Urban Institute, an estimated 1.1 million school-aged children of illegal immigrants are living in our country.

The cost of educating these illegal students is almost $2 billion per year and is projected to top $27 billion per year in the near future, according to Americans for Immigration Control.

Considering the burden and risk of the current level of illegal immigration, I firmly believe it is vital to secure our borders first, before we address any other immigration issue.

What the Judiciary Committee voted out is amnesty; it allows virtually anyone who is here illegally or who wants to come here to apply for citizenship.

This is a reward for law-breakers. It is essentially an open flow for immigration.

We have seen in the past that this approach does not work.

For instance, in 1986, the Immigration Reform and Control Act, IRCA, granted amnesty for illegal immigrants already here in return for strict prohibitions against future illegal entrants.

In place of promised outcomes, however, the number of illegal aliens has more than tripled since IRCA was passed.

Another problem with the Judiciary Committee bill has to do with college tuition for illegal aliens.

While current law allows States to determine whether or not they will provide in-State tuition at colleges and universities for illegal aliens, the Judiciary Committee bill includes a provision whereby the Federal Government mandates that States provide in-State tuition for illegal aliens.

This is unfair for the thousands of out-of-State students who must pay higher tuition costs than illegal immigrants who have broken the law and do not belong in our country.

Some say we don't necessarily need as many guest workers as the Judiciary Committee bill allows.

For example, economist Philip Martin of the University of California says that, when the ``Bracero'' program of the 1960s that brought in seasonal Mexican laborers was discontinued in 1964, the California tomato industry that had depended on these workers developed oblong tomatoes that could be picked by a machine--increasing California's tomato output five times more than what it was before the machines were used.

In a recent Washington Post article, Robert Samuelson expresses his view that with a massive guest worker program, we are importing poverty.

Referring to guest workers, Samuelson says:

. . . they generally don't go home, assimilation is slow and

the ranks of the poor are constantly replenished. Since 1980

the number of Hispanics with incomes below the government's

poverty line (about $19,300 in 2004 for a family of four) has

risen 162%. Over the same period, the number of non-Hispanic

whites in poverty rose 3% and the number of blacks, 9.5%.

He continues:

What we have now--and would have with guest workers--is a

conscious policy of creating poverty in the United States

while relieving Mexico. By and large, this is a bad bargain

for the United States. It stresses local schools, hospitals

and housing; it feeds social tensions (the Minutemen have

witnessed this) . . .

As a matter of fact, according to the Pew Hispanic Center, the illegal immigrants that are currently here only represent about 4.9 percent of the labor force; they represent 36 percent of insulation workers, 28 percent of drywall installers, and 20 percent of cooks.

These illegal immigrants, while large in numbers, are not the majority of the workforce.

I ask that we consider the Frist bill which, though not perfect, would increase enforcement and border security.

I further ask that we not bring up the Judiciary Committee's amnesty bill.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.