Floor Statements

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Madam President, I appreciate the excellent remarks from the heart of my good friend Marco Rubio. He is a great addition to the Senate. And I would say the heart of America is good. The heart of this country is good. For 30 years they have been pleading with Congress to keep a generous immigration policy afoot in America, but at the same time they have been pleading with us to end the illegality that has continued for years now. The people have pleaded with us to do something about it, and year after year after year Congress has refused, the President has refused. That is why we now have 11 million people in the country illegally.

I think the heart of America is good and people are willing to deal compassionately and not try to deport 11 million people. They want to do the right thing about this, but by a 4-to-1 margin they have said they want to see this Congress do what Members of Congress have repeatedly promised and never delivered on--create a lawful system, a system we can be proud of, a system that serves the national interests.

As I explained this morning, rather than working with law enforcement groups and prosecutors and considering the needs of everyday citizens, the sponsors of this bill have spent months in negotiation with special interests and lobbyists to produce a bill that will not work. That is the problem we have before us today. This will create even more lawlessness in the future.

I want my colleague to hear what our Nation's immigration officers-- men and women on the frontlines--have to say about this legislation. Shouldn't we listen to them? They asked to be able to participate in these secret negotiations, and they were rebuffed. I asked that they be allowed to participate, but they were rebuffed. Let's hear what they say about the bill--the bill Senator Schumer said in committee was tough as nails, and the TV ads running have said it is the toughest bill in history, maybe the history of the world. Is that correct? Is that correct, I have to ask? I think not.

This is a joint statement issued today by the councils representing Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers--the ICE officers--and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service officers, a joint statement of two associations representing these tens of thousands of officers. Shouldn't we listen to what they are saying? Please listen, colleagues.

ICE officers and USCIS adjudication officers have pleaded

with lawmakers not to adopt this bill. The Schumer-Rubio-

Corker-Hoeven proposal will make Americans less safe, and

it will ensure more illegal immigration in the future--

especially visa overstays. It provides legalization for

thousands of dangerous criminals while making it more

difficult for our officers to identify public safety and

national security threats. The legislation was guided from

the beginning by anti-enforcement special interests and,

should it become law, it will have the desired effect of

these groups: blocking immigration enforcement.

This is an anti-public safety bill and an anti-law

enforcement bill. We urge all lawmakers to oppose the final

cloture vote on Thursday and to oppose the bill. We call on

all Americans to pick up the phone and call their members of

Congress.

So who do we trust on this question of whether we have a bill that will work? Our good political Senators who work hard but haven't been out on the frontlines doing the work or the people we pay who try to do the work every day, putting their lives at risk?

There is something else I would like to touch on. I think it is one of the least-discussed parts of the conversation. I am sure we will have others talk in more detail about enforcement failures of the legislation, but in many ways this could be the most important. I know our friends in the media certainly haven't given a lot of coverage to it, but I hope we will think about it more; that is, the future flow or the legal immigration part of the bill.

The Congressional Budget Office tells us that the bill's large increase in mostly lower skilled legal workers will push down wages and increase unemployment. That needs to be talked about. It must be fully understood. Hundreds of people are hurting today.

There was an article recently in the New York Times--I think 700 people camped out for 5 days to get a few jobs as elevator repairmen. They waited in the rain, they camped out, they waited in line hoping to get one of those jobs.

There was an article involving Philadelphia about individuals who had prior convictions and wanted work. They set up an opportunity for them to apply to find a job. They expected 1,000, and 2,000 showed up. They interviewed a number of them, and the stories they gave are heartbreaking.

Don't we need to consider the impact this policy could have on working Americans? It is a sensitive topic but a crucial one.

Here is what David Cameron, the British Prime Minister, said recently:

There are those who say you can't have a sensible debate

because it's somehow wrong to express concerns about

immigration. Now I think this is nonsense. Yes, of course it

needs to be approached in a sensitive and rational manner,

but I've always understood the concerns--the genuine concerns

of hard-working people, including many in our migrant

communities, who worry about uncontrolled immigration. They

worry about the pressure it puts on public services, the

rapid pace of change in some of our communities and of course

the concerns, deeply held, that some people might be able to

come and take advantage of our generosity without making a

proper contribution to our country.

Mr. Cameron goes on to say:

It is our failure in the past to reform welfare and

training that meant that we left too many of our young people

in a system where they didn't have proper skills, they didn't

have proper incentives to work, and instead we saw large

numbers of people coming from overseas to fill vacancies in

our economy. Put simply, our job is to educate and train our

youth, not to rely on immigration to fill the skill gaps.

Does that resonate with any of our people today? Have we thought through this as to how we should handle these matters?

Let's look at our own situation right here in America. Twenty-one million Americans are unable to find full-time work. One in three without a high school diploma is unemployed. Forty-seven million Americans are on food stamps. Labor force participation is the lowest since the 1970s.

The percentage of Americans actually working is lower and has been continually falling since the 1970s. It goes back to that date when women were just beginning to enter the workforce.

One in three youth in our Nation's Capital is living in poverty. It appears we are in an era of a new normal--economists have been talking about this--a new normal where we see slower growth in developed economies than we normally would see. There is more robotics, and businesses are looking to contain the growth of employment. Low job creation has been the result.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that I be notified after 20 minutes.

Our own Congressional Budget Office has done a 10-year economic projection, as they do every year. They did this in January, unconnected to immigration. They found in the second 5 years of our 10- year window, 2018 to 2023, we would only create 75,000 jobs.

Some have said we are going to bring in workers, and that is going to create jobs. We will talk about what economists really say about that. But what does this legislation do? I think this legislation has not given thought to the plight of these unemployed Americans.

Colleagues, the legislation that is before us today has four times more guest workers. These are people who come only to work. They are not just seasonal workers, they come for years at a time with their families, but they come specifically to take a job--four times more than in the 2007 bill that failed and many objected to on the grounds it would hurt workers.

It also triples the grants of permanent status awarded to legal immigrants over the next decade relative to current law. That was the result of the legalization process. Experts who have looked at this and other factors have come to the same conclusion: There would be at least 30 million people who would be given legal status over the next decade, whereas normally we would give 10 million people legal status. Yet to this day the sponsors of the legislation refuse to tell us how many would come into the country.

What we do know is that the plan is not a merit-based plan as promised, but it is mostly lower skilled, meaning it will hurt our poor and working-class citizens the most. We have data that shows that. This will be a hammer blow for working-class Americans.

The Civil Rights Commission had hearings, and members wrote us. They said it is going to devastate poor workers. They said,

We don't have a shortage of lower-skilled workers. We have

a glut of lower-skilled workers.

That is a direct quote from their letter. So let's compare our current situation when the legislation was introduced in 2007. Today, 5 million more Americans are unemployed than in 2007; 20 million more Americans are on food stamps; and unemployment among teenagers is 54 percent higher than in 2007. Meanwhile, median household income is 8.9 percent lower than in 1999. That is huge.

Professor Borjas at Harvard, himself an immigrant who studies immigration and economics, has said a large part of that decline is driven by the large immigration flow that comes into our country. This would increase it dramatically. We want to have immigration. We are not going to stop immigration. We are going to maintain a generous immigration flow. But the people need to know this bill increases it dramatically.

CBO did a report on the legislation. This is what they found: Unequivocally, the legal immigration surge in this bill will reduce average wages for a decade. There is a chart in CBO's report. I had it on the Senate floor earlier. Wages will remain lower for many years after that than if the bill had never passed.

What about unemployment, the number of people out of work? According to CBO, it will increase, and per capita, GNP will be lower for the next quarter of a century.

Yes, you are going to have an increase in GDP--and our colleagues are quick to say that--because of the large new group of people. But that increase per person in America doesn't occur. It reduces the per capita GNP. And these are extremely conservative estimates. Dr. Borjas in his report suggests the situation will be worse than this.

To whom do we owe our allegiance? To these groups who want more people in the high-tech world, agriculture world, meatpacking, or other businesses, or to the American citizens, who work hard, pay their taxes, fight our wars, and obey our laws? Who is speaking up for their legitimate interests?

So the time is long past, as Prime Minister Cameron has said, for a national discussion over illegal immigration policies. We all believe in it. No one proposes ending immigration. It is a deep part of our tradition as a nation. But a nation has not only a right but a duty to establish a responsible flow that promotes assimilation of those who come here, promotes self-sufficiency, rising wages, and helps identify people who can flourish.

The last thing we want to do is to invite people to come to America to work and find out there are no jobs for them here or that they are putting Americans out of work in order to get a job. That doesn't make sense. We have not had the kind of discussion we need. The data indicates, objectively speaking, that this will be a detriment to working Americans.

A great nation needs a policy that promotes its legitimate national interests, that considers the tough time workers are having today as a result of high unemployment and falling wages, a policy that rejects ideas that will pull down even further the wages of hurting workers; that could, as Senator Sanders has said, create a permanent underclass in America. It is a dangerous thing. We need to do it right.

The legislation before us is a dramatic step. I urge my colleagues to reject the bill and to work on a positive reform plan that serves the national interests of all Americans--immigrant and native born.

Sadly, this legislation advances the interests of those who wrote it--many of them with very special interests--at the expense of the general public.

The vote we are about to have is for final passage. The promises of an open and fair process have been as hollow as the promises that this bill would be the toughest ever and will end the lawlessness in the future forever. It just will not happen. Our law officers have told us this.

This legislation is amnesty first. The legality occurs first. It plainly lacks the kind of mechanisms that are necessary to create a law enforcement system that will work. There is a lack of commitment to that. You can see it throughout the bill. It is not written by people who are out there every day and who know the problems with enforcement. If it were, they would have fixed so many of these problems that are fully shown throughout the bill.

Yes, more money has been promised with the recent amendment for the border, but that is in the distant future. What about the rest of the bill? The E-Verify workplace enforcement system is terribly flawed. It has been delayed. It could be put to work right now. We don't need to wait 5 years as this bill does. Why it would be delayed that long is beyond me, unless you are not very interested in getting started and making sure that half the people are legalized and others can't come in and take a job who enter illegally.

The entry-exit visa system in this bill, S. 744, this 1,000-page bill, is much weaker than current law. Current law says you must have a biometric entry-exit system at sea, air, and land ports. This bill says you only have to have an electronic system at airports and seaports, making the system incomplete and unable to identify who stays and who has returned home on time.

Interior enforcement is much weaker--read the passionate letters from our law enforcement officers as I read this morning, pleading with us not to pass the bill because, they say, it will hurt enforcement and weaken national security.

The method of processing those given legal status will not work. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which manages this, has one big objection to this bill. They say there is no way they can accomplish what will be asked of them if this bill is passed. They say it will lead to lawlessness, and they will be unable to identify dangerous people who should not be in the country.

I thank the Chair. I will be wrapping up. Far from having fines pay for the cost of this amnesty as the sponsors promised, this is a huge budget buster--a huge budget buster now. The ObamaCare provision that was supposed to ensure that persons who were given legal status did not get subsidized health care now provides an incentive for businesses not to hire American workers because they will have to pay the ObamaCare premiums but would hire foreign workers, the illegal workers who are now given legal status--they would be having multithousand-dollar advantages in hiring them over American workers.

The legislation will not work. Let's continue to work through all these problems together. I do believe that this--our bill's sponsors are clearly correct to say we need to fix this broken system. A bill that will respond to the pleas of the American people for a lawful immigration system that serves our national interest and in which we can take pride is what I will support. How can we vote for a bill our own Congressional Budget Office says will reduce average wages in America for 12 years.

We have in this group of American workers thousands, millions of immigrant workers, millions of minorities and African Americans and others at low wages. This legislation, at a time they are hurting very badly will reduce average wages for 12 years, will increase unemployment, and will reduce per capita GDP for over 25 years. This is policy we have to ask serious questions about, all this at a time of high unemployment, long-term falling wages, surging welfare and disability and dependency.

It is not a healthy trend in America. We have to ask these questions. Our real focus, as Prime Minister Cameron has said, should be to work hard to train our people, our unemployed, our young people for jobs that pay a decent wage, have a health care and a retirement plan. This legislation will not end the lawlessness as our professional officers have repeatedly told us. It will not do so. It will give legality-- immunity, if you want to call it that--virtually immediately. There is a promise of enforcement in the future, but our officers say it will not happen. It is not going to happen now.

I believe they are correct. I had the honor to be a Federal prosecutor for quite a long time and I know law officers and I know their difficulties and I totally agree with them.

This was a letter that was written today from the ICE officer head, Mr. Chris Crane, a true patriot. He has worked so hard to do this. He said one of the problems with the bill:

. . . is a failure to enforce the nation's immigration laws

on the interior of the United States. It is not a border

issue. It cannot and will not end as a result of increased

border security. It must be resolved through increased

interior enforcement.

40% of all illegal immigrants currently in the United

States did not illegally cross the border, but instead

entered legally with a visa and didn't leave when it expired.

40,000 border patrol agents provided in your legislation will

never come into contact with these individuals. . . .

Do you hear that, colleagues? These Border Patrol agents are never coming in contact with the people who are in the interior who came on visa and chose not to return. He goes on to say:

Systems like E-Verify and biometric Entry/Exit--still

missing from your bill--may identify millions of illegal

immigrants and status violators, but ICE officers will not

exist to locate and apprehend them rendering the systems

useless. The majority of foreign nationals identified by

these systems will remain in the United States. . . .

500,000 ICE fugitives are currently at large in the United

States. ICE estimates 2 million criminal aliens at large in

the United States, 900,000 criminal aliens are arrested by

local police each year.

They go on to note there are only 5,000 ICE officers in America. This administration sued State and local governments that try to help the ICE officers get their job done.

Then the joint statement today from the ICE and USCIS Officers Association says this:

ICE officers and USCIS adjudications officers have pleaded

with lawmakers not to adopt this bill, but to work with us on

real, effective reforms for the American people.

This bill, they say, is an:

. . . anti-public safety bill and an anti-law enforcement

bill. We urge all lawmakers to oppose the final cloture vote

today and to oppose the bill.

This legislation will not end the lawlessness. I wish it were different, but

those are the facts. It does not create a merit-based future flow as has been promised, and it leaves us in a very difficult position. I feel like there is no choice for us today. Let's vote no on the legislation. It is not going to end the efforts. We are going to have to continue to wrestle with this.

The good news is that the House, at least initially, what I have seen in their work indicates they are giving a far more prudent approach to it. The first bill they produced--I tried to offer it as an amendment, but it did not get brought up--has an effective effort at improving interior law enforcement. That is the kind of thing we need to be doing. Then we can win the confidence of the American people, and we can move past this very difficult time in our history.

I reserve the remainder of the time on this side.

Madam President, as I have looked at the legislation-- and we have wrestled with what goes in it--I will just share with my colleagues my perspective, having been in charge of enforcing Federal laws as a U.S. attorney in the interior of the country.

We need to understand a couple things. The border is very important. There has been wide open illegality at our borders for years.

San Diego, a number of years ago, was having drugs, crimes, violence. They built a fence and prosperity rose on both sides of the fence. Crime went down. It just had to be done, and they have been very happy with it.

That helps a lot, and it is not at all impossible for us to get our border under control today. It does not require that much more than current capacity, but what we need is an absolute commitment from the President and the Director of Homeland Security to get that done. We have lacked that.

I want to move beyond just the requirements of the border. There are other areas that are critical to having a lawful system of immigration. Those include entry-exit visas, and that includes workplace enforcement.

Under current law, Congress has passed--and actually there have been six laws to this effect in the last 10 years--these laws require that there be an entry-exit biometric visa system at all air, sea, and land ports. The 9/11 Commission recommended that. The 9/11 Commission--when they had a review of what had been done toward accomplishing their recommendations--they went back to it and warned that we had not completed it. It is current law. It requires a biometric entry-exit system.

People who come into our country today are fingerprinted, but when they leave the country they are not checked. So we do not know--when they got their visa and they entered the country--whether they ever left.

There are arguments that have been made that it would cost billions and billions of dollars. But a pilot project, which I just discovered recently--I did not know it was there--was in Atlanta and one of the other airports. In Atlanta, they did this: A person goes through the airport to depart from the United States, they go by a handheld fingerprint-reading machine--police officers have them in their cars; they can stop a drunk driver and check their fingerprints right on the side of the road--they put their finger on that, they go out of the gate, and you know whether they have departed the country.

So this is a significant technological advancement. It works. In Atlanta, when they did that, they caught over 100 people on the watch list--people for whom there were felony warrants, people on the terrorist watch list. They knew, and we have a record of the people who left the country.

That is critical to our system. We have almost gotten there. But there has been a failure to see it happen because some people do not want it to happen. That is not in this legislation. This bill eliminates the requirement of a biometric system, and it eliminates the requirement that we have an exit system at the border. It is only air and sea. That is a major diminishment of an absolutely critical part of our system. It is going to be even more critical.

Why will it be more critical? Because we are going to have the doubling of the number of people who come to our country on visas, and we are going to have an increased problem of visa overstays. The Congressional Budget Office warned of that in their report. It is obvious. The Citizenship and Immigration Services and the ICE officers have warned of it repeatedly to us in their letters. So this has to be a part of our system. It just has to be. The fact that it is not in there indicates the people who drafted the bill had no real interest in seeing enforcement enhanced, but they actually wanted to allow the enforcement to be weakened. So that is a nonstarter. This has been in the law for over 10 years.

So the ICE officers have told us: Look, 40 percent of the people now who are here illegally came by visa overstays. But that is going to increase dramatically for a lot of reasons. One

of them is we are going to double the number of people who come by visas under this bill.

So they have warned us that this concern about a de facto amnesty will continue because we have no people on the interior of the United States to enforce the law. You are going to 40,000 Border Patrol agents, but only 5,000 people inside the interior of the entire United States of America.

This President, as part of his systematic plan to stop enforcement, has sued States and broken the 287(g) agreements with States that allow them to participate and help the ICE officers do their jobs. States cannot prosecute people. States cannot deport people. But States can, as part of their job, when a police officer arrests somebody for a crime or drunk driving--and they identify them as being illegally in the country--they can take them to the ICE officers and help them do their job. And there are agreements to do this to this effect.

What has happened? This administration has eliminated those agreements and canceled the program. I helped write the program. Lots of States were participating happily in it, and they were not being forced to do anything they did not want to do, but it allowed them to be more effective in doing their job.

So the problem is when you see that missing in this 1,200-page bill, but you see provision after provision after provision that focuses on other issues, focuses on issues important to special interests who helped write the bill. Then you begin to get suspicious about what is happening. That is why the ICE officers and the Citizenship and Immigration Services were so concerned about not being able to participate in the program effectively and to share their views. It is clear they did not want their views.

So President Obama--although it has been maintained pretty carefully that he was not involved in writing the legislation, it appears he quite clearly was. They are not happy with the ICE officers. The ICE officers actually sued Secretary Napolitano for stopping them from enforcing the law they have sworn to enforce. They say they are being required to violate their oath and their commitment to the law by policies from politicians in the Homeland Security Department. They have written it in letter after letter after letter, openly saying the politicians in the Department are overriding the law--directing us and undermining our ability to do what we are sworn to do. They have a lawsuit pending about it. I have never heard of that, that officers would do that.

Then we have the confusion over the E-Verify system. Senator Portman improved the bill dramatically with his amendment--or would have. He was not able to get it up for a vote. But the E-Verify system is in place today and it is utilized by governments and by contractors who do work for the government. I think people who want to voluntarily use it can use it.

You can give a Social Security number to your boss or your employer- to-be and he runs it and checks. What they find is many illegal workers are using the same Social Security number as other people. The computer and the Social Security department catches that. That tells the employer there are six different people using this Social Security number. You should not hire this person until he has been checked out.

So that is the way the E-Verify system works. It takes about 3 minutes. It has a 99-percent accuracy rate, but the forces out there have blocked the legislation for E-Verify. Even this minimum standard that is operating today, we had to fight to get an extension. I had to hold up legislation to guarantee that they would at least extend the current system because there are forces out there that put in big money that do not like this project. They do not like it. They want to end it. They are afraid it will be expanded.

Any plan that pretends to be serious about workplace enforcement has to utilize the E-Verify. Well, this bill, instead of just taking the system and expanding it--which would not take much effort; computers are capable of handling the numbers--instead of just doing that, they have done it in a way that delays it for 5 years. So to me this indicates there is not an intensity of interest after the amnesty has been given.

After people have been given legal status, they will be given a Social Security number. They will not be hurt by having to have their number checked. They will have a legitimate Social Security number. They will be legal. They will take any job out there. But the people who come in later, the people who did not qualify, people who otherwise were criminals and should not be getting a job and do not qualify for this provisional status, they would be identified for years under this system. It indicates a lack of seriousness in the commitment.

I see Senator Grassley is here. I will wrap up by saying that creating a lawful system of immigration requires more than border enforcement. It is important but you have to have interior enforcement. You have to have workplace enforcement. You have to have entry-exit visa enforcement. This is critical.

As I have been stressing, we do not talk about it enough. The bill also sets out in its 1,200 pages the future flow of workers into America. Our colleagues have said it is a merit-based system. We have a points system. Unfortunately, that is not substantially correct. It looks to us like less than 15 percent of the people enter into our country under our plan by a merit-based system. Canada does that. They are very happy with that. I think about 60 percent of their people do so. The more education you have, the more job skills you have, the more fluency you have in the language, you get more points.

Under this merit-based system, it has about 15 percent of the people covered by it in a point system. The fact that your brother is here is equal to 10 points. If you have a 4-year college degree, that is only equal to 5 points. It takes a master's degree to get 10 points, equal to the family connection points. So the point system is still heavily skewed to things other than actual job skills, education level, and the ability to be productive and flourish in our society.

We want to bring people to our country who are going to be able to flourish, do well, be able to find a job, and not be unemployed or the only skill they have is one that Americans are applying for in big numbers and they would take a job from an American, unemploying an American. So we have to create a system that serves the national interest and identifies the kind of workers the country needs and we can absorb as a part of the over 1 million or so people we admit each year lawfully into America.

That makes sense to me. Also, the guest worker programs are exceedingly complex. There are W programs, there are E programs. There are different kinds of programs throughout this whole bill. The net result, the number of people who come not to be permanent citizens, not to be immigrants, but come as guest workers will double under this legislation. That makes it harder for the legal immigrant who is new in America trying to find work to get a job. They are having to compete with the guest workers. So those are the kinds of things we need to be thinking about as we go forward.

I wish to express my appreciation to the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, Senator Chuck Grassley. He has been a student of this problem since 1986. He has shared with us his perspective on it. He has a deep conviction that if we go through this process again, it needs to be done in a way that we can be proud of a few years later, not be embarrassed about as we were after 1986.

So we would create a system that allows a lawful flow to occur but stops the illegal flow in the future. That is the problem I think this legislation has, among others.

Senator Grassley, thank you for your efforts. Good work. I have enjoyed working with you and Senator Leahy, who conducted a tough series of hearings. He let us have votes. We got a lot of votes in the Judiciary Committee. He asked if anybody else had another amendment when we finished. We got it done. That has not happened on the floor today. We have only had nine votes, and three of those were motions to table very important amendments that deserved more consideration than that.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, we will have a vote before much longer on the question of whether the legislation before us violates the budget. I think that is going to be established quite clearly. The chairman of the Budget Committee, Senator Murray--and I am the ranking Republican on that committee--is going to acknowledge that and the Parliamentarian will so rule that the legislation violates the budget and violates it in a number of ways, contrary to the promises made by the sponsors of the bill.

The sponsors of the bill proposed a large piece of legislation and told everyone a great deal about their bill, one fact after another, and those promises and representations have been shown to be inaccurate. They are not accurate and that is unfortunate. That is why the bill is having the difficulties it is.

If it simply was a bill that provided a legal status for people who had been here a long time without difficulties and it was a bill that actually fixed the border, fixed the workplace enforcement, fixed the entry-exit visa, and created an effective internal enforcement mechanism for the future, the legislation would have a good chance of having popular support. But as people find out more about it, they find all those factors are not going to be achieved effectively--in some instances even weakened from current law--and as a result the legislation is in trouble.

When we get a piece of legislation that is 1,200 pages and people are unable to digest it, it boils down to talking points. So the sponsors produced a series of talking points that they said reflects what is in the legislation. One of their talking points was that the bill is not going to cost the taxpayers money; that we would fine the people who are here illegally and they will pay the cost of this bill so it would not impact the budget. We were promised that in the Senate Judiciary Committee when this legislation came up. Senator Schumer made that explicitly clear. This is a quote from him in committee, and this is what their talking point said and what their Members have been saying repeatedly:

And here, what we're simply doing is making sure that all

the expenses in the bill are fully funded by the income that

the bill brings in. This is to make sure that this bill does

not incur any cost on the taxpayers. It's to make it revenue

neutral.

That was the promise we had heard. People like to hear that. They were pleased to hear that. It was a positive spin for the bill. He goes on to say:

Section 6 provides start-up costs to implement the bill,

repaid by fees that come in later.

Then he goes on to say money will be paid from companies and workers and by the immigrants who get the legal status in terms of ``their fines as they go through the process.''

That was the promise that was there. Yet now we have legislation and a score that demonstrates that is plainly not correct. First, the Congressional Budget Office analyzed the cost, and this was before we added the extra money last week or what we will vote on today. This was before they added the substitute Corker-Hoeven-Schumer amendment, and that substitute adds a lot more money.

What our experts in the budget office tell us is that it would add $14 billion to the on-budget debt of the United States, but it is really more than that.

Most of the individuals who will be legalized will be able to have Social Security cards and will pay FICA, Medicare, and Social Security withholdings on their paychecks every week, which will incur extra revenue for the U.S. Government. Our colleagues claim credit for the FICA money to try to justify their claims that they are within the budget and that we should not just count the on-budget score that debt increases from the CBO. But we have to know that the FICA money is money that goes to the Social Security and Medicare trust funds, and every one of the individuals whose average age now is in their thirties will eventually claim the benefit of Medicare and Social Security. They will draw out of the Medicare and Social Security trust funds the money they paid in.

Statistically speaking, they will draw out a lot more than they pay in because those funds are not on a sound basis. Medicare and Social Security are on an unsound basis today. They are counting that money to pay for their bill when that money is dedicated to the Social Security and Medicare trust funds.

By spending that money today, they are simply adding to the debt of the United States. They cannot claim that twice. They cannot claim that the individuals who are going to be given Social Security cards and will be on a path to receive Social Security and Medicare when they retire--that they are paying into Social Security and Medicare if their money is being spent on funding this program. That is double counting, and Mr. Elmendorf of CBO showed that.

This chart shows it is really more than just the $14 billion, which is significant. This chart shows how much the deficit of the United States is impacted by this legislation. The unified budget surplus counts all the Social Security money and all the tax money in one pot. It is one way to do the accounting of the United States. It is not accurate in this case. It should not be used. It claims a $197 billion surplus. That is the Social Security and Medicare money. But if we take away the Social Security surplus this bill creates, $211 billion, and the money they pay into the Medicare trust fund, $56 billion--the net deficit is $70 billion. We have to get our minds correct.

The reason this country is going broke, the reason this country is so far off a sound fiscal path, is that we continue, we persist, in using a unified budget number when that money for Social Security and Medicare is dedicated money. It is set aside to pay for something in the future.

If someone sets aside money in their savings account for their retirement, they cannot spend it today and pretend they still have it for their retirement account. It is just that simple.

This is a bad trend we have been in. It was not so obvious when Social Security and Medicare were bringing in a lot more money than was going out. But now that is not so, and we will soon be in deficit, and very serious deficit. So we should not in any way suggest, believe, or tell the American people that this bill is paid for. It is not

paid for, and as a result it violates the Budget Act. That is the point of order that Senator Vitter has made, and we will vote on it.

In addition to that, it is worse. There are 10 more budget violations in the bill: One is for new direct spending to exceed the Judiciary Committee's authorization levels over a 5-year period. Another one is a 10-year violation of spending over authorized levels in violation of the committee allocations.

Another is an emergency designation to increase spending pursuant to emergency spending from the comprehensive immigration trust fund; emergency spending designation for the comprehensive reform trust fund in violation of the PAYGO Act; emergency designation in violation of a 2010 budget resolution; emergency designation for Social Security cards, in violation of the statutory PAYGO Act. This bill calls it an emergency to have funds for Social Security implementation. That is not an emergency.

Another is an emergency designation for the E-Verify system. That is a system we have established and should be able to expand rapidly. That is not an emergency to expand that. That is in violation of the 2010 budget resolution.

Another is an emergency designation for E-Verify in violation of the PAYGO act; emergency designation for passenger manifest information expenditures, in violation of the 2010 budget resolution; emergency designation in violation of the Statutory PAYGO Act for passenger manifest information.

All of those represent violations of the Budget Act. Senator Vitter raised the one that plainly violates the flat spending limit we agreed to and are now operating under. When the response came from Senator Leahy, he moved to waive that. He moved to waive not only that, but all the other 10 violations of the Budget Act. You only raise one at a time. Senator Vitter raised one, and they moved to waive them all and eliminate this pesky complaint that their bill spends more money than the budget allows.

We will be voting on that, colleagues, and this Senate has been in recent months doing well with regard to adhering to the budget limits we agreed to. We have had seven consecutive votes in which the Senate has voted not to violate the budget when a bill hit the floor that violated the budget. We sent the bill back for reform so if it comes back it has to be in harmony with the bill--seven consecutive votes.

My colleagues who have been there and who believe they have a responsibility to honor the budget limitations we agreed to should not vote to waive the budget. Let's stay within the budget. Let's require the bill's sponsors to do what they promised to do, and by right they should be able to do, which is produce a bill that comes within cost without raiding the Social Security and Medicare trust funds, as they now intend to do. That is just the way it is. I wish it were not so, but it is.

I will take a minute to point out that recently--last night or late yesterday--Senator Bennet, one of our most able Members of the Senate and a Member of the Gang of 8, took the floor to promote the bill and claimed that before jobs are offered, the bill ``requires an American is offered the job first.''

He went on to say: ``We are not bringing in a whole bunch of new people when there are Americans looking for work.''

We are not bringing in a whole bunch of new people when there are Americans looking for work--well, we are. The guest worker program that is in this bill, in addition to the legalization process of normal immigration, doubles the number of guest workers who will be coming to America over current law. These are not people who come to be permanent residents and immigrate to America. These are people who come to take a job and work for a certain period of time--really up to 3 years, and they can extend for 3 years. They have become permanent job takers, in many instances.

He says: First of all, you have to certify an American has been offered the job first. He and other supporters claim this bill is not going to impact wages, is not going to impact jobs. They say don't worry about it--I am worried about it. First and foremost, we are going to have 1.1 million people, and many of those are not able to work in the economy fully today because they are illegally here. They will be given a legal status, a Social Security card, driver's license, and the ability to apply for any job in America. So all of a sudden we are going to have a half million people, perhaps, out there competing for jobs that Americans cannot find today because unemployment is very high. That is going to happen promptly.

Then we are going to accelerate another 4.5 million people into the country, without regard to their skills, and they will be looking for jobs mostly in the lower skilled workforce area. Then, in addition to that, we add the normal flow of immigration into America. We currently welcome 1 million immigrants every year, but this is going to welcome 1.5 million a year. So, there will be an additional 500,000 workers a year in America under the normal immigration system. In addition to that, the guest worker program will double--all at a time when we are not doing well economically.

Today's announcement that the government revised downward substantially the growth in the first quarter is a real problem. We are not seeing job growth. Let me just show this chart about the impact on wages and workers in America that will occur as a result of this legislation. I think probably these numbers are modest. I think it will be more dramatic than this.

This is our Congressional Budget Office. They looked at the numbers, and they said: the average wage would lower over the first dozen years if this bill passes.

For 12 years, if we pass this bill, the average wages of Americans will be lower than would have been the case if the bill had not passed, according to our own CBO.

Somebody came and said on the floor: We won't worry about that because in 20 or 30 years they say it might be better.

First of all, our problem is today. People are unemployed today, and they cannot find work today. Wages have been declining every year since 1999. Working wages of Americans have been declining relative to inflation steadily for over a decade. This bill will accelerate that. It takes us in exactly the wrong direction. Why would we do that?

Then it says CBO--this is their own report and this chart is in their own report:

CBO estimates that S. 744 would cause the unemployment rate

to increase slightly between 2014 and 2020.

So for the next 7 or 8 years we are talking about increased unemployment.

This chart shows the wage situation. This is the current rate. The bill passes, wages drop, and they start going up out here, according to CBO, in year 2025. If the bill had not passed, the growth would have been higher still, but now it knocked it down dramatically. Even though it is growing, it doesn't mean it is getting back to where it would have been had the bill not been passed.

People who say this bill will not impact adversely--working Americans are facing an economic reality that is unfortunate for them.

Finally, they say it will make the economy stronger. You have heard that. Under this bill we will give legal status, in the next 10 years, to 30 million people; permanent legal status to 30 million people instead of 10 million people who would be given legal status in America if we followed current law.

Virtually all of those will be able to work, and we would see some increase in GDP/GNP if that were to occur. However, how much increase do you get and how does it compare out per person in America?

CBO said S. 744 would reduce per capita GNP by 0.7 percent in 2023. That is page 14. In fact, per capita GDP, according to their own chart that I have reproduced from their report, drops from 2017, 2021, 2025, 2029, 2030. It takes until 2030 before it starts getting back. If the bill hadn't passed, GDP per capita would hopefully be going up.

This is way below what would happen, and this hurts Americans when per capita GNP is reduced. Everybody will feel that--maybe not the masters of the universe in their suites out here that are nipping off extra profits because they have lower wages. It may not impact them. They may make more money.

In fact, Professor Borjas at Harvard says the people who gain the most from this immigration bill will be the people

who hire the most low-wage workers because wages will go down. They will make bigger profits, but the people who will be hurt are the vastly more numerous workers whose wages will go down.

This needs to be talked about. People seem to be in denial, but we have to talk about that. I ask my colleagues to consider this as they decide how to vote on this important piece of legislation.

I thank the Chair, and I yield the floor.

Mr. President, we just saw on the news today that the GDP for the first quarter, according to the Wall Street Journal, was revised downward dramatically from previous estimates. I am not saying there is anything wrong with their accounting, but they go back and doublecheck their numbers and add other analyses and they come up with what the growth of the economy was in the first quarter. The previously announced growth level was 2.4 percent for the first quarter, which is low. Coming out of a recession, we need to be doing better than that. But now that it was revised downward, they found there was only 1.8 percent growth in the first quarter. That is a very dangerous trend, and the article said it is evidence of a slowing growth in America.

The fourth quarter of last year GDP growth was only .4 percent. If continued throughout the year, that is a very troubling number. The data shows for the last 15 quarters, almost 4 years, we have averaged only about 2 percent growth in our economy--growth in GDP.

I would say to my colleagues, as we vote to bring in more and more workers at a time when jobs are not being created in any significant number, we need to be aware that this can cause severe consequences.

The Atlanta Federal Reserve Economic Study, done several years ago, found the immigration flow today in the Atlanta area of the Federal Reserve had reduced the wages of American workers in that region by as much as $1,500 a year. That is $120 per month less money for an average family to take care of themselves.

Unemployment and declining wages are a big reason that people are getting in trouble on their credit cards. Professor Borhaas and others have done studies on this.

Another study found a $960 decline in people's annual wages, which is about $80 a month. Eighty dollars a month may not sound like a lot for a Senator, but it sounds like a lot for a working American--maybe equal to their gas bill, or part of it.

I would say that as we consider our votes on the immigration bill, let's consider that this economy is not growing and is not creating large job growth. We have projections that we are not going to do so for the next decade. And I am not talking about people who will be legalized that are here, but we ought not overload the economy with a new flow that is much larger than the current flow of immigration legally.

I see my colleagues are here, and I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I see Senator King from Maine here. I will only talk for a minute. I will share some thoughts later about where I see the difficulties with the immigration bill.

I would say that for the vast majority of the people who will be legalized or who will be coming into the country, businesses will be under no requirement to hire Americans first. That is not accurate, and it is a cause of concern for me.

Farewell Remarks

I wish to share some brief remarks. I know we have a lot to do, but I was here to hear Senator Cowan's farewell remarks to us. They were delivered eloquently and effectively, with integrity and graciousness and a sense of purpose that I found impressive. I think all of us have found him impressive, getting to know him. I heard him share his background recently, how he came to this position. He does so with a constancy of purpose and clear vision for what he believes is right. He has been raised right, and he reflects those values and has done so in the Senate.

It is a pleasure for me to have had the opportunity to get to know him. I would just say it must be a special thrill for him to be able to, all of a sudden, find himself, as he said so nicely, in the U.S. Senate without having to campaign, raise money, or otherwise be in that position.

He served his State with skill and dedication. It is a pleasure to have served with him. I wish him Godspeed in his future endeavors.

I understand the Senator from Maine is going to share with us some valuable history today. Maybe a connection between Maine and Alabama might even be mentioned.

I yield the floor.

I thank the Chair for allowing me to have the floor.

Look, we were moving--Senator Grassley had a list of 16, 18 amendments Wednesday night. He was prepared to begin the voting on those Thursday, Friday, Saturday if need be, as Senator Reid had said we could work on Saturday. Monday, what happened? They had the super- amendment, they had the Corker-Hoeven amendment, and the majority decided to sit on that and not allow any amendments to occur Thursday, not allow any amendments to occur Friday, and only have a cloture vote on Monday. And that vote--I don't think our Members understood fully-- gave complete power to the majority to dominate this process, to end the idea that we would have an open, fair process. It ended with the cloture vote Monday.

We were in the process to vote on a series of amendments. Senator Grassley worked and worked, and he got 35 amendments that he said we would agree to, out of the hundreds that were out there, to have votes on. Yet now they come back and say 15 or 17, and now we are going to do this, and we want this amendment and that amendment.

The process, I hate to say--it is pretty obvious to me--on Monday afternoon was altered. We had gone from an open debate process, as Senator Leahy conducted in the Judiciary Committee--at the end of it, he did say: Anybody else have anything else they want to offer? And there was nothing else to offer, and he voted.

The committee was not a normal committee. We had four of the Gang of 8 on it. So the vote after vote after vote, including two votes on E- Verify that would have strengthened the bill, was voted down. Votes on the earned-income tax credit--fixing and honoring the promise not to provide that welfare payment--were voted down.

So I just want to say that everybody knows what happened. The Republican Members of the Gang of 8 said we would have an open process. Right after the vote Monday afternoon, they told me they were going to work for a process, but I knew then that the deal had been cooked and that this wouldn't result in something that would work and be fair.

I would be pleased to yield to the Senator from Louisiana.

I thank the Senator from Louisiana for his comments, and I thank Senator Portman for providing some good language to improve our situation.

I truly believe what happened Monday afternoon heralded deep trouble. There was deep trouble the week before when a dramatic reversal of enforcement ideas came about to throw money at this problem come Friday. That is what happened, and the process has been shut down essentially since then.

I will yield to the Senator from Wisconsin.

Mr. President, one more thing. First, I agree with Senator Johnson. I offered an amendment on the earned-income tax credit in committee--and four of the Gang of 8 Members are on the committee-- and they all voted that down, as I recall, even though they promised there would be no welfare benefit for those in the country illegally who would be given provisional status under this legislation. So that was a breach of one of the key promises they made when the bill was moved forward.

As a result, we know the earned-income tax credit is not a tax deduction; it is a direct check from the U.S. Treasury to people based on a lower income. It is a welfare-type payment. It is not a tax deduction-type situation. So that was a disappointment in committee, that the group's promises were violated, and they have been blocked again on the floor.

There is one more thing I want to say. I don't appreciate the idea expressed that no matter what would happen, Members on this side would not vote for the bill. That is not true. We need, and need badly, an immigration bill that would improve the immigration system of America, put us on a sound course for the future, would provide compassionate status for people who are here illegally and put them in a situation where they do not have to be deported. And I would support that and have said that for years, actually, and have said that through this process.

But let me tell you what the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Association wrote to the Senate just 2 days ago, June 24:

The . . . immigration bill, if passed, will exacerbate

USCIS concerns about threats to national security and public

safety.

They go on to say:

It will further expose the USCIS agency as inept with an

already proposed massive increase in case flow that the

agency is ill prepared to handle.

They go on to say this about the bill:

It was deliberately designed to undermine the integrity of

our lawful immigration system.

They go on to say:

This bill should be opposed and reforms should be offered

based on consultation with the USCIS adjudicators who

actually have to implement it.

Nobody asked them. They met in secret with the special interests, big business interests, the La Raza interests, the agriculture interests, the Immigration Lawyers Association, but they didn't have any of the officers there. I wrote and asked them to meet with them. They still refused to meet with them because they didn't want to hear that.

On June 24, 2013, ICE's union association wrote us and said:

I urge you to vote no as this bill fails to address the

problems which have led to the nation's broken immigration

system and in fact will only serve to worsen current

immigration problems.

They go on to say:

Instead of empowering ICE agents to enforce the law, this

legislation empowers political appointees to further violate

the law and unilaterally stop law enforcement. This at a time

like no other in our nation's history, in which political

appointees throughout the federal government have proven to

Congress their propensity for the lawless abuse of authority.

There is no doubt that, if passed, public safety will be

endangered and massive amounts of future illegal

immigration--especially visa overstays--is ensured.

So all this talk about the greatest bill ever, it is not so. This bill is much weaker than the bill that was voted down in 2007. It was on the way to defeat last week, until they had a desperate claim to throw 20,000 agents at the border and spend a bunch of money without any thought about how it would work.

I am concerned about this. I think a lot is at stake. We know how the situation got here. We know what happened. They voted cloture Monday and the majority leader filled the tree. He, therefore, has complete control over any amendments. The last time in 2007, there were 47 amendments voted on. This time, nine have been voted on. Even with the 35 Senator Grassley proposed, that would be less than last time.

We know what has happened. The Corker-Hoeven amendment was able to rescue a bill that was in deep trouble, and now it looks like we are moving on to final vote, without the ability to have amendments, because the majority will not agree to allow an open process, as was promised, and allow a number of amendments that were offered.

Senator Leahy said a lot of amendments were offered in committee. Why couldn't they have been offered on the floor? Why couldn't we have voted for amendments on the floor? The majority doesn't get to pick and choose what amendments they are going to allow to come up. We are either going to have an open amendment process or we are not, and it looks like we are not.

I thank the Chair and would yield the floor.

Mr. President, reserving the right to object.

Would the majority leader agree to 30 minutes for me before we close up?

I thank the majority leader. He is always courteous.

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

Mr. President, I would like to express my appreciation to Senator Chambliss. This is one of the least-discussed but more important parts of our bill, ag provisions. He has delineated weakness after weakness in this process. The idea is he had to strengthen the bill. I hope the people who have heard it would draw a number of conclusions. First, there are great weaknesses in the bill. Second, Senator Chambliss fully understands, though he has worked on this--I know last time we had a bill here--at great length and contributed in great detail to it. I think the third thing we ought to understand is this is a complex regime we are trying to set up. I am not sure the government can ever accomplish a setup of as complex a regime as the effort that has been made to create in this legislation.

I thank Senator Chambliss for his positive contributions, for his work. I know he has been a constructive advocate with Members on the other side, trying to improve the legislation. I thank him for sharing in depth the difficult and confusing parts of this law.

There are a lot of things we need to understand before we move to final cloture vote on this legislation. It is late. I hope people will pay attention. We need to understand accurately what is happening. I have been an advocate. I am sure in the times we are here, sometimes we have to respond at a moment's notice and we make a statement that is not entirely accurate. But I do believe the sponsors of the bill who came to us and claimed they had the toughest bill in history and that it was going to solve our problems had an obligation to be more accurate than they have been.

Sometimes they make mistakes. Some of the disagreements make a difference in whether the legislation is good legislation or whether it is bad legislation. It is just important. I would like to point out a few things that have been talked about a lot today.

One was recently one of our Gang of 8, Senator Menendez, made reference to the border security and the officers who have written a letter complaining about this legislation and suggested, somehow, that maybe it was before the border enforcement had been improved--promised to be improved, at least. But I think it evidences a misunderstanding of how our system works.

This is a letter from the National Citizenship and Immigration Services. These are not the Border Patrol agents, these are not the ICE agents, these are the people who process the claims for citizenship and they try every day to do the right thing and treat people fairly and equally and ensure that people wait in line and wait their turn. They are not supportive of this legislation. They represent 12,000 USCIS employees, adjudication officers, and staff. This is the statement they issued:

The amended 1,200 page Corker-Hoeven immigration bill--

Not something previously, but the last bill we moved forward today--

if passed, will exacerbate USCIS concerns about threats to

national and public safety.

These officers try every day to review these applications for visas and entry permits. They try to identify terrorists and not let them come in. They turn down people who don't qualify. They said this bill will exacerbate threats to national security and public safety.

They go on to say:

It will further expose the USCIS agency as inept with an

already proposed massive increase in case flow that the

agency is ill prepared to handle.

In other words, they are not able to handle the flow they have now and this is going to provoke a disastrous flow that will make them all look inept. They are correctly afraid people will say they let terrorists and criminals in the country, and they had no way possible to process these matters.

They go on to make a strong statement. These are people who serve our country and who are not allowed to participate in drafting the legislation.

The proposal goes out of its way to provide legalization

for criminal offenders while making it more difficult for

Adjudications Officers to identify threats to the nation's

security in our ongoing war against terrorism. It was

deliberately designed to undermine the integrity of our

lawful immigration system.

I don't think our people deliberately wanted to have the system fail, but the people who have been writing this, if they wanted to make it tougher and tighter, would have written it a lot differently than it is now. It leaves these officers exposed and unable to fulfill their requirements to identify and block people who should not be admitted to the United States, and that was a very strong statement. It represents deep feelings by those officers.

They go on to say:

This bill should be opposed and the reforms should be

offered based on consultation with USCIS adjudicators who

actually have to implement it. Hopefully, lawmakers will read

the bill before their votes. I say put a cork in it.

That is what they say to us, and that was on Monday.

Here is another statement from the ICE officers, these officers, headed by Chris Crane, their association union president. Chris Crane is a former marine. He is so articulate and concerned about this legislation. He has raised it time and again.

The ICE officers have filed a lawsuit against Secretary Napolitano because they say she has blocked their ability to do their duty and placed them in a position where the supervisory directions to not enforce the law deny them the right to fulfill their oath to enforce the law. They filed a lawsuit in Federal court attacking this. I have never heard of this.

This whole association, which consists of thousands of officers, filed a lawsuit against Secretary Napolitano and their supervisor. They voted no confidence in John Morton, their supervisor, 2 years ago, and he just retired a few days ago. An independent survey of government morale factors found that ICE virtually had the lowest morale rating out of 179 government agencies.

Two years ago I asked Secretary Napolitano: Would you meet with these officers? She refused to say so. I asked her again earlier this year. She has not met with them. Nobody wants to listen to the people who are required to enforce the law.

Who are the ICE officers? The ICE officers are the people who deal with interior enforcement and deportations. They identify people who are here illegally, and they deport them and go through the mechanism. They have relationships with prisons where they go by the prison and pick up somebody who is illegally in the country and who has committed a crime. They are the ones who get them deported. They arrest people-- or at least supposedly they used to when they had jobs. They interfaced with local police.

They have been undermined in every way by this administration and kept from doing their job. That is a fact. That is why the morale is down, and that is why they have sued the government. That is why they oppose this bill. They were never listened to.

It cannot be the policy of the United States of America that if someone gets past the border of the United States, they are never going to be deported. It cannot be the policy that the only thing that counts is having a Border Patrol, but if they can get through, they are home free. There are not that many. I think there are 12,000 of these officers. There are not nearly enough to do the job already. They are getting no strength or support at all in this legislation.

I would note further that under the Congressional Budget Office analysis of this bill, which comports with what I have been saying for months, we are going to have a big increase in the amount of visa overstays. They are not going to be caught at the border. They are going to come in on a visa and never return. If we don't have ICE officers engaged in the effort, we will never be able to deport them.

We say, well, we are going to give legal status to everybody who is here. Let's say we give legal status to everybody who is here. What about the future? The people who are given legal status here will be given a Social Security card. They will be given a legal document that allows them to be in the country. ICE is not going to deport them. But what about those who come in the future? We are going to have no mechanism so they can be deported? That is one of the biggest flaws in this legislation.

I was a Federal prosecutor. I know about law enforcement. I did it for 15 years. If we don't help and have them engaged and utilize their ability, and treat them like second-class officers or citizens, we are not going to get the kind of legality the legislation promises--nowhere close. It is flawed. It should not pass. These officers tell us that correctly.

So the ICE officers are right. They said to us on June 24:

I urge you to vote no as this bill fails to address the

problems which have led to the nation's broken immigration

system and in fact will only serve to worsen current

immigration problems.

It will worsen current immigration problems. That is their word. They go on to say:

Instead of empowering ICE agents to enforce the law, this

legislation empowers political appointees to further violate

the law and unilaterally stop enforcement. This at a time

like no other in our nation's history, in which political

appointees throughout the federal government have proven to

Congress their propensity for the lawless abuse of authority.

There is no doubt that, if passed, public safety will be

endangered and massive amounts of future illegal

immigration--especially visa overstays--is ensured.

They go on to say:

Abuses by political appointees, who currently pick and

choose laws enacted by Congress will or will not be enforced,

will escalate with their increased discretion and authority

provided by this bill.

They say:

A vote against this bill is not a vote against immigration

reform which we all seek, it's a vote against bad legislation

and the special interests that wrote it; it's a vote to start

this process anew and create reforms that truly fix the

nation's broken immigration system.

How much clearer can it be? They are correct about this. Chris Crane is an

American patriot and his team is courageous. They have had to stand in there against an administration that issued this directive that basically required them not to follow plain law. What does this bill do? He indicated it right there. He said it gives even more discretion to the Secretary so she can issue even more directives undermining the law.

In fact, basically what the bill does is give more legal authority to the Secretary to do what she has been doing now, which is fundamentally, in many ways, contrary to law.

The Federal judge who is hearing this lawsuit the ICE officers filed explicitly stated at one of the hearings that the Secretary is not above the law, and that is certainly correct. She has been acting above the law by directing them not to comply with the law.

We are not saying we want the ICE officers to go out and round up everybody. Remember, if this bill passes, everybody will be given legal status--the ones who are supposed to be given legal status--and others will need to be identified. If they are not legally here, they will need to be deported. In the future, people who come in violation of the law will need to be deported also.

The Gang of 8 proposal adds four times more guest workers to our economy than a 2007 plan offered. It offers four times more guest workers than were offered by the 2007 bill that failed here--that comprehensive plan. This is at a time when 21 million Americans cannot find full-time employment. Imagine that. We have a much higher unemployment rate today than we had in 2007 before the bubble burst and we had the recession. We had virtually full employment in those days. Now we have high unemployment, which is a deep problem with employment in America today, and I don't think it is going to rapidly get better. For the last quarter of last year, growth of GDP was only .4 percent. The first quarter of this year has been revised down dramatically today to 1.8 percent. That means over half a year our growth is only 1.1 percent. That will not create jobs. It is not creating jobs. It is not enough to pull down unemployment in any way.

This bill is going to bring in huge amounts of new workers to take the few jobs being created. The bill also dramatically boasts permanent legal immigration. The permanent legal flow of immigration will increase substantially. Overall, it is conservatively estimated that the bill would legalize more than 30 million people--mostly lower skilled legal immigrants--over the next decade. It will be three times the current rate, and that is something I said originally.

I asked Senator Schumer, the Gang of 8 leader, at the committee: How many people will be legalized under your bill? Well, we won't say. I said again: How many? You offered a bill; you want us to vote for it. Can't you tell us how many people would be admitted? He refused to say. I said, 30 million over 10 years. The current legal flow would be 10 million over 10 years.

CBO came out with their report last week: 30 million in the first 10 years. Who was right about that? I mean, this is a big increase. Yes, it includes the people who are here illegally, but the annual flow is at least 50 percent higher than the current 1 million, according to the Los Angeles Times. I think that number comports with what we are able to calculate. So we are talking about a 50-percent increase in the annual flow of immigrants into the country with more coming in under chain migration. All of them will be able to work. All of them will be competing for jobs in the workplace at a time we are not producing many jobs.

What does the Congressional Budget Office say? I said for weeks this flow of labor had no other reasonable impact than to pull down wages of American workers. What did CBO say? CBO said the same thing. Last week the Congressional Budget Office in their study used this chart--I didn't make this chart. This is one of the few charts CBO put in their report, and it deals with the question of wages. ``The average wage would be lower than under the current law over the first dozen years.''

This shows in 2025 coming back to catch up. But, still, if the bill hadn't passed, we would have had more increased wages, and we would have had a different picture altogether. So it is going to be a serious impact on working Americans.

Professor Borjas from Harvard talked about this. He has written papers about this. He has written books on the subject. He is, I am sure, the most authoritative person. He is an immigrant himself--not his parents; he is an immigrant. He says also that wages are adversely impacted, particularly in lower skilled workers.

So Professor Borjas basically said there is benefit to low-income workers. Who gets it? The companies that hire the most low-income workers because those companies will be able to hire more people at lower wages. Who will lose, he said, in this process? The many more people who are workers. That is who is going to lose. We can't bring in large increases in labor at a time of high unemployment and not expect labor rates to go down.

Is the free market crowd not aware of that? Are our Democratic colleagues who talk about protecting the worker not aware of that? How can that be denied? Professor Borjas said it.

The Atlanta Federal Reserve economists found a substantial reduction of the value of working people in the Atlanta region as a result of the current flow of immigration. They detect a clear reduction in wages as a result of the current flow of immigration, and this flow is much bigger.

We are talking about not only a 50-percent increase in the legal flow of immigration every year, meaning 15 million over 10 years as opposed to 10 million. In addition to that, we are talking about the 11 million who would be given amnesty and legal status. Then there is an additional 4.5 million people who can't come in right now because there is a limit of how many each year--a cap. Those are going to be accelerated.

Then we have a guest worker program. Senator Chambliss talked about the agriculture industry. There are all kinds of guest worker programs. The guest worker programs will double the number of workers who come in. They come for one reason, and that is to take a job. They will double.

So this is a huge impact on our wages in America. This country is not creating enough jobs to sustain that.

That hurts the 11 million who are going to be given legal status. That hurts the immigrants who come here legally and have legal status already. That hurts poor people all over America, particularly because so many of these workers are competing for the lower wage jobs.

According to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and Professor Borjas, the group who will suffer the most are African-American males. This is really a matter not to be disputed.

One in three high school dropouts doesn't have a job. One in two African-American teenagers is unemployed. Twenty-one million Americans who want a full-time job cannot find one. In the city of Detroit, one in three households is on food stamps. In Washington, DC, one in three children lives in poverty.

Senator Menendez, I think, confuses total wage growth with average wage growth. Remember, more workers will increase the total wages, so if we bring in 1 million people, yes, more wages will be paid, but the average wage would be lower.

If a person is a worker, what does that person want to hear? They want to hear somebody say: Oh, the economy is going to have more wages. Isn't that great. But I am going to have less because 30 million people-plus will be here added to the workforce and everybody gets less and I am supposed to be thankful about that. I am supposed to write my Congressman and say: Oh, great, thank you for passing a bill that increases total wages in America.

Give me a break.

How about this: They say that GNP is up. Senator Menendez said that. He said GNP will increase. We are hearing that repeatedly: GNP will increase. Well, of course, just like total wages will increase when we have 30 million, 40 million people added to the economy, GNP is going to increase some if we add large numbers of people to the economy. That is the total of goods and services produced in America. But what about the average person and their share of the economy? Will it go up or will it go down?

Look at this chart. It comes right out of the CBO score, right out of their book. This is 2013 and this is 2029. This

is, I guess, 2032 where the lines cross. How many years? Well, over 29 years or 26 years. This bill, S. 744, would reduce per capital GNP by 0.7 percent in 2023, out here, and it stays below the line it would have been on had the bill not passed. This is below what would have happened if the bill had not passed. Passing the bill pulls down GNP per capita, making each worker in America less able to have a full share of the wealth of America. That is what that means. It is not right.

We have had people just blindly coming down here for days now and asserting boldly, without any serious economic data to back it up-- except in 2033. This is out to 2033. They have had years way out there where they try to claim improvement. We need to be worried about our people now. We have people unemployed now, looking for jobs right now. We should be helping them. So this is important.

Finally, I will show my colleagues one more chart we need to focus on. This is one of the most stunning charts I have seen. I was shocked when my staff told me about it. It was part of the Congressional Budget Office analysis and debt projections for our economy for the next 10 years. They do that every year. They do updates every year. So in the early part of this year, they did a projection of employment for the next 10 years, and they projected what kind of job creation we would have over the next 10 years. Our CBO does it every year. It is not a new report, it is something they do normally. This is what they concluded: For the next 5 years, 2015 through 2018, while we are coming out of the recovery from the recession, they project we would create 171,000 jobs a month.

That is really not enough to reduce unemployment significantly. We ought to be creating 200,000, 250,000, 300,000, to begin to pull down unemployment. But that is what they predicted. But look at this: This is the second 5 years of their 10-year window. They project only 75,000 jobs a month. So our staff called them.

They said: Tell me about this.

CBO said: We are glad you called. We are glad you called because we have given a lot of thought to this. We have studied projections and data and the case for projections for slower growth in this period of time for mature economies. This is what we come up with as the best projection, using private sector information and other data, including Department of Labor Statistics.

Well, from 2019 through 2023, we will be bringing in 75,000 jobs a month, with this bill. How can that not increase unemployment in America? How can that not create a glut of workers that pulls down wages and creates more unemployment?

I just don't see how we can possibly justify this large flow of workers without adversely impacting the salaries of American workers. I am not talking about the 11 million who would be legalized. I am not talking about those people because that is part of the agenda we have, to be a part of any long-term settlement of our immigration problem. I am saying in the future the annual flow, the monthly flow, will be more than we will be creating jobs here. That is a pretty stunning figure.

Mr. Peter Kirsanow, who serves on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and used to be on the Labor Relations Board, I believe, writes that this bill would have ``profound and substantial costs to American workers.''

He was participating in the hearings of the Civil Rights Commission. He said every witness there said that. Professor Borjas at Harvard, the leading expert in this area, has found that from 1960 through 2012, immigration has cost native-born workers an average of $402 billion in lost wages, while firms using workers such as this gained income. He goes on to say the impact of increased immigration from 1980 to 2000 resulted in a 3-percent decrease in wages for average native workers and an 8-percent decrease for high school dropouts. This is 8 percent. That means a lot of money.

He goes on to say: ``Immigration has its largest negative impact on the wage of native workers who lack a high school diploma''--a group that makes up, in recent decades, a shrinking share of the workforce. These workers are among the poorest of Americans.

He goes on to say: ``The children of these workers make up a disproportionate number of children in poverty.'' He concludes that, based upon census data, when we have an increase of workers in a specific field of 10 percent, we can have the employment rate fall. A 10-percent increase in supplied workers from immigration levels reduced the employment rate for African Americans by 5.9 percent. That is already.

My point is I don't see how anyone can say that anything like over the next decade, we are not going to see lower wages, more unemployment, and lower per capita GNP. Frankly, I think Borjas's analysis is probably stronger on that subject than CBO's.

We know this: The Federal Reserve Bank in Atlanta has done similar studies. These studies show things such as the average worker's pay being reduced by $1,500 a year, which is $120 a month.

My colleagues continue to insist that their promise is correct, that this bill would not provide welfare to those who are given legal status. But the facts show it is not correct. I just have to rebut that. I questioned that at the beginning. We now know their promise is not correct.

Immediate access to once legalized individuals--they will first have immediate access to State and local benefits.

Senator Rubio even proposed an amendment to the bill that would have eliminated that, but it was never voted on. So the bill we will be voting on does not change that at all. He knew that was contrary to the promises made.

Immediate access that will be given to those who are given this RPI provisional status to free earned-income tax credits is in the bill. I offered an amendment in committee to fix that. In other words, the earned-income tax credit, if a person makes below a certain salary and they are working and they have a family, they get a big check, sometimes $2,000, $3,000, from the Federal Government. It is not a tax deduction. It is not a credit against future taxes. It is a direct payment to that individual in the form of a subsidy and a welfare payment and that is the way the CBO scores it--as a direct payment, just like any other payment of welfare to the individual because that is what it is.

They will get that immediately. I offered an amendment in committee. I do think--I think I incorrectly said earlier that the Gang of 8 Members voted against it. I do believe Senator Graham and Senator Flake voted for my amendment in committee, but it failed in committee. That amendment, to be offered tonight by Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, has been blocked and will not be voted on.

So if this bill passes, there will be welfare payments immediately to all 11 million who qualify, and large numbers of these individuals will qualify because they are low-skilled. Over half do not have a high school diploma, and they will be in that wage rate that qualifies for this welfare payment.

Also, within 5 years, 2 to 3 million illegal immigrants who are given legal status will become green card holders and/or citizens and become eligible for all Federal benefits. So a big chunk of them--2 to 3 million--will be put on a pathway to citizenship in 5 years and certainly legal status in 5 years.

I ask unanimous consent, Mr. President, for an additional 2 minutes and I will wrap up.

I thank the Presiding Officer for his courtesy.

So those will get the welfare within 5 years. That is where we are.

I appreciate the work that a lot of people have put into this legislation. People have worked hard on it. They have a vision they want to accomplish. We do need to fix our broken immigration system. But this legislation does not do it. It does not come close to doing it. It should not become law, and we should make sure it does not become law.

I urge my colleagues tomorrow to vote no. That does not mean we will never do anything. That is, of course, silly. We need to come back with a more realistic piece of legislation--legislation that asks seriously how many workers this economy can accommodate. Do we have a system that deals with visa overstays? This bill weakens dramatically the entry- exit visa system under current law that has never

been implemented but should have been implemented years ago. It undermines the requirements in current law that would make that system work. Therefore, it will not work. It is weaker than the current law. We should be following current law.

In addition, we need to strengthen, as Senator Portman advocated, the E-Verify system at the workplace. That is not done. As Senator Chambliss pointed out, there are so many complexities in these guest worker programs, so many loopholes and difficulties that we do not even know about. We need to simplify that system.

A guest worker system that brings a person here to work for 3 years with their family, where they can reup for another 3 years and maybe another 3 years--they are then going to be asked to leave this country if they no longer have a job, if we hit a recession? That is not going to happen. That is an impractical system.

A good guest worker system should allow workers to come to America-- only those who intend to work for the season they intend to work, and then they should return home. They should maintain their residence in the foreign country, and then they work here as guest workers. That is what a guest worker program should be.

This bill allows people to come with their families, to put down roots and become established, and then it is impractical and unkind and unrealistic that we would, 10 years from now, say go home. We are going to have huge visa overstays, as CBO predicts, because that is the way it is going to work.

I thank the Presiding Officer for giving me an opportunity tonight to share a few of my concerns, as we move to a big vote tomorrow on cloture.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, I think we should get a little perspective, at least as I see it, on the Corker-Hoeven-Schumer substitute that was voted on earlier, and we will vote on again. I think this is what happened.

It became clear last week that the Gang of 8 bill was nowhere close to doing what it promised to do on enforcement. The flaws were too dramatic to hide and the CBO found it would only reduce illegal immigration by 25 percent after they had promised dramatic changes in it. And I pointed out that it had holes all through it, like Swiss cheese, and the CBO essentially confirmed that.

The bill was in trouble. Support for the gang's proposal began to fall, and the mood changed from over confidence among the supporters to even panic. The gang knew action had to be taken or things could be lost, so they got--they went to Senators Corker and Hoeven with this idea that they would just add 20,000 Border Patrol agents to our current agents on the border and 700 miles of fencing. Both of those projects they had steadfastly rejected, even rejecting the Cornyn amendment to add 5,000 agents. One of the Members of the Senate said it was dumb to do any fencing, and they opposed the fence.

Well, these provisions of new enforcement were contrary to what the supporters had been saying for weeks. They promised America their bill was the toughest ever, driving those messages into homes all over America with TV advertisements; with Senator Rubio; big business; Mr. Zucherberg pretending he is a conservative advocate; running ads telling us all what we ought to know and do about this bill. The goal, I have to say, was to provide some sort of cover to get wavering Democrats and Republicans to sign on to this new bill that is going to add 20,000 agents.

Well, why would they be willing to make such a dramatic, unceremonious retreat on a position they had taken for months? First, they were desperate. Something needed to be done. Secondly, they know that the promises made in this substitute bill to build fences and to add 20,000 agents will never occur. It is not going to happen. So they are really not worried about that. It is a kabuki dance, a bob-and- weave, a rope-a-dope. Everybody in the Senate knows how this process is working. The staff know it, and I think probably most of the media understand it.

These promised actions are not going to happen in the future. The interests who push this bill have never wanted to end the illegality. I have been fighting on this for years. Every time we get close to fixing E-Verify, every time we get--in fact, we had debates, and I had to hold up bills to keep E-Verify from expiring. Forces were out there trying to kill E-Verify for years, and I held up legislation to insist that at least we keep it alive. We weren't able to strengthen it, which it needed desperately. That is the workplace situation, E-Verify is, where when a person applies for a job they run a quick computer check on a person's Social Security number to determine whether they have a lawful Social Security number. It identifies a lot of people who are illegally here and should not be taking jobs. So those forces have never wanted a lawful system, and they objected to things that occurred.

So their interests and the interests of those who met in secret to cobble this bill together have always favored more immigration, legal immigration, and it seems to me quite a bit of indifference to illegal. These are the forces that have voiced support for but blocked the creation of real border security fencing over the years.

They have voiced support for E-Verify with a blocked extension of it and strengthening of it. They have voiced support for an entry-exit visa system that works in all land, sea, and airports; indeed, we have passed bills to do that--biometric land, sea, and airports. This bill reduces that requirement through just entry-exit visa systems at air and seaports and not on land, and it is not biometric. That is a critical difference because now 40 percent of the people here illegally come on visas and overstay, and we have no idea who is leaving the country. We clock them in on entry, but we don't clock them out when they leave. So we don't know if anybody has overstayed.

That is the situation we are in. I see my friend, Senator Vitter, and I want him to have time to talk. I know he is due to be talking now. I would say one more thing as he prepares to deliver his remarks.

We were promised, when the bill passed, that the economy would be better, wages would improve, and GDP would be up, and unemployment wouldn't be adversely affected. The CBO report said unemployment will go up, and I have a chart they put out in their own report showing that. They say wages will go down over the next decade, and they say unemployment will go up. They say gross domestic product will increase some as a result of the situation of more people, but per capita, per person, GDP declines for 21 years.

So we need to know--at this time of high unemployment, slow growth, low-wage growth, we need to be very cautious about allowing millions of new workers to enter this economy at this time. We want to have immigration, but we want to have it at a rate that serves the national interests and increasing it dramatically is not appropriate.

I thank the Chair.

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

Mr. President, I support Senator Vitter's motion. There are multiple points of order that could be raised against this legislation. They have declared a number of the spending programs emergencies; if you designate an appropriation as an emergency, it does not count against the budget, but it is real spending all the same.

Normally, we would expect that border enforcement and hiring of officers would not be an emergency; neither would other aspects of what we are doing here be considered an emergency.

We were told by the sponsors of the legislation repeatedly that this bill will be paid for and it will be paid for by fees and fines contributed by those who are here illegally as part of their payment to get citizenship and legal status. Well, that comes nowhere close to funding the legislation.

This chart I have in the Chamber gives us some--I will get to it in a second. But this chart gives an indication of where we stand with regard to budget implications of the legislation.

So the fines and penalties and fees that are a part of this maybe bring in $6 or $7 billion. They said there was enough to pay for the bill. The bill originally started out at $6 billion, then it went to $8 billion, and then, with the Corker-Hoeven amendment, it jumped to $46 billion. There are no additional fees on the illegal aliens.

When they met with the support group, the Gang of 8 met with the real group who has been driving the bill--this coalition of special interests.

They went to them and said: We need to raise some more money.

And they said: Well, you cannot put any more fines on the people here illegally.

So they said: Yes, ma'am. We will not put any more fines on them. We will put more fees on legal immigrants in the future.

So they raised fees on legal immigrants but did not raise fees on the people who are here illegally who originally they said were going to pay for the entire bill. So that is important for us to fully understand. The money is simply not there.

I will note parenthetically that the 2007 immigration bill--that was on the floor and we debated and eventually failed--that bill would have raised as much as $8,000 per illegal individual. This bill only raises $2,000, and it is to be paid over 10 years. This is not a burdensome payment if you are going to say they pay a fine--as the sponsors of the legislation did--to become permanent residents and put them on a path to citizenship. So it is about $17 a month. I calculated it out roughly. That is not a big fine. You are allowed to work. You get a Social Security card, an ability to apply for any job in America on an equal status with anybody else who has been unemployed and looking for work, their children looking for work and need a job. Somebody who was just a few days before illegally here now has full power under this legislation, if it were passed, to take that job. So the idea that $17 a month is somehow going to be breaking the bank is not accurate.

The problem fundamentally with this situation is that it double counts billions of dollars. We need to understand how this process works, this double counting. It was part of the 2,000-plus page ObamaCare health care legislation. This thing is over a thousand pages--1,200 pages--and things get lost in it. What is lost fundamentally in it--and the supporters of it ought to be more candid about this--is that to make their argument that the bill is going to bring in more money than goes out, they have to double count Social Security and Medicare money. They just do. Senator Corker has made that argument. Basically, we have this money coming in.

In one of the conventions of accounting that our budget team uses-- the

Congressional Budget Office--it calculates all the money coming into the government, all the money going out of the government, regardless of whether or not there is a trust fund.

Another form of accounting accounts for the trust funds and accounts for general revenue. General revenue is on-budget. Off-budget is the Social Security trust fund and some other funds.

So look at this chart. I think it gives a picture of where we are. This is the true cost of this immigration bill. I am the ranking Republican on the Budget Committee. We wrestle with these numbers all the time. Under this, they claim they have a unified budget surplus of $197 billion. That is the accounting method where all the money coming in is counted against all the money going out. But if you remove the Social Security surplus, that is $211 billion. If you remove the Medicare surplus, that is $56 billion, showing, instead of having a surplus, we have a $70 billion deficit.

You say: Well, CBO said different.

No, CBO did not. CBO, in its report, explicitly shows that the on- budget accounting is negative, that it adds to the debt. It counts a surplus in Medicare and Social Security. Now, how could they do that? Well, these individuals--many of them do not have a Social Security Number and are not paying Social Security and Medicare taxes--the withholding of FICA on our paychecks. They are not paying that. Once legalized, they will pay that. There will be new money coming into the Treasury.

These sponsors of the bill, so desperate to promote their bill and say it is paid for, say that Social Security payment, that FICA payment, is now available for them to spend over here on all the things they want to spend the money on; therefore, it has created a surplus. But it ignores something very important: that each one of those individuals who have paid into Medicare, paid into Social Security, are going to draw out Medicare and Social Security. It is their money. It is their retirement money. You cannot put the money up for their retirement and spend it the same day and expect it to be there.

This is how this country is going broke. This is how they handled President Obama's ObamaCare. They double counted the money. Well, you say that is not accurate. Let me read the letter I got from the Congressional Budget Office Director the night before we voted, December 23. I voted against it. The ObamaCare legislation passed on Christmas Eve. They finally got the 60th vote before Senator Brown from Massachusetts could be installed. This is what the CBO said at the time:

[T]he savings to the [Medicare] trust fund under PPACA--

That is the ObamaCare--

would be received by the government only once, so they

cannot be set aside to pay for future Medicare spending and,

at the same time, pay for current spending on other parts of

the legislation. . . . To describe the full amount of

[Medicare] trust fund savings as both improving the

government's ability to pay future Medicare benefits and

financing new spending outside of Medicare would essentially

double-count a large share of those savings and thus

overstate the improvement in the government's fiscal

position.

If that were a private business that sent out a solicitation to buy its stock and they said, we are on a good basis, we are making so much profit--and they are counting as their profit the money going into their employees' pension plan--I think they would be in big trouble, do you not? Because it is not their money, it is money committed to the employees' pension. You cannot claim it as profit and say, invest in my company, I am making a big profit, counting the money that is in the employees' retirement money.

Well, this is what we have been doing. The Senator from South Carolina used to say: We have been raiding trust funds. If we were in private business, we would be in jail. I think there is too much truth to that, frankly. So this is undisputedly real.

But because there is a score, a unified budget score, the method that says all money comes in and all money goes out, you have a surplus, you can count this as a surplus. Why is that? Well, because most of the people who will be legalized under this bill, those individuals are in a situation where they are younger, maybe 35. So they will pay into Medicare for a number of years, and Medicare for a number of years will see a surplus in their account.

But after they reach retirement age and start retiring, the money is going to be drawn out. In fact, right now the amount of money paid into Social Security and Medicare by American workers is not enough to cover the cost of their retirement. That is why both of those accounts are in serious trouble. We have got to do something about it. We need to be making it stronger, not weaker. This makes it weaker. You are taking the money that should have been going to fund the retirement accounts of the people who were previously illegal who are now legal and spending it on something else.

Senator Vitter is exactly right, there are multiple bases for making a budget point of order against this bill. I believe the motion to waive the budget point of order was a motion to waive all of them, so this will be the only one we will get to vote on. So there are others who could have been raised also.

So what about this argument that wages are supposed to be improved by the bill? We were told that and told that repeatedly. This is what the CBO report says, ``CBO estimates that S. 744 would cause the unemployment rate to increase slightly between 2014 and 2020.'' So this is a fact. So at a time of high unemployment, lower wages, we are passing legislation that will increase unemployment, make more people unable to find work.

This is a chart that was in the CBO report, not my chart. I did not make this chart; it is in their report. It points out the average wage would be lower than under current law over the first dozen years. So we are asked to vote for a bill that CBO says would make the average wage of American working people lower for a dozen years.

I do not see how that is rational, frankly. We have seen since 1999 the wages of American workers have been decreasing as compared to the inflation index. The amount of money they are making is falling compared to inflation. That is a tragic thing. It has been continuous. I thought it might be temporary, but it has been continuing steadily.

One expert, Professor Borjas at Harvard, attributed 40 percent of that to immigration already. This bill will dramatically increase the flow of immigration. So I am worried. This is a chart that has down here 2021, 2023, before it hits the line back where it was. Then you say, well, then it is improving. Not so. Not so. If the bill had not been passed, we would have had some increase all along. The lines would have been much higher. I do not know how many years it would take for this ever to get back to where it would have been if the bill did not pass.

That is what the CBO says. It is not that inconsistent with common sense, that at a time of high unemployment and you bring in millions of workers, it is going to pull down wages. If you bring more coal into America, you bring more iron into America, more cotton into America, the price of those products falls. It is supply and demand. You bring more labor in, you are going to have a lower wage rate, which David Frum has written is what the bill was designed for to begin with, pull down wages.

We need to think about this. I dispute this idea that there is no impact on wages by this immigration law. This is what will happen in the next 10 years: We are going to legalize 11 million people. About half of those are not working effectively in the real job force; maybe they are doing part-time work; maybe their family is taking care of them; maybe they are working in a restaurant or lawn care companies off the books. All of a sudden they are going to be given legal status. They will be able to apply for any job: truckdrivers, forklift operators, coal miners, steelworkers, work for the county commission, city council, State of Alabama. They can apply for all of those jobs. So you are going to see a large increase in the supply of labor available for jobs for which they were not eligible previously.

Second, what about the normal legal flow? We now admit about 1 million people a year into America. That is the most generous admission rate of any Nation in the world. It is pretty significant, very significant. We have been absorbing that. I think we can continue at that rate. However, this bill, in addition to the 1 million I just mentioned, will increase by at least 50 percent the number of immigrants who

come into the country every year hereafter, which is pretty significant.

In addition, there is another 4.5 million who are waiting to come into America. They have been tentatively approved, but there are limits on how many can come each year. So they are waiting their time. They call it a ``backlog.'' They are just waiting their time. That is 4.5 million. They have been accelerated.

Let's think this through. Under the current law, we were on track to admit 10 million people as immigrants into America. By immigrants, I mean people who want to stay here, get legal permanent residence and become citizens. We are on track for 10 million if you follow current law.

Under this bill, we will admit, over the next 10 years to lawful status in America, the 15 million I mentioned, the 11 million plus the 4.5. Then we are going to increase by 50 percent the annual admission rate from 1 million to 1.5, meaning 15 million over 10, which means 30 million. So the number of people who will be given permanent legal status in America over the next 10 years will be 30 million, not 10 if the law had been properly applied.

There is another category. Those are people we refer to generally as guest workers. Guest workers come not to become immigrants, not to stay in the country permanently, but come to work in an area where they can find a job. It is supposed to be in an area where there are not workers to do the work. That is the theory, at least. How will that be impacted by this new legislation? It is going to be double. So the number of guest workers, which is very large now, is going to double under this legislation.

I would say, first of all, it is common sense that the average wage is going to fall. It is common sense that unemployment will go up. It is common sense that it is going to be harder for Americans in this time of high unemployment and falling wages to get a decent job with health care and retirement benefits. It just is.

People can spin and they can quote Grover Norquist and those kinds of things to say otherwise, but Professor Borjas at Harvard says differently, a Federal Reserve economist in Atlanta says differently, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights said they had hearings and every witness acknowledged it would be bad for American workers, particularly lower income workers, particularly for African-American and Hispanic workers who are already here. They will get hammered the most under this dramatic increase in workers.

They say it will increase GNP. Well, it will. You legalize 30 million, you are going to have a larger economy and it will be bigger. But the question is, per person, per capita, will America's productivity increase? Will our GDP increase?

Well, what did CBO find? This is their chart. It shows that it dropped. This is the baseline today. If we pass the bill, the per- capita GNP of the United States of America of each citizen drops. That does not make us wealthier as a Nation, as a person. So what if the economy grows a little bit but everyone has less because you have got more people? That is what they say: S. 744 would reduce per capita by 0.7 percent in 2023. That is 2023. This is about 16 years they chart that it will be lower than it would have been if the bill never passes.

So why would we want to pass legislation that clearly reduces the per capita wealth of America, our growth of GNP? I do not think that makes good sense. I am concerned about it. Nobody wants to talk about it, they just want to pretend there is no limit to the number of workers who can be brought in and that that will not have a societal impact on America.

Let's take a look at a few things here. This is the Washington Post from 2 weeks ago when we got the job report dealing with the jobs for the month of May. It was considered to be fairly positive. It was about our normal average increase during the recovery period from the recession. But it is still not much. Not so good.

Unemployment went up, even though we created, they said, 175,000 jobs. That sounded good. We created 175,000. But you have to create about that many jobs each month to stay level, because we have more people coming into the workforce each month.

Look at what they said in the article:

The bulk of the job gains in May were in the service

industry, which added about 57,000 jobs last month. Still,

roughly half of those were temporary positions, suggesting

that businesses remain uncertain of consumer demand.

They go on to note:

Missing from the picture were production jobs in industries

such as construction and manufacturing. . . . Meanwhile,

manufacturing shed 8,000 workers. . . .

Manufacturing jobs went down by 8,000. The increase was in service industries. The increase in half of those were part-time or temporary, not full-time, permanent jobs.

Anybody who says we are in great shape with regard to job creation is not telling the truth.

An article in today's Wall Street Journal, ``Some Unemployed Keep Losing Ground,'' states that ``nearly 12 million Americans were unemployed in May, down from a peak of more than 15 million. . . . ''

At one point a few years ago, we had 15 million Americans working. We now have 12 million Americans working.

The percentage of Americans in the workforce continues to fall. It is the lowest since the 1970s when women were entering the workforce. That is why the percentage went up, but now we are down to that level again. People are not finding work.

The idea that we can bring in millions of workers well above the current rate and that this is somehow going to create jobs is hard for me to accept. The article states:

``At 175,000 jobs per month, we're years away,'' said Adam

Looney, a Brookings economist, from where we need to be in

unemployment rate. The real reason is economic growth has not

increased much.

It goes on to cite some very sad numbers that show the danger for people who have been unemployed for longer periods of time. It does appear, unfortunately, that somebody who is older or somebody who has not found a job for quite a number of months finds it even harder to find a job in the future. This is the Wall Street Journal, and they support immigration aggressively, but this is their story. The article talked about Mr. Ken Gray.

Ken Gray has experienced that frustration firsthand. In

January of 2011, Mr. Gray's wife died after a battle with

ovarian cancer; three months later, he was laid off from his

job as an account manager at AT&T, where he had worked for

more than 20 years. Still grieving from the loss of his wife,

Mr. Gray says he was slow to turn his full attention to his

job search. By the time he did, the Chicago resident was

long-term unemployed, and he has struggled to get prospective

employers even to respond to his applications.

``You just feel so discouraged,'' Mr. Gray said. ``You ask

yourself what's the sense of sending a resume if you don't

hear anything.''

Now 59 years old, Mr. Gray been living off his dwindling

savings since his unemployment benefits expired last year. He

says he remains determined to find work. But long-term job

seekers are twice as likely to leave the labor market as to

find jobs, and many experts worry that many of them will

never return to work. That could create a class of

permanently unemployed workers and leave lasting scars on the

economy.

``Once people reach a point where they no longer consider

themselves employable . . . it is very difficult to pull them

back,'' says Joe Carbone, president of WorkPlace, a

Connecticut workforce-development agency. . . . ``We are

losing thousands of people a day. This is like an epidemic.''

I don't think we can pretend this isn't reality. I think the CBO numbers probably understate the problem. Professor Borjas' studies would indicate that and others would indicate that.

Another example is from the New York Times, May 20, 1 month ago, written by Jessica Glazer:

The men began arriving last Wednesday, first a trickle,

then dozens. By Friday there were hundreds of them, along

with a few women.

They set up their tents and mattresses on the sidewalk in

Long Island City, Queens, unpacked their Coronas and cards--

and settled in to wait for as long as five days and nights

for a slender chance at a union job as an elevator mechanic.

On Monday morning. . . . Those in line--there were more

than 800 by sun-up Monday--were hoping for a chance at job

security, higher salaries and other benefits.

Andres Loaiza, 25, had his eye on a position that includes

minimal physical labor. . . . Every 18 to 20 months, the

union accepts 750 applications for the 150 to 200 spots in

its four-year apprenticeship program. . . . While they

waited, the hopefuls lined the sidewalk along 36th Street. .

. . The union had rented six port-a-potties and hired a 24-

hour security guard. . . . Overnight, they brushed their

teeth with bottles of water; tucked into

their sleeping bags, folding chairs or cars; and tried to get

some rest.

On Saturday a light drizzle fell. Gerry Dubatowka, 20, whose father is in Local 3, waited for his shot.

He is studying electrical technology at Orange County

Community College, but said he would rather work with his

hands than be in school.

``I just want to do whatever, wherever I got to start,''

said Mr. Dubatowka. ``I want steady work all the time.''

For millions of Americans, this is what they want. They want a job with a retirement benefit, a health care benefit, and a steady job. We are not creating enough of them. That is the problem. Continuing:

After Sunday's drenching rain, Monday morning dawned gray.

A few arguments erupted as people tried to cut the line. . .

. At 9 a.m. Monday, the door opened. The first man in line

disappeared inside and emerged moments later with a wide

smile across his face.

``Yay! No. 1!'' one man yelled when he stepped onto the

sidewalk.

``Good luck, big guy!'' said another.

This is the problem we are facing. I would share with my colleagues, at the rate of immigration in the future, we will have well over 100,000 new immigrants a month enter the country who are looking for jobs. We will have more than that enter, but we will probably have about 100,000-or-so-plus a month looking for jobs.

What does our Congressional Budget Office say about our future economic growth pattern? The CBO each year, as part of the budget process, lays out a 10-year projection of economic growth for America. They project all kinds of things. They are not perfect, but they use the best data available from the Labor Department, academic studies, private business analysis, and they project how many people would be employed. They are projecting for America's economy what I think a large majority of other economists and private sector people are predicting; that is, a new normal, where growth has not increased as fast as it has during boom times in the past. You have heard that phrase, ``a new normal.'' This is a new normal, and that is what we are facing.

They predict, in the second 5 years of our 10-year budget window, we will increase jobs in America by 75,000 a month, well below the amount of people immigrating to America to get jobs under this bill. Should we invite people to come who are not likely to have a job? Should we invite more people to come than we will have jobs for when they will make the new immigrants who arrive before them unable to have a good job?

Shall we bring in more immigrants than we can absorb, causing wages to decline for American citizens, making it harder for American citizens to find work? Do we take those people who are not finding jobs and do we then place them on the welfare rolls and put them on a government subsistence program when they have been independent and able to prosper previously in the private sector?

What is the right thing for America, colleagues? I think we have to think about that. These numbers from CBO show there will be adverse impacts on the economy, wages, and unemployment at a time when we need to be doing just the opposite. We need to be creating jobs, putting people to work. We simply have to give first priority to those to whom we owe our allegiance, the people who fought our wars, paid our taxes, and kept the country going when they were able to work.

I raise that point. People don't like to talk about it, but I do believe it is honest and true. A good immigration policy should be focused on a number of things. It should be focused first on the national interests, the interests of the American working people, whether they are lawful immigrants and not yet citizens or whether they are lawfully here as citizens. We owe our obligation first to that cohort of people. They are loyal to our country, and we owe them our loyalty first.

Then we bring in people at the rate we think we can absorb that is healthy for America. Maybe 1 million people a year is about the right rate. If that is where we are, I can accept that. To have it increased by 50 percent, to have the guest worker program doubled on top of allowing early entrants and legality to 15 million, that is a trend that I think is dangerous for America.

My position is this, let's be prudent, friends and colleagues. Let's be cautious. Let's not be increasing the legal flow by 50 percent at a time of high unemployment when it looks as if we are not going to be able to create enough jobs for those people who would be coming here. We surely don't need to be doubling, it seems to me, the guest worker program at a time when we have high unemployment.

This is where we are. I believe that needs to be considered. I think the American people who are out here watching what is going on in the Congress need to be asking their Senators and their Members of Congress who will be taking up these issues soon: Are you thinking about us? Whom are you thinking about? Are you thinking politics or are you thinking about me? Who is thinking about me?

You meet in secret with the Chamber of Commerce. You meet in secret with La Raza, you meet with the politicians, you meet with the meat packers group, and the immigration lawyers association, but you don't meet with the law enforcement officers who have told us this bill will not work.

You don't have representatives from the heart and soul of America in there. Nobody is expressing what kind of impact will be felt by them. This is what my concern is and one of my many concerns as we wrestle with legislation.

We can deal compassionately with the people who have been here for a long time, and I will support that. I believe we need a system that ends the lawlessness and a system that serves the national interests of American citizens.

I thank the Chair, and I yield the floor.

The Senator from Oklahoma.

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

Madam President, under the rule, I believe I am allowed to use the time of Senator Grassley.

Madam President, the vote we will be having later this afternoon is not on a Corker-Hoeven amendment, as I think most Senators may have thought when they left town Thursday and Friday. In fact, Thursday night we were told the Hoeven-Corker amendment would be filed and, presumably, we would then be debating that amendment. As we went into the night, every hour being told it would soon be filed, it turned out it wasn't filed until almost noon Friday, and it wasn't filed as the Corker-Hoeven amendment dealing with Border Patrol officers and fencing and some other issues, it was filed as a complete substitute to the whole bill.

This vote this afternoon will give Majority Leader Reid procedural control of the debate. It is his motion to shut off debate on a 1,200- page substitute--200 pages more than the bill we were looking at last week and that no one has read.

Our Senators haven't had a chance to read the bill to see how the merged language falls throughout the legislation and to see what other changes may have been made over the weekend. I was here. We have been trying to get through this, but it is not easy. I am sure my colleagues haven't been able to do so.

The majority leader has filed cloture and is blocking any further amendments from being in order unless he personally approves them. That is the parliamentary situation we are in today. We are in a situation in which the majority leader will approve, personally, any and all amendments that get voted on. So he has once again created a situation where Senators have to play ``Mother May I'' to get a vote on an amendment they feel is important. This is not how the Senate should be run.

A duly elected Senator from any State in America should be able to come to the floor and get an amendment voted on without having to have the personal approval of the majority leader. This trend has accelerated in recent years where it is truly damaging the whole role of the Senate, and we need more attention to that issue. This is exactly what happened with ObamaCare. The majority rushed through a complex bill so there would be no time to digest what was in it.

Just yesterday, on one of the Sunday programs, Bob Woodward, the famed writer who dealt with the Nixon scandal and other issues over the years, said this:

When you pass complicated legislation and no one has really

read the bill, the outcome is absurd.

I think that is too true, unfortunately. Senator Reid has said many times we have to pass this bill by July 4. Why is that? Is that his decision to make?

Is it the other Senators' decisions to make? So to accomplish that goal, he has filed cloture immediately on this new substitute bill. He filed cloture as soon as it was filed to shut off debate. That is the effect of what we are doing.

Why is there such urgency to pass legislation of this importance by Friday? I am not aware that we have any big business after the July 4th recess. We could stay here through the July 4th recess, for that matter. As Bill Kristol, the writer and commentator, noted yesterday on one of the programs:

There's no urgency. Can we at least let people read it for

a week?

The last thing Republicans should do is be enablers in the majority plan to rush through the bill before people know what is in it. Why should we enable that? If this bill is so good, what is the harm of letting the Senators and the American public have a while to digest what is in it? Why not commit to open and extensive debate? We have an obligation to read a bill before we pass it. If Senators have not read the 1,200-page substitute bill, they shouldn't vote to cut off debate. They should vote against that.

Let me say what the problem is here. This is a new technique. Senator Lamar Alexander said some time ago, that the truth is the Senate doesn't do comprehensive well. I think that was a very serious comment after the failure of this last bill and after ObamaCare and its massive power and overreach.

So what has happened? What has happened is Senators got together, as they did with ObamaCare, basically in secret, they wrote a 1,200-page bill in this case, and they did talking points. The talking points in a big bill like this--and particularly this one--have had political consultants, pollsters, all kinds of people organizing this campaign to drive this legislation through the Senate. They have had a response to every criticism; they have had spin in every different way. They are running TV advertisements right now, I suppose, still promoting this legislation as something it is not.

The talking points are designed to be very popular. The talking points are designed to be very much in accord with most people's views about what good legislation is. Indeed, I liked most of the talking points myself. I would vote for legislation that did most of that, for sure--if it did what it said. That is what is sold because nobody can articulate and explain the details of it, and people's eyes glaze over when you talk about it and people don't understand it fully. So they promote the bill as if it is the talking points, when the talking points do not comply with what is in this legislation.

That is why we have an obligation to study it, read it, and vote on the bill, and not the talking points. A few weeks ago, former Attorney General and Reagan's close friend, Ed Meese, wrote a letter to the editors of the Wall Street Journal and said:

On legislation as important as this, lawmakers must take

the time to read the bill, not rely on others'

characterizations of what it says. We can't afford to have

Congress ``pass the bill to find out what's in it.''

So at this point in the legislative process, a ``yes'' vote on cloture tonight means Senator Reid will have gained complete control of the process. No amendments will be voted on he does not approve. His goal is to drive the train to passage by this Friday. Public policy, public interest is beside the point.

So the vote this afternoon is to proceed again to the altered substitute--the entire substitute--of the Gang of 8 legislation, and the flawed framework of this bill remains immediate amnesty, which will never be revoked. That will occur within weeks, with no enforcement measure ever effectively having to occur. In reality, it will not have to occur.

According to the June 7 Rasmussen Report, the American people want enforcement first by a 4-to-1 margin. The Gang of 8 initially promised their bill would be enforcement first, but that is not what the bill said. Today, no one disputes that it is amnesty first. In fact, the lead sponsor of the bill, Senator Schumer, on ``Meet the Press'' conceded this point shortly after the bill was filed, saying:

. . . first, people will be legalized. . . . Then, we will

make sure the border is secure.

``Then, we will make sure the border is secure.'' This is important because this is what happened in 1986, and Senator Grassley is so clear about that. He voted for the 1986 bill, and he saw the enforcement never occur.

Under the substitute, illegal immigrants can still receive amnesty-- not when the border is actually secure but when Secretary Napolitano tells the Congress she is starting to secure the border. So it occurs when Secretary Napolitano--who is now not enforcing our laws--tells Congress she is starting to secure the border.

Within 6 months of enactment, Secretary Napolitano need only submit to Congress her views on a comprehensive southern border strategy and southern border fencing strategy and give notice that she has begun implementing her plans.

At that point--which will likely occur earlier, as Secretary Napolitano indicated during her testimony before the Judiciary Committee--she may begin processing applications for and then granting legal status, granting amnesty, and granting work and travel permits. She will grant Social Security account numbers, the ability to obtain driver's licensing, and many Federal and State public benefits, all without a single border security or enforcement action having been taken.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that I be notified after 20 minutes. How much time has been consumed at this point?

I didn't understand it. I am sorry. Was there a UC on the Senator taking the floor? If so, I will certainly yield and wrap up.

Madam President, I will conclude by 5 till and yield to the Senator at that time. I think that will get us on the right track.

I know there were discussions, and I was told earlier that would be the time that I would have. Then I was told they want you to come earlier, and I didn't realize the Senator was in on part of that agreement. So that is perfectly all right, and I will accommodate the representations we have been given.

Madam President, Senators have been talking a good bit about the enforcement that would occur under the substitute that has been offered, but the substitute does not change the fact that no reduction in illegal immigration is ever required.

In the beginning, proponents touted the bill's requirements that the Secretary achieve and maintain 90 percent effectiveness in apprehending illegal border crossers. We don't hear so much about that anymore. That is because all that the bill requires now is that the Secretary submit a plan for achieving and maintaining that rate, not that it actually be achieved. Even if this was a real requirement, it wouldn't matter because it does not account for those who evade detection at the border.

During her testimony before the Judiciary Committee, Secretary Napolitano all but acknowledged the effective rate is meaningless because by definition Homeland Security has no idea how many border crossings go completely undetected. So it is not subject to real enforcement.

I appreciate my colleagues, Senator Corker and Senator Hoeven, and those who have set forth their goals to produce legislation that would be good for America. I appreciate the vision that has been stated. But having been involved in this now for quite a number of years--not because I desire to, but because I felt an obligation to do so, having been a Federal prosecutor for almost 15 years--I want to see the system actually work.

I am aware this bill is an authorization bill. It may authorize Border Patrol officers. It may even authorize fencing. But until Congress appropriates the money over a period of a decade, the way it is set up, it will never happen. I am confident all the promises made in the legislation underlying and in the additions that have been made to it, it will not be accomplished in their entirety; and under this legislation we will be sure to have a vast increase in illegal entry under the entry-exit visa system, as the Congressional Budget Office has stated, and we will still have illegal entrants from the border.

Madam President, I yield the floor and reserve the remainder of the time that is reserved for Senator Grassley.

Mr. President, the Senator will acknowledge that his amendment was filed Friday afternoon, at a time when probably 90 percent of our Senators had left town. It was not his 200-page amendment or just his interests; all kinds of special interests and Senators' interests have been added to the bill. It was filed as part of the overall bill. So the Senator would acknowledge that the replacement that we would be voting cloture on tonight is 1,200 pages, a little less than 200 pages more than the bill was on Friday morning?

Yes.

Mr. President, I am going to talk about what the amendment does. The Senator has not seen quite as much--although he is an experienced and very able addition to this Senate but has not, perhaps, seen how over decades promises about enforcement at the border are not fulfilled, and that is important. I will go through the amendment the Senator has offered, and make some comments about why I think it does not do what my colleague believes it does, why we should not pass this, and why we absolutely should not move forward on the substitute which is basically the bill that has been put out by the Gang of 8, which fails in a whole host of ways. I would also be concerned--and I will ask the Senator, does he believe that Senators who have concerns about the bill should be given the right to have amendments voted on in an up-or-down way as long as reasonably necessary, to be able to offer amendments to fix the legislation?

I appreciate the Senator saying that, but it is not going to happen because when we have cloture tonight, Senator Reid is going to be in complete control of the voting process. Amendments will be at his pleasure. There will be the amendments he is willing to vote on, and the ones he doesn't approve of will not be up for a vote.

So that is where we are, and that is a fact. We are going to have other cloture motions, and the goal will be to drive this bill to passage by or before Friday. There will be far less votes than the last time the immigration bill came up.

The last time the big immigration bill came up, there were 45 or so amendments that we voted on. So far we have had nine votes on amendments. There were discussions Wednesday and Thursday night that we would have another 16 amendments. I was advocating for more amendments to be brought up. I thought we had an agreement to do that, and we were moving that way until this great amendment--the grand amendment that fixes things--came up.

I will point out a few things I think are troubling with the legislation, and we can then go to Senator Corker for his remarks. I just want to make my points now.

First of all, Senator Corker said there is a trigger, and that trigger is 10 years from now. It has to do with whether individuals are going to get permanent legal status in 10 years. What if it turns out the Congress has not appropriated money to complete the fencing as promised? What if it turns out Congress has not funded the Border Patrol agents they promised?

Are we are going to end up saying to these people: You don't get your status.

They are going to say: What's the problem? We did everything we were told to do, and Congress didn't do it. Give us our green cards.

People are going to say: We cannot deny people their green cards. These are people who have been here for 10 years, not to mention the time they have already been here and probably had children born in this country who are citizens. This is not a practical or realistic guarantee this will ever happen.

Based on my experience, I don't believe we are going to add 20,000 agents. We probably don't need that many, although we do need more agents and better effectiveness at the border. The impact of the trigger is the legal status and the Social Security card. The right to work anywhere in America is given within 2 months of the passage of the legislation. They are making promises 10 years down the road that I am saying are not likely to ever happen. In fact, I don't think it will happen in the way it was said.

The Secretary has the power to reallocate personnel under this bill, and it gives her broad power to do that. She

will say she has done what is required--or the next Secretary will say that--and I am concerned about that.

As far as the costs, Senator Schumer and the Judiciary Committee promised that the bill was paid for by the fees, the punishment, and the fines--and I will talk about that at some length later--from the people who entered the country illegally. They claim they will have as much as $8 billion, and maybe that is so. I am not sure.

They would not say how many people would be legalized. I asked that question twice to Senator Schumer. He refused to say how many people would be given green card status in the next 10 years in America. Maybe he doesn't want us to know. If he doesn't know, that is a big gap for somebody who is writing a 1,000-page bill and doesn't know how many people are going to be legalized.

This is what he said: What we are simply doing is making sure all the expenses in the bill are fully funded by the income the bill brings in. This is to make sure this bill does not incur any costs on the taxpayers to make it revenue neutral.

He said: It provides startup costs to implement the bill repaid by fees that come back later. So what we are basically doing is setting up two pots of money that have startup money, and it is repaid. Both the companies pay when they get new workers, and the immigrants who get RPI status pay in terms of their fines as they go through the process.

That is what we were told in their talking points. This is their poll-tested talking points when they were drafting the original version before Senator Corker was involved. Now it is $46 billion. Where is the money coming from? Well, they say the bill creates more revenue.

The Congressional Budget Office--our budget accounting firm--said before Senator Corker's bill raised the cost from $8 billion to $46 billion, it would increase the on-budget deficit by $14 billion, and then it would reduce the off-budget deficit by $211 billion. So isn't that good news? It improved our off-budget deficit.

What is the off-budget deficit? The off-budget deficit is the Social Security withholding the newly legalized persons will pay when they get their Social Security cards. So they will be paying withholding on their checks that maybe they were not paying before, and they score that as increased revenue, and it certainly is increased revenue. One form of our accounting will show that as an increased revenue, and that money in that form of accounting, unified-budget accounting, allows us to think we can spend it for anything we want.

Wait a minute. What is the reality? The person is paying their Social Security and Medicare withholding, and it doesn't go to the U.S. Treasury. It goes to the Social Security and Medicare trust funds. It is not available simultaneously to be used to pay for a new bill. This is how this country has been going broke.

The same thing happened during ObamaCare. The night before the vote, December 23--we voted on Christmas Eve to pass that bill--I got Mr. Elmendorf to say: You can't simultaneously strengthen Social Security and Medicare with this new money and pay for something else with it. He used this phrase: It is double counting the money. That is where they are coming up with the money here.

So the Social Security and Medicare payroll withholding that people will pay when they are legalized and given a Social Security card is their retirement. We have to have that money to pay for their retirement when they get ready to withdraw Medicare and Social Security. We cannot spend it now and pretend we have free money. The CBO score from just last week shows that is the situation. I am just not happy about the counting of money in that form.

I want to make sure whose time is being used, but go ahead.

I thank the Chair, but the cloture will be on the substitute which is 1,200 pages, not just the Senator's amendment, most of which I am supportive of. I think I could be supportive of much of it if we could make it effective.

The Senator is correct when he says the people who are paying into Social Security and Medicare are not paying enough to produce the revenue that would take care of them for the rest of their lives. The Senator is right, and I certainly don't dispute that people who are given Social Security and start to work under this bill, which provides them amnesty and legal status, that they are going to pay Social Security and Medicare money they were not paying before, but that is their money. That money has to be used to pay for their retirement. Where is the money going to come from to pay for that?

All I am saying is that it is quite plain, and that is why the CBO score said the on-budget deficit gets worse. In the 10-year window, the Social Security account looks better, but they are not counting the younger--the average age is 35. Workers will be retiring in the years to come and will demand their Medicare and Social Security. If the money is spent now, it will not be there in the future. That is how a country goes broke.

Senator Corker is one of the most knowledgeable, hard-working, courageous, and determined people in the Senate in trying to fix the financial path we are on, but I think the Senator is misinterpreting that issue.

Mr. President, how much time has been used on my side?

I am going to have to save some time for other people who are due.

Maybe the question should be, how much time have I used?

Sixty? Senator Corker said he was using some of his time.

Mr. President, I better wrap up. I know others want to speak in opposition to the legislation.

With regard to the fence, there is a statement from the sponsors of the Corker-Hoeven amendment that we are going to have a bunch of new workers at the border--Border Patrol officers that will be guaranteed. I pointed out how that is going to be funded for over 10 years. This is not an appropriations bill; it is a promise. The legality--the amnesty--occurs first. Just like so often happens in the past, the promises are never fulfilled when competing interests start fighting over money. It just doesn't happen.

There are some people who have opposed fences and opposed Border Patrol agents religiously by using every excuse possible in this body. It will not be easily accomplished in the future. In fact, in my opinion, it will not be fully accomplished.

With regard to the promised fencing that is in the bill, the new substitute requires the Secretary submit her southern border fencing strategy to Congress and certify that 700 miles of pedestrian--not double-layered, reinforced fencing, is in place. Congress first passed a law requiring double and triple layer fencing in 1996. In 2006, Congress overwhelmingly passed a law requiring a double layer fence. That never happened. Then-Senator Obama voted for it and then-Senator Biden voted for it. It never happened. Only 36 miles of that ever got built because there was discretion given somewhere a little later and all of a sudden they talked about a virtual fence that never occurred. So this weakens current law, or it weakens the law we passed previously.

The new bill says the second layer is to be built only if the ``Secretary deems it necessary or appropriate.'' That is what happened in 2008. The new bill keeps the language from the Gang of 8 bill addressing limitations on the requirements for strategy. This was offered in the Judiciary Committee by Senator Leahy. I was rather taken aback by it because they had been promoting the bill as being a bill that had fencing in it. Senator Leahy offered the amendment. The Gang of 8 all supported it--those on the committee. It said this:

. . . notwithstanding [the requirement that the Secretary

come up with a Southern Border Fencing Strategy], nothing in

this subsection shall require the Secretary to install

fencing, or infrastructure that directly results from the

installation of such fencing, in a particular location along

the Southern border, if the Secretary determines that the use

or placement of such resources is not the most appropriate

means to achieve and maintain effective control over the

Southern border at such location.

I think that is a fatal flaw in the language. It allows Senators to believe, perhaps, and advocate that their bill guarantees we are going to have 700 miles of fencing when it is not there. Senator Leahy knew exactly what he was doing when he offered that amendment in committee. And the 1,200-page substitute includes this exact Leahy amendment language. It has not changed by the Senator's offer of legislation.

I have spoken more than I intended to. There are a number of other issues I would raise if we had the time. I believe this is close to what we ought to be doing, but we don't have the mechanisms in place to get us there and we can't count in any realistic way on this all happening. As a result, we are going to have, as we had before, the legalization now and a promise of enforcement in the future that does not occur.

I thank the Chair, yield the floor, and reserve the remainder of my time.

Madam President, this is not a vote on the Hoeven amendment; it is a vote on the complete substitute of over 1,000 pages that includes all aspects of the bill before us. It includes amnesty, and it includes the failed entry-exit visa.

If we vote for cloture tonight, we will be transferring complete control of the entire process for this immigration bill to the majority leader, Harry Reid. We can hear the whistle in the distance right now as the train is arriving in the station. If Senators Reid, Corker, and Hoeven are able to cut off debate, the next vote will come in about 30 hours and another substitute vote in 30 hours after that.

Senator Reid has filled the tree. There will be no amendments allowed--

Without the approval of the majority leader.

Cloture Motion

Mr. President, today I wish to pay tribute to Judge John Brantley Crawley of Brundidge, AL, who passed away on June 4, 2013. I met and talked with Judge Crawley when I ran for attorney general in Alabama in 1994, and when he decided to run for an associate judgeship on the Alabama Court of Civil Appeals. He won and ably served becoming the presiding judge on the court in 2005, a position he held until his retirement in 2007.

I liked him. He was a man of personal integrity and decency. He had no ego problems. He had good judgment and was comfortable in himself and with others. He was a real lawyer who had represented thousands of normal people walking about. This experience taught him about people and legal issues. That experience made him the fine judge that he was.

He is survived by his wife of nearly 48 years, Sherrie Johnston Crawley; son, Brant; brother, Larry; and sister, Nancy. Judge Crawley was a genuine and generous man, a modest man, with a keen sense of humor. His career included 40 years of practicing law and 18 years serving the Alabama Courts and his contributions to justice in Alabama and the rule of law are most deserving of this recognition.

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

Madam President, to me it is rather astonishing the extent to which we are discussing this historic immigration bill and how little our focus has been on the real impact of it, what immigration means, how to make it better, how to serve the national interests to do the kinds of things the American people want us to do. We really talked about a lot of hot-button issues, but we have not focused on the substance of what we are doing, how many people the country can absorb legally every year. We do 1 million legally every year. How many more can we assimilate effectively and have reasonable expectations that they would find good work in America, to be able to have them find work but not put Americans out of work, and what kinds of skill sets do we need most? Will our system of enforcement work? And there are many other questions like that.

So I would say that to some degree we have missed that discussion. We are told that today--now we are going on 11 o'clock--we will see a magic amendment, the amendment that fixes everything, that we can just relax and go home and take a good nap because we have an amendment that is going to fix all of the problems in the legislation. Well, that is odd because we were told when the bill was announced that it was the toughest legislation ever, that it fixed everything, it did not need any improvement, we are all OK with it, you all just pass it, and if you raise questions about it--as I did--then you are not a good fellow, you are not being nice if you point out problems.

Apparently, now the sponsors of the bill have realized that they have a lot of problems, that as the bill has been examined and actually read--the thousand pages of it here, it has been read and studied--more and more and more problems have been found with it.

We have had a great deal of discussion about the border. The border security issue is a very important issue, but it is one of the issues in establishing a good lawful immigration system that serve the national interests. It's just one of the issues. It was nothing like the bill's sponsors promised. It would not have accomplished the job.

Those of us who were asking the tough questions--people tried to dismiss the concerns. They finally had to deal with the issue that it did not do what they promised. It was a big problem. So now they have accepted an amendment, it appears, that would change the legislation quite a bit--at least with regard to the border. That was talked about a lot because it always symbolizes whether we are serious about enforcement.

It was so weak in the legislation. When the bill first started, they proposed spending $6.5 billion on border security. Then, as it went through committee and complaints arose, they went up to $8.3 billion-- about a 30-percent increase. Then the bill hit the floor and the American people began to find out how weak it was, and our phones started ringing--almost in a panic, it seems.

A group has met in secret. They have announced the Corker-Hoeven agreement to spend $38 billion, to add 20,000 agents. It is all fixed. Vote for the bill. Now you have no excuse. You have to vote for the bill. But if you are holding a bucket of water and it has a bunch of holes in it and you close one of the holes, all of the water is still going to run out of the bucket.

There are other problems with the legislation. There was just one problem that was so dramatic and so plainly contrary to the promises the sponsors had made for their bill that it was really devastating. Now, in total retreat and capitulation, they have talked about adding 20,000 agents and spending $38 billion on the border.

We do not want to hear you guys complain anymore. Now you just hush and pass our bill. Do not talk about what else is in it. Do not talk about the policy issues that are raised by the legal flow of immigration we have. You just pass the bill now because we answered the border security problem.

Well, this is not the way it is going to be. We should be able to do dramatic things and effective things at the border with $38 billion, but, as I will point out in a little bit, we are not sure at all that is going to happen in an effective, smart way, especially when it has come up in this fashion and especially since we have passed laws repeatedly that mainly require certain things to happen and then they never happen, such as fencing.

We said the last time we passed a bill that we had to build 700 miles of double-layer fencing. Well, that was in 2008, I believe. Today we have 36 miles of double-layer fencing and about 300 miles of pedestrian fencing. So now they say they have their 700 miles. Well, it remains to be seen if that will ever happen, No. 1, but, No. 2, it is not double- layer, as we passed in law previously. That never happened. It is just a single-layered fence, which is much easier to penetrate. A double- layered fencing system with a vehicular ability to move between the fences is very, very effective. It has proven effective before. That is why it was put in the bill--not because someone wanted to sound tough but because it will work.

Things that really work tend to be blocked in the Senate. Things that would actually make the system transform from illegality to legality have always been blocked, in my experience, since I have been in the Senate. It is amazing to me in that regard.

We have not seen the amendment. We were told we would have it last night at 6 o'clock. We were on track to have a series of amendment votes, some important amendments to be voted on. We were getting ready to do that. All of a sudden, it was announced that an agreement had been reached and a new amendment had been offered. This amendment was going to fix the border. It was going to spend more money than ever. Nobody now had a right to complain about the immigration bill before us, S. 744. We had it fixed. The series of amendments we thought we had--no votes were cast on them.

Actually, the night before, a tentative agreement had been reached to vote on as many as 16 amendments. That would have been a nice start to begin the discussion, allow people to point out that there is a weakness in the bill and propose a solution to fix it. That is the way legislation is supposed to go. You bring forth an amendment and you say: This bill lacks this. This provision in the bill is wrong. I have a fix for it. This is my offer. This is my amendment.

That is the way good legislation should be processed in the Senate. That was all stopped.

So we waited--6 o'clock, 7 o'clock, 8 o'clock, 9 o'clock, 10 o'clock. I think it was 10:30 when we departed and still there appeared no magic amendment that is going to fix every problem with the legislation. No magic amendment. Here we are at 11 o'clock and we still have not seen it. Frankly, I would like to read it. I am going to read it. We read this one. It did not do what the sponsors said. They had good talking points. I could have voted for the talking points. I liked what they said, basically, in the talking points, but it was not in the bill. That is the problem.

I have been a Federal prosecutor for many years. It is the law that gets enforced, not some Senator's talking point. That is worthless. It is what is in the bill. It requires and directs agents to do this and that. It requires judges to do this and that. It requires law enforcement officers to do this and that. So what counts is what is in that bill.

With regard to this new amendment, I would like to ask a couple of things to Senators Hoeven and Corker. Does your amendment put enforcement before the legality? Does it put enforcement before amnesty?

Is this before the first legalization is allowed to occur, or is the amnesty still first? They told us initially they were going to have enforcement first. By a 4-to-1 margin the American people have said they are prepared to treat with compassion the people who have entered the country illegally, have been here for a long time and done, otherwise, the right things. We are prepared to be compassionate and deal with them--but we don't trust Washington. We want to see you do the enforcement before you give this legal status.

This is common sense. There is nothing wrong with that. The American people aren't mean spirited when they say that. They have seen this game before. They have seen how it has been played before. They don't have confidence in us. I can cite example after example after example of laws, rules, promises made, and never carried out.

That is why we have such a massive, illegal flow into America and how we have accumulated 11 million people, many of them wonderful people. This isn't the way we want the system to work. I think that is the question, why do we have amnesty first again.

Senator Grassley, our ranking member on the Judiciary Committee, has repeatedly said: I was here in 1986, and I voted for the amnesty in 1986. I thought it was going to work, and it was a mistake. We should have seen it was not going to work. We had the amnesty first. We had promised to do all kinds of enforcement in the future, and that never happened. This is why we are at this spot again today. That is the history of it.

What about the fencing that is promised in the bill? Does the amendment require any fence to be built before the amnesty is granted? I want to know that when we see your amendment. Do we have any confidence that we will ever see the fence built any more than we saw it when we passed laws previously to build fences that never occurred?

Does your amendment require a biometric exit system as required by current law? Under current law the Congress of the United States has required that the executive branch create an entry-exit visa system that is biometric. It basically means you use your fingerprints. Your fingerprints are read so you can't bring in a document and say I am John Doe and not be John Doe. When you come into the country, your fingerprints are recorded. When you go out of the country, your fingerprints are recorded. You clock out like many companies do in the workplace. You put your card in and your time is accounted for. We know when you came, when you left, did you overstay, or did you depart as required by law.

Current law says we will do that. You will be fingerprinted when you enter, and that is done. You are fingerprinted when you enter the country, but what has never been done is the exit system when you depart the country. Every kind of excuse has been made for that, but the truth is there is no excuse for not doing that.

Does this amendment fix that problem? The experts tell us, and the Congressional Budget Office reported a few days ago, that we are going to see an increase in visa overstays under this bill and the trends we are facing. There are several reasons for this. One big one is the legal flow of workers into our country; guest workers who come to take jobs, work for certain periods of time, will double. CBO predicts you are going to have an increase of the number of people who overstay their visas.

Since we have no ability to clock people when they depart, it becomes unenforceable. I think they are exactly right about that. Right now the entry visa system is responsible for 40 percent of illegal entries into the United States. Visa overstays account for approximately 40 percent of the current illegal population.

I think we can expect, with the large increase in guest worker programs--well over 50 percent in the future responsible for illegal entries into the country.

Does this amendment fix that, Senator Hoeven and Senator Corker? This is half of the problem, more than half of the problem, frankly, if this bill passes. I don't believe it is likely to do so.

Current law says there shall be a biometric entry-exit at all air, sea, and land ports. What does this bill say? The toughest bill ever, they say. Does that make it stronger? Does it fix the weakness in the current system? No. It says you have to have an electronic system--much weaker than biometric. It says you have to have it only at air and sea ports but not at land ports.

This bill is plainly weaker than current law.

I will ask this to the amendment sponsors: Does it actually have a mechanism to require those who receive the amnesty to pay back Federal, State, and local taxes? Is that part of the deal? That is what has been touted, we have been told repeatedly. They are going to pay back taxes. Let me say, it is not going to happen under this legislation. There is no way this is even going to create an attempt by the IRS to go back and try to investigate persons to see who owes more taxes.

That is a talking point. Talking points aren't law. Talking points aren't reality. They are political weapons used to advance the agenda of those who have special interests.

I would ask this question: Does your amendment require those who receive amnesty to learn English? They say our bill requires people to learn English, but it doesn't, as you can plainly tell if you read the legislation. Illegal immigrants will immediately receive legal status under this bill. After they have been here for ten years or, for some, only five years, they can adjust to legal permanent resident status. At the end of 10 years in RPI status, if you speak English, then you can adjust to LPR status. If you are not speaking English and you are in a course, then they have to give you permanent legal status. You don't have to pass the course. All you have to do in your 9th year, the 10th month, is sign up for an English course somewhere, and get your legal status under the bill. Would that loophole be fixed?

Does the amendment, my colleagues, prohibit people with multiple DUIs from receiving amnesty? Do you do anything about that loophole?

Does your amendment require that anyone applying for amnesty actually be interviewed? This is one of the big shocking weaknesses in the legislation.

When a person is transformed from a person in illegal status to an RPI status, the legal status, which happens in a few months, what do we do to make sure that person isn't a known criminal? That person could be a terrorist. What do we do about that? Normally, one of the most valuable things that can be done in these processes is to interview the person.

It appears quite plainly this bill--the bill certainly does not require interviews. It is almost certain that DHS will not undertake them voluntarily either, having seen how Homeland Security is handling the DACA program. There are reports that USCIS is not interviewing those applicants face to face. This is a big weakness in the system. It is almost guaranteed that nobody is going to be interviewed face to face and actually examined to see if the paperwork they are submitting has any validity at all. Many times that meeting can identify a weakness in the paperwork and lead to further investigation. If you don't have interviews and you otherwise aren't smart about how you administer it, large numbers of people can get status they don't deserve through utilizing fake documents. We can expect that to happen, and it should not happen.

We are being generous under this bill with regard to the people who would be given legal status, but only those who qualify should get it. People who don't qualify should not get it, or we are perpetuating illegality again indefinitely into the future.

Does the amendment prohibit those who have domestic violence convictions from receiving the legal status? Not so in the bill today.

Does the amendment ensure those who do not receive amnesty would actually be deported in the future? A lot of people will not qualify. They should not have amnesty. We come to find out they have been convicted of a felony, drug dealing, assault with intent to murder, robbery. Should they be given amnesty? No, we say, they shouldn't be given amnesty. Well, do they get to stay here if they are identified, found, and arrested for some other crime? Shouldn't they be deported? We need to be sure the persons who do not qualify are going to be deported.

I have an amendment that is a serious amendment that would help move us from this present failed system, to one that could actually work, to deal with interior enforcement and deportation in a proper manner.

I have a letter that came in from June 19, 2013, addressed to Senators Corker and Hoeven from the National Immigration Customs Enforcement Council of the American Federation of Government Employees, signed by Mr. Chris Crane, their very able, competent president. This is what Mr. Crane said, writing on behalf of the 7,600 agents and officers:

According to the National Journal, you are working on an

amendment with members of the Gang of Eight to ``help pass a

bill.'' I am concerned that your amendment as outlined in the

article not only provides immediate legalization before

enforcement, but also appears to completely neglect interior

enforcement. S. 744 drastically reduces the ability of ICE

officers to do their jobs while providing legal status to

convicted criminals, including gang members, drunk drivers,

and sex offenders.

I can assure you these are not the types of ``reforms'' sought by the American public, in fact, these are not reforms at all but, instead provisions written by special interest groups concerned only with their own political agendas and future financial gains.

This is a man who heads the law officers association, who has had his officers blocked from enforcing the law by political directives from the supervisor. It is a plain fact. They have negated the ability of the law of America to be enforced.

He continues:

Any plan is doomed to fail that does not empower ICE agents

to enforce the laws enacted by Congress--and that does not

put an end to the unlawful abuse of prosecutorial discretion

by political appointees.

There is some history to this. The ICE officers are in an uproar. The morale of the ICE officers was ranked near the absolute bottom of 170- something government agencies. They are out there risking their lives dealing with criminals and people in violation of the law. What did they hear from their political supervisors? Don't enforce the law. Don't follow through on what you are required to do by congressional action. They have actually filed a lawsuit against their supervisors because they are being told by the supervisors not to do what they took an oath to do, which is to enforce the law.

Mr. Crane states:

Yet, instead of cracking down on the Administration's abuse

of power, S. 744 places unprecedented new restrictions on

interior enforcement--making the current situation much worse

and much more hazardous. It is as if S. 744 were explicitly

written to handcuff law enforcement officers--binding their

hands while giving virtually unchecked authority to executive

branch officials to prevent future removals, including

removals of criminal aliens. These are the people doing the job every day. They were never talked to. They asked to meet with the Gang of 8. No, they didn't want to hear from them. The Gang of 8 wanted to hear from their special friends. They wanted to hear from the special business groups who wanted cheap labor. They wanted to hear from big labor. They wanted to hear from La Raza. They wanted to hear from special interest groups, and they heard from them--the chamber of commerce and ag industrial groups. That is who met with them. That is who wrote the bill--those special interests along with the American Immigration Lawyers Association. I assure you they have put into this bill, in place after place after place, where now they can file cases, appeals, and create disorder within the normal operating system of immigration.

Mr. Crane goes on to say:

Absent drastic improvements to the interior enforcement

provisions, there is no doubt that S. 744 will undermine the

constitutional rule of law, guarantee future illegal

immigration, and place the public at risk.

That is a dramatic statement, and I am not seeing it anywhere close to being refuted. As to the question, does it guarantee future illegal immigration, look, the Congressional Budget Office did the report for us. They are nonpartisan. They serve all of us. We have a Democratic Senate majority and Mr. Elmendorf was picked by them, but he is a fair man. He said we would only see a 25-percent reduction in the number of illegal entries into America if this bill is passed.

Our colleagues promised it was going to end the illegality; that it was going to be the toughest bill ever. The Congressional Budget Office this week said this legislation will reduce illegality only by 25 percent. That is just not acceptable. That is not acceptable. We have been told so much different, and Mr. Chris Crane says the same thing. He goes on to say this:

S. 744 not only fails to contain needed interior

enforcement provisions, but weakens interior enforcement.

This is because powerful special interests involved in

crafting the bill's language are opposed to interior

enforcement--a fact ICE officers are all too familiar with.

The political agendas of these groups place the public safety

and security of our Nation at risk.

I believe he is accurate. I know he cares about what he is doing. Mr. Crane is a very impressive young leader--a marine. He loves his country. He believes this bill is bad for America and he has had the courage to state that and his association has backed him up on it. They are all in it together, I guess. He goes on to say this, in addressing the sponsors of the amendment:

As respected political leaders, I am asking you both to

work with me and others in Congress and law enforcement in

ensuring that this bill puts the safety of America before

powerful special interests.

I think that is a very important letter. It cannot be that our colleagues can promote a piece of legislation as being the most effective improvement in history when our own officers who are out there trying to enforce the law say it makes it worse. It is very disappointing.

I wanted to kind of tease my colleagues a little bit about this amendment that we are still waiting to see. It hasn't appeared yet. We thought we were going to have it at 6 o'clock last night, then 7, then 8, then 9, then 10, then 10:30, and now it is 11:20 the next morning and we still haven't seen it. Presumably it must be OK, though, because it is going to fix everything we need to be concerned about.

Senator Schumer, in the markup in the Judiciary Committee, in talking about enforcement, said this. This was all about Mr. Cornyn, our able Senator from Texas, who offered an amendment in the markup in the Judiciary Committee to enhance enforcement at the border and do a lot of different things he thought were important and add 5,000 new Border Patrol agents. So what did our colleagues who had written the bill--the Gang of 8--who said they were going to stick together and fight off any amendment that had any significance to it--and they all rallied and fought off the Cornyn amendment, too--what did they say about Senator Cornyn's steps to make the legal system work better and to add some new agents to the border? Being a Texas Senator, he is familiar with those issues. Senator Schumer said this:

Just on the border alone, Senator McCain and I had an

amendment a few months ago that spent--a few years ago,

rather, that spent about $600 to $800 million on the border

and effectiveness rate went up from 68 to 82. We spent much

more than that, as much as $6.5 billion.

In other words, they spend in this bill, they say, $6.5 billion, as I mentioned earlier.

This is what he goes on to say:

The border will effectively be closed, we believe, with

these expenditures, in the way they will be done.

If he is going to spend a total of $6.5 billion in this bill and effectively close the border, how is it he is now supporting an amendment that would add 20,000 agents to the border? Because the bill is in trouble and they are in panic mode, I would suggest.

A little later, in the same markup, referring to the Border Patrol agents, he said this:

Their numbers have gone way, way up and most people think

they're an adequate number.

Why, that was just May 9, a little over 1 month ago. He said they were an

adequate number; that we don't need any more Border Patrol agents, and they attacked Senator Cornyn for having the temerity to suggest we needed 5,000 more. Now, when the bill is in trouble and they are in panic mode, they are coming in with an amendment--though we haven't seen it yet--they claim will add 20,000 Border Patrol agents.

Back in the markup on May 9, Senator Schumer said this:

Look, our goal is to make the border much more secure and

we do. We do dramatically.

If it does all that, why do we need a new amendment? The point I am making, what I am saying is the talking points of the bill sponsors have been positive, positive, positive throughout. They say the things people want to hear. The question is, does our legislation do what people want done? That is the question.

Back then he said we are doing all you want, the border is effectively closed, we don't need any more agents.

Senator Flake, in talking about Senator Cruz from Texas, who offered an amendment in the Judiciary Committee markup on the border, and ably did so, said this:

We add in our legislation 3,500 new customs agents. That's

at a cost of about $6 billion--3,500. What we're talking

about here is tripling border patrol. It's currently at about

21,000. Take it to 60,000. So 40,000 new agents. We're

talking about $30, $40 billion to do that. . . . and I know

it's sincere--a desire to--to put more resources on the

border, but we have fiscal restraints here.

So he opposed it, one of the Gang of 8 Members.

At the markup, Senator Schumer said:

And so, to simply for us to dictate, when we are not the

experts, to quadruple border patrol, is, in my opinion,

something, you know, that you might accuse me of: throwing

money at a problem without really knowing what its effect

would be.

He goes on to say on the floor, in talking about this bill on June 11, just a week or so ago, before the Corker amendment had ever been dreamed of:

Make no mistake our border will be secured as a result of

this bill. We appropriate $6.5 billion upfront in this bill

to bolster our security efforts. That is in addition to the

annual appropriations made for each year of border security.

That must not have been accurate. He said the bill had taken care of it; that they have an adequate amount in the bill as it is, and now this would add 20,000 more Border Patrol agents. Again, the point is, we get positive spin no matter what the circumstances are because they are out to sell this bill. They are out to promote their creation, and they have lost sight of what it actually does. They have truly lost sight, in my opinion, of the fundamental responsibility of important legislation, which is not to achieve a political end but to achieve a better America, to serve the national interest.

I am going to continue to ask: Does this bill serve the interest of the people of the United States of America? Not economically and not legally, in my opinion.

Now this is Senator McCain, on June 18, just the other day:

But those who think we need more people--we do need more

people to facilitate movement across our ports of entry.

He says it is too slow; that we want more people to come in quicker. Continuing to quote Senator McCain:

But we have 21,000 border patrol. Today there are, on the

Arizona-Mexico, there are people sitting in vehicles in 120-

degree heat. What we need is not more people, because we've

gone--in 1986 we had 4,000 border patrol to 21,000, but what

we need is the technology that has been developed in the

intervening years.

So he says what we need is not more people, and what he means is we don't need more Border Patrol agents, that we need some more technology. That is what they said last time when they undermined the fence. Some may remember the phrase they used then was that we are going to create a ``virtual fence.'' We are going to create a high-tech fence. We don't need to build those old fences. That is not good. We are going to take care of it with technology. So we spent, as Senator McCain said on the floor, I think it was $980 million on a virtual fence at our borders that utterly failed. We got nothing for it. What else didn't we get? We didn't get the fence. We wasted $1 billion on a failed technology and didn't build the fence that was promised.

This is why the American people are not confident that anything politicians tell them, about immigration particularly, will ever happen, and the American people are right. Time and again, politicians have promised, promised, promised and never delivered, delivered, delivered. That is just a fact. I think this bill and these statements say a lot.

With regard to Senator Cornyn's amendment that would add 5,000 agents and do some other things, this is what Senator Schumer said back in the committee in May, just this last month:

And what we have learned, and it was hit home to me when

Senator Flake and Senator McCain took me to the Arizona

portion of the border, it's vast. We have more people on the

border patrol. What's the number? 21,000. I think it was

triple what it was 5 years ago. But you can't have--yeah, if

you want to have the whole Federal budget, you guys figure

out how you're going to spend and get that money, the whole

Federal budget on just the border patrol? You could probably

have 100 percent operational control.

So he was saying then don't question our bill. This does all we need. We don't have the money to spend more on it. Now, apparently, he is trumpeting the great bipartisan agreement that would add 20,000 more Border Patrol people.

Maybe we need more Border Patrol agents and we need to use technology and we need to use fences wisely, but what we need is a Secretary of Homeland Security who knows what they are doing, who is committed to ending the illegality and using every resource we have wisely to confront this illegality and ending it.

If we had that the last 4 years, we would have had far more reduction in illegality on the border than we have seen, and we would be in a much better position to go to the American people and say let's talk about amnesty now because we have proven we have made real progress. But they have never wanted to do that. They have been listening to the voices out there and the political interests and the special interests, and they have not done it.

Now we have 11 million people here. What is their solution? Surrender to the illegality. Just give up. We will just give amnesty to everybody here and we will pass a law and we promise it will fix things and we do not really worry whether it does or not. I can tell you it will not, it will not fix it.

There are a lot of things that are noteworthy. I would like to talk about them as we go forward on this legislation. One of them I think is interesting, and I am just going to raise it because it is an issue we need to confront. We hear it a lot. People are talking like this out there. Bill O'Reilly's talking points memo is consistently a high-grade memo that has valuable insights that I think Americans would do well to listen to on a regular basis. He is a very insightful individual.

In regard to what he said last night, I got a transcript of it. I think it shows some of the misconceptions about the legislation that we simply have to correct. It is not sufficient to pass this legislation based on talking points, on spin from the sponsors of the bill. We have to say: OK, does it really do that? How does it do it? Can it be made better? Are there weaknesses?

This is what Bill O'Reilly said last night:

Senator Rubio told me on the phone today that it would be

at least 13 years--13--before people in the country illegally

right now could gain full legal working status and even

longer to achieve citizenship.

We will talk about that. He goes on to say:

"Talking Points'' support immigration reform even though I

well understand the new law will be somewhat chaotic and it

will be a magnet for even more people to come here illegally,

which is why we need stepped up security.

Let's go back to that first statement. It said there ``would be at least 13 years before people in the country illegally right now could gain full legal working status.'' Not so. Not so at all. Not even close. Within a few months everyone who applies for the RPI status, the provisional status, will be given a Social Security card and the right to go to work and be lawful in the country and they cannot be deported unless they commit a serious crime. It is virtually immediately, not 13 years.

It says ``even longer to achieve citizenship.'' That is not accurate either. This is how the citizenship and green

card status works, the permanent legal status: Within months, everybody who qualifies under the 11 million will be given RPI, provisional status, virtually immediately. They will be able to take any job in America, move anywhere they want to in America, displace workers in America, and compete for jobs wherever. That is what will happen under the bill.

For about 2.5 million who were people who came here as teenagers, the so-called DREAMers, they get citizenship in 5 years. They will have citizenship in 5 years. That is 2.5 million. Certain agricultural workers, those individuals who are illegally here, become permanent legal residents. They get their legal right to work immediately. But in 5 years they get permanent legal status, and the other 8 to 10 million illegal immigrants would be eligible for green cards or legal permanent residence in 10 years, not 13.

There is an immediate amnesty that precedes all this. Legal status and the right to work is immediate. It is not 13 years. A large number of persons will be able to have citizenship within 5 years--25 percent, maybe, will be getting that.

I think our people who are commenting about this need to get away from the spin of the sponsors and spin of those who are vested in trying to pass the bill and get down to what the bill actually says. That is very important.

The sponsors of the bill, Senator Schumer and others, claim the bill is paid for, and they have all the money needed to fund the legislation. They claim this Congressional Budget Office report that came out the other day backs them up. But it does not. It does not back them up.

I am ranking member on the Budget Committee, and we need to talk about that in some detail because it is a very important matter. CBO does not back that up. The CBO report showed this bill reducing deficits in the next decade, according to the sponsors of the bill, but in fact CBO plainly states on page 12 of the report that the legislation will increase on-budget deficits over that time--increase deficits of the on-budget accounts.

Why? Because the newly legalized immigrants will be paying some payroll taxes--they will be paying the payroll taxes, Social Security, FICA, Medicare taxes that are withheld from workers' pay--but they are not drawing Social Security benefits at this time because most of them are younger than that and they are not yet past 65.

So that creates a surplus flow, right? Of the $459 billion in new taxes and fees, only about half of that comes from the income taxes these workers are going to pay. Why? Because most of the workers are low-income workers. Over half of the people who are here illegally do not have a high school diploma and they are not making real high wages. You have to earn a pretty sizable wage before you pay any income tax, although you do pay your Social Security, Medicare withholding--the payroll tax.

How do they then say they have money created to pay for all this stuff? They count the money from the payroll taxes, OK? That makes sense, you think, at first glance. But that, by rights, though, belongs to the Social Security trust fund. That is not money available for the government to spend on trips to Africa or some summit somewhere or for Solyndras. That is Social Security money. Using this money to offset other spending is an accounting trick that was used to pass ObamaCare, and it is not right.

Let's go back over that again. The on-budget account--income tax coming in from the legalization because some people who are legalized are going to pay more income tax--but there are a lot of expenses out there too. The earned-income tax credit is a direct payment, not a tax deduction but a direct welfare means-tested payment to poorer workers. That is a big cost. And there are other costs.

So the CBO said income taxes that are paid will be less than the cost of the immigration; therefore, adding $14 billion to the on-budget debt of America. But the sponsors of the bill want to claim their legislation pays for itself. They say: But they are going to be paying Social Security and Medicare taxes; therefore, we want to count that money and that will prove that we paid for the bill.

Really? Aren't the individuals who are now given a Social Security number, allowed to work and pay the payroll taxes--aren't those taxes supposed to be put into a trust fund for their Social Security and Medicare benefits when they do get to be 65? Absolutely. Any surplus money that goes into Social Security and Medicare is not free money given to the U.S. Treasury to spend to pay for border control agents. That money is loaned by the trust funds. They get a Treasury bill in exchange for it. The U.S. Government pays them interest on the money that the Social Security loaned to them. It is their money. It is the trust fund's money.

A lot of people try to deny that, but there actually is one. There are debt instruments showing the transfer of this money, and interest payments are paid by the U.S. Treasury. So you can't count the money that people pay into Social Security as being money that can be used to spend on other programs of the government. That is an important issue.

Mr. Elmendorf, the Director of CBO, the night before the President's health care bill passed--I prevailed upon him to write a letter to explain that. He wrote a letter and said you can't simultaneously--what had happened in ObamaCare was they cut Medicare costs and increased Medicare payroll taxes and used that money to fund his new health care program. They claimed that it strengthened Medicare and at the same time provided money to fund ObamaCare. Mr. Elmendorf used a sentence that I thought was very powerful. I think I can recall it.

He said: You can't simultaneously use the money to strengthen Medicare and pay for a new program. He used the phrase ``double count,'' the kind of things people in business go to jail for. He said that is double counting the money.

This is exactly what has happened here. The money that goes to people's Social Security and Medicare trust fund accounts is not enough now to pay for the amount of money the individual will claim when they become 65 and start retiring and using health care and Social Security checks every month. There is not enough now. You certainly can't claim that this is going to strengthen these programs and provide money for the government to use outside of these programs. According to CBO, that is precisely what this immigration bill does with respect to Social Security. I feel strongly about that.

Mr. President, I see no one else here. I yield the floor at this time and reserve the remainder of my time.

I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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

Mr. President, as this discussion and debate over the immigration reform has gone on, I have made a number of statements. I think many of them, unfortunately, have been proven true. I said the bill did not promise enforcement at the border. Now apparently we are waiting again to see where this amendment comes. They claim it will dramatically improve enforcement at the border. And

we have not seen it yet. Maybe it will not appear. But they say it will. It was in the newspapers yesterday and said it would fix everything with the bill. Well, of course, it will only deal with the border, apparently, in any significant way. There are many other serious flaws in this legislation that simply have to be addressed.

I also complained that we had all these secret meetings and groups there, and the public interest, the law enforcement interest, was excluded. The only people who were there were special interests. I have talked about that. And I talked about the influence of the White House meetings and directing the agenda and how the bill was all written.

Well, today's New York Times has a story about that. I think it is relevant for us to read because it is further confirmation that we have an elite group of people with special agendas meeting to draft legislation that is going to impact all Americans. It is going to impact the entire country, and nobody is speaking up for the average American citizen in any effective way that I can see. They are not even being thought about. They are talking to pollsters and consultants and political gurus and advocacy groups--open borders groups, low-wage labor groups.

All right, here it is, today's ``New York Times.'' The headline is: ``White House Offers Stealth Campaign to Support Immigration Bill.'' They are stealthy? This is a secret campaign? Apparently so.

The hide-out--

``The hide-out''--

has no sign on the door, but inside Dirksen 201 is a spare

suite of offices the White House has transformed into its

covert immigration war room on Capitol Hill.

Dirksen 201. I did not know that is where they were meeting. Last night on the floor I said: I wonder where they are meeting, plotting all these things. Right now, I presume, they are plotting this amendment, trying to get more votes, and wheeling and dealing and giving Louisiana purchases and cornhusker kickbacks, I suppose, to get votes. Where is the public interest?

Meeting secretly over there in a covert war room in Dirksen.

Strategically located down the hall from the Senate

Judiciary Committee--

The Judiciary Committee room is on the second floor too.

in one of the city's massive Congressional office buildings,

the work space normally reserved for the vice president is

now the hub of a stealthy legislative operation run by

President Obama's staff. Their goal is to quietly secure

passage of the first immigration overhaul in a quarter

century.

So that is where the driving force is coming from. I have been wondering where they have been meeting. Now the New York Times tells us.

It goes on:

``We are trying hard not to be heavy handed about what we

are doing,'' said Cecilia Munoz, the director of the White

House Domestic Policy Council and the president's point

person on immigration.

Director Munoz is an able person, but she has an agenda on immigration. She was one of the leaders in La Raza a number of years ago and publicly stated that workplace verification--the things this bill claims to have in it, but not very effectively, I am afraid; and we have never implemented it effectively before--but there was a workplace verification plan in the 1986 amnesty bill that was supposed to keep illegal entrants from getting jobs in America. It was under fierce criticism and basically never worked. Ms. Munoz said that workplace verification was discrimination. In other words, to have a policy that would require businesses to provide jobs only to people who were legally in America is discrimination. She attacked it and said Congress had a moral obligation to repeal that law. I want to say, this is the White House director of the immigration policy. This is not an evenhanded policy we have. It is being driven by this kind of agenda. It just is.

The article goes on to say:

Six years ago President George W. Bush publicly sent

cabinet secretaries to roam the Capitol building daily to try

to woo Republican senators for a similar immigration bill.

But this time, high-profile help from the White House is

anathema to many Republicans who do not want to be seen by

constituents as carrying out the will of Mr. Obama.

So Republicans are sneaking over there. Maybe somebody ought to sit outside room 201 and see how many Republicans go in.

It goes on to say:

So while lawmakers from both parties are privately relying

on the White House--

``Privately relying on the White House''--both parties--

and its agencies to provide technical information to draft

scores of amendments to the immigration bill, few

Republicans are willing to admit it.

Well, I would think--I do not know why they would not want to admit the President is basically drafting this bill and it is President Obama's legislation fundamentally. That has been obvious to me, but I did not have any proof of it until we read the New York Times today.

Quoting:

So while lawmakers from both parties are privately relying

on the White House . . . to provide technical information . .

. [s]ome are so eager to prove that the White House is not

pulling the strings that their aides say the administration

is not playing any role at all.

And they quote Mr. Alex Conant, a spokesman for Senator Rubio, to that effect.

Well, who is writing this? Who is involved? The White House or not? It is pretty clear to me the White House is.

It goes on to say this:

Inside Room 201, the administration has gathered a

collection of its own Congressional lobbyists, policy

specialists and experts from an alphabet soup of the agencies

that will have to put the immigration legislation into effect

if it passes. They all moved into the vice president's

offices on June 10, setting up laptop computers and thick

binders filled with proposed amendments on an oval conference

table.

There is no doubt about that, this bunch is prepared. This legislation was put together haphazardly, in my opinion; fundamentally, not well written. But everything else about it has been carefully, meticulously planned with every kind of force they can bring to bear-- money to run ads nationwide, sending people into living rooms in Alabama and Indiana and Illinois saying this is the toughest bill ever. It is nowhere close to being as tough as the 2007 bill. It is weaker than current law, as it lays before us today. They said all kinds of things and how it was brought in committee, how it was brought to the floor, that they have studied every bitty bit of it.

They have drafted talking points that they believe are poll tested. They have talking points that people want to hear: that we are going to treat compassionately people who are here illegally. Americans want to do that. They do not want to try to uproot families who have been here for years, who have children here, who have deep roots here. But they want the lawlessness to end.

So they promised that. They have all kinds of promises in their talking points, but they are not accurate, as I have pointed out repeatedly. Senator Lee said last night it is not the talking points that becomes law; it is these 1,000 pages that become law. What impact will it have on the ability of law enforcement to have a lawful system in the future? That is the question.

Well, what do we know? Chris Crane with the association of ICE officers, interior enforcement officers, said it will make the situation worse, not better.

The article goes on to say:

``We have folks who know the Senate really well, who know

the players, who have been through this before so they know

exactly what Senate staff needs,'' Ms. Munoz said. ``We are

deeply, deeply engaged.''

Well, maybe Ms. Munoz could not keep it to herself, she could not keep the secret. The secret was supposed to be: We don't tell anybody President Obama is writing the bill because his administration has weakened law enforcement systematically. He has no credibility with the American people on immigration reform. So even though they have been writing it, doing all the staff work and supporting it continuously, they did not want anybody to know. But maybe she is getting a little nervous. Maybe she and the President are afraid folks will not know it is their effort and so they could not keep it quiet any longer. I do not know. Washington is a funny place.

It goes on to say in the article:

At one point, Mr. Pagano, Ms. Escobar and the other White

House advisers huddled for 45 minutes in the smaller of the

two rooms with Mr. Leahy's top aides. Working from

spreadsheets, they discussed each of the 10 amendments that

Mr. Leahy was likely to bring to the floor for a vote that

day.

``When Republican amendments are filed and we are trying to

decide, 'Can we accept

this? Can we accept this without some modifications?' they

are the ones who tell us--

``They are the ones who tell us''--

`This is quite doable,' '' said one Democratic Senate

leadership aide, who requested anonymity to talk about

legislative strategy.

Well, that is very much affirming of the little overheard statement on the hot mic in the Judiciary Committee. When an amendment came up that would have some effect on the Gang of 8's bill--and they had all agreed they would vote down anything that was bad--Senator Schumer was heard to ask one of his staffers: Do the Republicans have a pass on this?

What was he saying? He was saying: We will let these Republicans vote for this tougher amendment because we have the votes to kill it anyway. We are going to give them a pass so they do not have to stick with us.

And we had multiple references in the committee--members not of the Gang of 8 saying: Well, I would like to vote for this amendment. I think it is good for America. But I really cannot vote for it because it would upset the Gang of 8 and all their agreements that they have.

By the way, there is a misunderstanding of these agreements. The agreements are understood by most people to be agreements among the Senators. But that is not so. They met in exceedingly great length with Mr. Zuckerberg and the high-tech industry. They met with the agriculture business, the farming interests for large corporate farms.

They met with La Raza. They met with the Immigration Lawyers Association. They met with groups wanting cheap labor. They met with all of those folks. Each one of them was asked to sign on to the bill. They would not sign on to the bill until they got language in it that advocated what they wanted. So they wanted to get their benefits in the bill. Once they got that, one for all, all for one, they signed in blood. We are going to support the bill, but don't you change my special interest.

So the Senators said: Ok. We got all of you special interests to agree, we all agree, we are not going to accept any substantial change to what you have in the bill. We will fight off any amendments. They can make all of the arguments they want about what is good for America, but we have told you, if you will support this bill, we are going to give you what you want.

That is what the deal was all about. It is not good because the American people are the ones who are not being taken care of in this legislation. They discuss in this article, they asked themselves, can we accept this or have we got some conflict out there we cannot accept? The article goes on, ``Mr. Obama's political advisers say they are confident he will get the credit he deserves if the bill passes this summer. . . . ''

That is of big importance to him. They wanted to get credit. They have a political agenda. But what is liable to happen is if the bill passes in its present form, it will do damage to the American working person, families, legal residents, legal immigrants who are here trying to get a better payday. They are getting hammered. It could very well be dangerous to be taking credit for the bill.

Finally, it concludes this way:

But White House and administration officials have been in

frequent touch with Republican senators as the lawmakers have

to come up with dozen of amendments on tighter border

security and other parts of the bill they deem insufficient.

White House officials declined to name them.

Declined to say which Republican Senators are over there begging and scraping to try to get their amendments approved. It goes on to say finally, ``Mr. Pagano's team is planning to remain in Dirksen 201 for as long as the immigration bill remains on the Senate floor-- clandestine, but not completely invisible.''

Another Democratic aide said:

People know where to find them. It's like going to the

nurse's office. They know where it is.

That is a complete revelation of what I have been saying all along; that this is the way this bill has been put together and put together in secret by people not in connection with the American people. They are talking about polling data. They are talking about special agendas they want to accomplish with the legislation. Somehow we have lost sight of the simple values the American people want to see in an immigration bill. They wanted to see a lawful system. They want to see those who wait in line be rewarded. They want a system that serves American interests, a system that emphasizes immigration by people who are most likely to flourish in our society and be able to be successful and not be on welfare, not be dependent. Why, if we cannot accept everybody, why do we not create a system that substantially rewards those who are going to be successful, who are going to pay more in taxes than they will take out in revenue from the government and help create American wealth.

This bill claims to do that. But it is nowhere close to the Canadian bill which has about 70 percent of people there or 60-plus percent of people coming into Canada on a merit-based system. But this bill will be no more than 15 percent, maybe closer to 10 actually. But they claim it is a big move in that direction.

There has been further evidence on who wrote the bill. I will mention this article, June 13 in the Miami Herald about Mr. Leon Fresco, a very talented staff person who works for Senator Schumer who apparently has become the top person writing the bill. Mr. Fresco is from Miami originally and apparently a man of talent and ability. But he is a key guy who is actually writing the bill. Who is writing the bill? Are not Senator McCain and Senator Graham trying to defend America, helping to decide what to do in Libya and Syria? Chuck Schumer is writing tax policy and doing Democratic campaigns. People are busy here. Who is actually writing the bill?

Fresco, now 35--

The article says--

led the brutal negotiating sessions, some of which lasted

until 2 a.m., with staffers of the so-called Gang of Eight

bipartisan team.

Staffers of the Gang of 8, bipartisan team.

He orchestrated several of the most delicate compromises,

including the final and most difficult agreement between the

labor and business interests, which allowed both Democrats

and Republicans to claim victory. It was his hands on the

keyboard drafting passages of the original 844-page bill that

the group ratified.

Now 1,000 pages.

He put in the longest of the long hours, said Chandler

Morse, the immigration staff negotiator for Republican Sen.

Jeff Flake of Arizona. He was the one that everyone called.

He was the one the Republicans called when they were mad

about how things were going--

Morse said--

and he was the one the Democrats called when they were mad

about how things were going. As most often is the case in

Washington, the most significant work on the deal happened

behind closed doors, far from the cameras. Senators gave--

This is important for us all to understand how legislation is drafted, especially when it gets this big, this complicated, and attempts to be comprehensive on a matter that is as broad and as important and complex as immigration.

Senators gave their negotiators the principles to follow, a

framework, compromises they could and could not accept, and

then sent them off to find the solution on matters that have

plagued the nation for decades.

That is the way it has worked--turned it over to the staff. So when I asked my good friend, and I respect his ability and his skill, Senator Schumer, how many people would be admitted into America if the bill passed--I asked him that in Judiciary Committee--he would not say. I do not know that he knew. I had estimated it would be over 30 million-- absolutely confident that was correct. CBO this past week has said it would be 30 million in the first 10 years, three times the number of people given legal status in America in the next 10 years over what the law says should be.

Under the current law, it should be 1 million a year, 10 million over 10. If this bill is passed, 30 million over 10 will receive legal status and be put on a permanent path to citizenship--I mean a permanent path to citizenship. They may not get it in 10 years, but they are close to it and on a path to it. Many of them will receive citizenship--probably 5 million will receive citizenship within 5 years.

The Herald goes on to say, Senator Schumer's good staff person-- ``Fresco set the group's agenda.'' He really went about driving the bill. So this impression that somehow it was a ``coming

together'' of interested people without a real agenda that is seeking to fix our immigration system is not exactly correct, in my view.

My friend Karl Rove, from the Center for American Progress or something like that, raised a bunch of money for Crossroads to run ads in the last election that was supposed to elect Mr. Romney. Did not do so well, Karl. Sorry about that. Wish it had been more effective. I think if Mr. Romney had looked the American people in the eye and said one thing he might have been elected. I am sure Mr. Rove advised him not to do this. If he had just simply said we are going to treat compassionately the people who are in our country a long time, who are here illegally, and we are going to work out something for them. But if you elect me President, we are going to have a lawful system of immigration, that is enforced. We are going to end the lawlessness and we are going to serve the national interest. If you elect me, that is what is going to happen--just might have been Mr. Romney would have been elected President.

But the crew, the Crossroads guys who go to the country clubs and drink with each other and plot and think they knew something about politics, they have not been out talking to real people in decades. They thought they knew better. They have been telling us all what we are supposed to do and what good politics is.

I think good politics is serving the American people's legitimate interests. We are going to ask: Will this impact people's wages? It will impact them in a way businesses like, because the wages will go down so the employers will get to hire more people at lower wages.

Will unemployment--if this bill passes--go up or will more people be unemployed? Unemployment is going up if this bill passes. What about GDP? Of course, if we have 30 million new people in the country, we are going to have some increase in GDP. But per person, will GDP per person go up or down? It goes down. That means wages will go down. This is what I have been saying, and what Professor Borjas at Harvard, Professor Hero, Professor Matloff, and others have been saying repeatedly.

The Congressional Budget Office just asserted that. The Congressional Budget Office said if this bill passes, unemployment goes up, wages go down, GDP per capita goes down. What Professor Borjas said was, yes, certain businesses will profit. They will get the benefit of increased GDP. But the working person will see their wages decline, and the poorer person will have the most decline.

I do not think this can be defended economically. But the fat cats who fund American Crossroads, I am sure, see it differently. Obviously, they do. Mr. Rove said this in his op-ed recently, just last week or so, ``It is also important that Republicans avoid calling a pathway to citizenship amnesty.''

Thank you, Mr. Rove. I appreciate that advice. I have known Karl since college. We were friends in college. I think he is one of the most talented people I know. But I am not taking his advice about this matter. I am still meeting with average American people every week.

He said Republicans should not use the word ``amnesty.'' Do not call the pathway to citizenship amnesty.

We can call it amnesty, I think. He said:

Amnesty is the forgiveness of wrongdoing without penalty,

something President Ronald Reagan advocated and signed into

law with the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act. The law

essentially told those here illegally that if they had

arrived in the United States prior to 1982 and wanted to

become citizens, simply raise your right hand.

He said Reagan didn't do that and that they had a much weaker plan than this one. This one has penalties. This bill has penalties in it. He says, ``They must pay $2,000 in fines: $500 when they surface, $500 if they want to remain in America after 6 years, and $1,000 when finally eligible to apply for a green card'' 10 years later. So that is $2,000 to be paid over 10 years. This is the big fine that is going to be paid. Under the 1987 law, the fine was I believe about $6,000 minimum, $8,000 maximum per person.

This bill is much weaker on fines and penalties than the 2007 bill. This bill is much weaker. These fines are token fines--about $18 a month total. That is the penalty you are paying to be given a guaranteed pathway to citizenship.

I would say it is certainly not a very big penalty, but it is kind of interesting. Ed Meese, a great Attorney General and a friend of Ronald Reagan's, wrote a letter to the Wall Street Journal to respond to Mr. Rove's recollection of the Ronald Reagan amnesty bill. I think he was Attorney General at that time--if not, he soon would be. I believe he was Attorney General at that time, and before that, he was one of President Reagan's closest advisors from California, a former prosecutor, and was very knowledgeable about how the legal and prosecutorial system worked. He said this:

I recall the 1986 Immigration Act rather differently. Karl

Rove's recollection of the 1986 Immigration Reform and

Control Act is, shall we say, highly selective. That law, he

writes, ``essentially told those here illegally that if they

had arrived in the U.S. prior to 1982 and wanted to become

citizens, simply raise your right hand.''

That is what Karl Rove said.

Mr. Meese goes on to say:

[Karl Rove] asserts that the Gang of Eight bill is

different because it ``has plenty of penalties and hurdles

for those here illegally who seek citizenship.''

Well, I was there in '86. I read that bill carefully. (We

did that back then.) And I can tell you that Mr. Rove's

blithe description of the bill is way off the mark. The 1986

act didn't turn illegal immigrants into citizens on the spot.

It granted temporary resident status only to those who could

prove they had resided continuously in America for five

years.

Let me say what this bill does. If you could prove in 1986 that you had been here for 5 years, then you could stay even though you had entered illegally. This bill says that if you entered the United States illegally December 31, 2011, 18 months ago, you will be put on a path to guaranteed citizenship and given immediate legal status. You don't have to prove that you have a job, that you ever had a job. You don't have to prove you have family here, roots here, or any connection here.

Mr. Meese goes on to say, referring to the 1986 law:

After 18 months, their status could be upgraded to

permanent residency, and only after another five years could

they become U.S. citizens.

This bill delays citizenship further because when you become a citizen, you are entitled to all the welfare programs. The government and the sponsors of the bill really felt they wanted to push citizenship out so they could say that immigrants won't receive welfare. It won't impact the Treasury in the first 10 years of the bill, and we normally score costs to the government over 10 years. They moved it outside the 10-year window.

Mr. Meese goes on to say:

But advancement to citizenship was not automatic.

Immigrants had to satisfy various requirements along the way.

They had to pay application fees, learn to speak English,

understand civics, pass a medical exam and register for

military selective service. Those with convictions for a

felony or three misdemeanors were ineligible.

Sound familiar? It's pretty much the same ``penalties and

hurdles'' set forth by the Gang of Eight. Today they call it

a ``roadmap to citizenship.'' Ronald Reagan called it

``amnesty.''

Apparently Ronald Reagan himself in 1986 called the bill amnesty. They didn't try to deny that.

Continuing:

The '86 reform bill also had supposedly ``rigorous'' border

security and immigration law enforcement provisions. So how

did that pan out? On the day Reagan signed ``comprehensive''

reform into law, only one thing changed: Millions of unlawful

immigrants gained ``legal'' status. The promised crackdowns

on security and enforcement never happened. Only amnesty

prevailed.

That is what we are afraid is going to happen with this bill. It is so similar, isn't it, in the way they have laid it out.

Mr. Meese said:

Since the '86 amnesty, the number of illegal immigrants has

quadrupled. That should teach Congress a very important

lesson: Amnesty ``bends'' the rule of law. And bending the

rule of law to reach a ``comprehensive'' deal winds up

provoking wholesale breaking of the law. Ultimately, it

encourages millions more to risk entering the country

illegally in the hope that one day they, too, might receive

amnesty.

On legislation as important as this, lawmakers must take

the time to read the bill, not rely on others'

characterizations of what it says. We can't have Congress

``pass the bill to find out what's in it.''

That is what the former Attorney General of the United States said. He served Ronald Reagan, and he was

there actively when that happened, when that bill passed the last time. It is very similar to what Senator Grassley, who is here in the Senate, said happened and why he can't vote for this bill today.

I believe there has been far too little discussion about the most important value of this bill, the most important result; that is, what will be the impact on the American people? Whose interests are we serving?

One witness before the Judiciary Committee a number of years ago said: You tell me what you want. If it is to serve the interests of people who are here illegally and those who want to come here, I can tell you how to do that--let them come. It tends to be in their interest. Personal safety is better in America than most places in the world. Opportunities to make money are better. The welfare benefits and the Social Security safety net are stronger here. It is to their benefit to come to America. We know that. If you want to serve the national interests of America, then we can talk about that. I can tell you some principles that you should include in your bill if you want to do that.

Of course, one of the things he talked about was a merit-based system--the way you try to identify the people who have the skills educationally, academically, and the language proficiency that would allow them to have the best chance to succeed. We haven't talked about that enough. We need to be asking what the impact will be on the American people. That has not been discussed in any serious way.

It does not appear that the Gang of 8 ever sat down with the Nation's leading economists who have studied these issues because there are various issues that are crystal clear as we analyze these issues from an economic standpoint--peer-reviewed studies, not one-page op-eds by some part-time economist opining to advance the agenda of this administration or this legislation. Those are not the kinds of things we need to be relying on. Those are just talking points. They are just putting out talking points. What do real economist who have actually studied the Department of Labor statistics--what do they say? That has not been discussed. Indeed, our sponsors of the bill won't even tell us how many people will be admitted under this bill. We have had to get the data from studying the language, talking to experts, and now this week, finally, the CBO score.

Let me be frank. The reality is, the cold reality is, I think, this: that Mr. Trumka, the top union man, he was involved, as his designees were, to bless the bill finally. And he eventually did so, placing his goal of citizenship for millions who have entered the country illegally over the welfare of American workers. I am afraid that is what he did. He decided that political advancement for labor interests was more important than the impact it would have on American workers today.

And the business interests--what do they favor? Do you read the business pages? They are always talking about wages--wages going up, wages going down. For a businessman, wages going down is good news; wages going up, bad news.

What should Senators seek? What is the goal for the American people? Wages go up. Wages go down. Unemployment--do we want it to go up, therefore making more labor available, resulting inevitably in lower wages, or do we want unemployment to go down so more American people are finding jobs? Do we want a tight labor market or do we want a loose labor market? What is the public policy that the Congress of the United States should be advocating? I understand what the business guys would want. They want more great workers out there. They want to have 10 of them apply for every job. They want to pick the very best one, and they want to pay as low a wage as they can pay and still get that good worker. That is free market. I tend to favor free market. I believe in that. But nobody can ever suggest that bringing in large amounts of foreign labor doesn't create more labor in the United States and inevitably reduce wages. The Congressional Budget Office found that. Professor Borjas and others have found that. It is indisputable.

So Mr. Zuckerberg and the group out there in the West in Silicon Valley and the agribusiness groups that want to continue to move this forward--they have their interests in getting workers at the lowest price. I asked the other day if Mr. Zuckerberg would put clearly on his site, Facebook, actual job openings from corporations all over the country and the salaries they would pay. I think these businesses would find a lot more American workers than they say they can find. I don't believe he has to hire so many people from abroad to come over and work for 3 years, go back to their home countries, and provide, basically, a large supply of low-wage labor for these jobs.

Maybe I am wrong. Maybe Mr. Zuckerberg should try. If he clearly put it out there, he might find that in this time of high unemployment, with college graduates wondering where their next job is going to be, he might find he and others in Silicon Valley have some pretty good job applicants out there.

La Raza wants amnesty and citizenship. They are the advocacy group. They are not interested in borders and they are not interested in sovereignty issues. They are interested simply in being able to have everybody come. And they are against enforcement.

Ms. Munoz, who is now a top director for immigration policy in the White House for President Obama, said a number of years ago when she was at La Raza that it was immoral to have workplace enforcement. So the person who is supposed to be in charge of all of this believes that requiring a business only to hire people who are here lawfully--that that it is immoral, and she demanded that the law be changed?

This is the status we are in today. We need to understand the forces that are at work. There are a whole lot on the far left, and they want to have a North American union. That is not talked about much now, but in 2007 it was out there. There is an open borders crowd, a survival- of-the-fittest crowd. These are people who believe in bringing in more people, and believe that those who end up on the top will get cheaper wages. I will do fine, and I am not worried about other folks, whether their wages go up or not--the vast majority of American citizens. I am just not worried about that, I am going to end up on top. We are going to make more money if we have more people here. I don't think that is a healthy approach.

National Review, a great conservative organization, wrote a recent editorial and made this observation. It caught my attention because I have been thinking a lot about it lately. It said we are a nation--a nation--with an economy that we want to see do well. We are not an economy with a nation. A nation creates a binding series of interests, and we call on our citizens to go fight wars and their children to go fight wars and put their lives on the line for the Nation. They serve our country, and the country owes them certain protections and a chance to be successful and a chance to be able to make a decent wage with a health care plan, with a retirement plan, so they can take care of their families, take care of their children, to raise them and send them to college. A nation has those obligations.

So to simply say that millions can come to our country illegally, millions can come legally in levels that jeopardize, perhaps, the working majority of American citizens, that pulls down their salaries and does not allow them to prosper, is difficult for me to understand. How can that be justified? I don't see how we can justify that.

I am not against immigration. We do 1 million people a year in this country. I think that is about right. We need to shift it some so we are getting people who have a better chance to succeed in America, and we need to end the illegal flow, and then we would see, perhaps, a little tightening of the job market and maybe we would see some wages start going up for a change. Wages have been dropping consistently since 1999. This bill, according to the Congressional Budget Office, will drive down wages more over the next decade than if it wasn't passed.

I think we have a responsibility as national leaders not to radicalize some survival of the fittest, utterly open-borders theory of American law and policy. I don't think that is right. We have the conservative establishment, some of them in the business crowd, and my friend, Karl Rove, and we just disagree on this issue. I love Karl. He is so smart and he is so committed to America, but I think he doesn't get

this correctly. He is not thinking clearly. He is rubbing shoulders and elbows with folks who have different agendas and haven't thought through the impact on the American citizen.

The only interest being ignored in this whole process, it seems to me, is the public interest--the interest of the American people, the middle class who are struggling today. These special groups have had their special interests heard. They have been meeting in secret. They got the Gang of 8 to agree, they got the Gang of 8 to accept what they wanted, and they have agreed to put up money. They have agreed to advocate for the legislation and to keep pushing for it. But where are the law enforcement officers? Where were the good folks who represent the working people of America? So the missing interest throughout this process has been the people's interest.

I look forward to seeing--we are now at 1 o'clock--if we are going to get a special amendment that is going to fix things. Actually, I don't think the sponsors of this amendment have claimed to fix everything. It doesn't have anything to do with the fundamental issues I just talked about, about the ability of a nation to prosper, to take care of its citizens in an effective way. This amendment doesn't deal with that in any effective way, but we will see what it includes, whether it makes the situation better.

We are going to look past the talking points. We are going to look to the actual language of this amendment that--at now 1:05 p.m.--we haven't seen, but which we thought we would see last night at 6 o'clock.

I thank the Chair, I reserve the remainder of my time, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

What is the order, if I might ask?

There you go.

Inquiry. Was that by unanimous consent?

That explains it, then.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for up to 15 minutes.

Madam President, I know Senator Schumer and the Gang of 8 have worked hard on this legislation. I respect their efforts and goals. I share their goals, and I share many of the principles they stated. But what we learned is that the legislation came nowhere close to fulfilling those goals. That is why, here in the middle of the debate after the bill has been exposed, after it has been hammered for failure after failure, they have come up with a bill that says: Don't worry now. We are going to throw 20,000 agents at the border, and now you all have to vote for it because we fixed it. Now you got what you wanted.

I say to my colleagues, too often the phrase ``border security'' has been used to include all legal and illegal activities that occur. What we know is that not only do we have problems at the border, 40 percent of the people who are here illegally today are visa overstays. CBO's report, which just came out, indicates that is going to grow--as I had predicted it would--in the future. We are going to have twice as many people come to the country on visas, and they are coming to take jobs-- jobs that Americans need to be prepared to take. We need to get them prepared if they are not already prepared. We need to get them off of welfare and into self-sufficiency so they can make good wages that allow them to pay for their health care and have a retirement plan with enough left over to take care of their families. That has not been happening. Wages for average American workers have been declining since 1999, and it is a serious problem. I thought perhaps initially with the Republican agenda that this was a temporary thing and might bounce back, but we have seen that sustained.

Senator Schumer referred to the Congressional Budget Office score, but he didn't refer to this: This bill will accelerate that decline. Wages will drop more than they would have if the bill didn't pass. CBO found that unemployment would go up. They found that although there would be some increase in the economy, with millions of people coming, per capita, per person, the GDP would decrease. So this is a real problem we need to be honest about.

How large a flow of people can we sustain and create jobs for? Do we want to invite good people to come to America to take jobs and then they are not here for them? Do we want to bring in so many people that wages for American workers decline or Americans can't get the jobs? But somebody who comes from a very poor country, willing to work at the lowest possible wage--won't that pull down the wages of Americans who were hoping to get a pay raise instead of a pay cut?

I submit that this is a serious issue, and that is why Professor Borjas at Harvard has said it will adversely impact the wages of American workers, particularly low-income American workers. They will face the most adverse economic impact. This fact has not been disputed so far as I can see.

Now, the Senator says the bill is paid for. Know what they do? They count the off-budget money. This is what happened. Under the score the Congressional Budget Office gave to us, they found that it would increase the on-budget deficit by $14 billion. It will increase the on- budget debt of America by $14 billion over a period of 10 years. But they say they have a surplus over 10 years in the off-budget accounts-- some $200 billion. They have counted that up and said: We have a net surplus. Hallelujah.

What is the off-budget money? What are we talking about for the off- budget money? That is Social Security money. Everybody who pays into Social Security, when they get ready to retire, is going to draw out that money. It doesn't add to the net financial benefit of America if a person who is here illegally is given a Social Security card, starts paying into Social Security, and will end up drawing from Social Security.

We cannot count the off-budget money. That is how this country has been going broke. We have been using that budget gimmick for way too long, and that is not correct. We should not be doing that, and it is not going to improve the deficit over 10 years. The statement of the Congressional Budget Office and their important report are quite clear about that.

It says some other things. With regard to wages for American workers, the Congressional Budget Office report says that if this bill passes, wages will go down. It says that if this bill passes, unemployment will go up. That is their analysis of it. It has a chart in there that shows that for over 10 or 20 years per capita GDP is below what it would be if the bill had not passed and that wages are going to be low for years to come.

Why in the world would we as Americans want to dramatically increase the legal flow of immigration above our current generous rate and double the guest worker program? In addition to legalizing the 11 million people who would be legalized under the legislation, there are 4.5 million people who will be given speeded-up allocation under the chain migration system. So there will be 4.5 million accelerated under the chain migration as a result of lifting limits on those individuals and the people who are here illegally. In addition to that, we will have a large flow of other workers.

Now, I have an amendment. This is a number of pages of it, some 30 pages, very similar to what the House is working on today. It deals with the visa overstay issue. It deals with people who get into the country legally but don't go home and don't cross the border. It is a growing percentage of the illegality we see today, and it will soon be over half of the illegality, and it certainly will be if this legislation is passed. Does this legislation Senator Schumer refers to fix that problem?

With the amendment, does this legislation solve the complaints of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents? They have written us multiple times. They pleaded to be allowed to meet with the Gang of 8 and to be able to explain the realities of enforcement difficulties in America. We are having an impossible time making enforcement work. Why is this administration blocking them from actual enforcement of the law as they are sworn to do? They voted no confidence in their supervisor, Mr. Morton. They filed a lawsuit against Secretary Napolitano, and they asserted to her that she is blocking them through regulations and policies from enforcing the law they are sworn to enforce. The matter has been in the court, and the court is considering this lawsuit. I have never heard of Federal agents suing because they are not allowed to enforce the law. That is going on in America today. The ICE agents have written us a letter, and they said this legislation will make it worse. They said it will endanger national security.

What about the other part of the immigration process? Citizenship and Immigration Services is a group of officers who have to review the amnesty applications, review applications from abroad, and do those sort of things. Well, what do they say about it? They say the bill will make the situation worse, it will make it impossible for them to do their job. They do not have the capacity to process the 11 million people who are going to be asking for amnesty. It is not going to work. It will make the system worse. They have not been listened to in this process either.

Now, Senator Schumer said--and I hope everybody heard it--we have a plan. Don't worry. We are going to throw 20,000 agents at the border, and now you can quit complaining, you complainers, and just be happy and vote for our bill.

Well, then he said something like: Well, we don't have it written yet. We don't have it written yet, and we are working on it. We are sharing it with our allies, and we have not shown it to anybody else yet. But trust us, we have a bill that will work.

That is what they said when the bill was originally filed. They said they had a sufficient fencing system at the border. We read the bill, and there was no requirement in the bill to build any fences at the border. It was totally up to the Secretary. So now he seems quite happy--not having been able to run that past the Senate, having been caught on that deal--he is now willing to enhance some fencing. But current law, the law we passed a decade ago, required 700 miles of double-layered fencing, which would actually be very effective. This bill now, after having had the bill endangered, they ran out and said, well, we will do 700 miles of single-layer fencing, which is quite less secure and not what we voted on in the Senate 10 years ago. President Obama voted for it and Vice President Biden voted for it and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton voted for it. That has never been done. We promised to do that too. We passed a law, we even passed funding for it, and it never got built. Only 30 miles of the 700 miles of double-layer fencing was ever built.

So this is a problem we have, along with the American people. So I say to Senator Schumer: I want to read this Corker amendment. Who is writing it, Senator Corker, Senator Hoeven, or Senator Schumer? Senator Schumer is telling us what is in it. He is saying he is still working on it. He is saying he is sharing it with his allies but not with those who have doubts about it. I would like to see this bill we have heard so much about. Also, will it deal with other issues?

So we know this: We know the legislation gives amnesty first. We were told originally by the Gang of 8 we were going to have border security first, right? They finally had to acknowledge that isn't so. That is a pretty big promise.

Border security first. Not so in the bill, not so in the Hoeven- Corker amendment. The toughest enforcement ever. Clearly, the bill was weaker than the 2007 bill. Members of the Gang of 8 have acknowledged that. It is nowhere close.

On visas, current law requires that under the visa policy of the United States, we have entry-exit visas, biometric at land, sea, and airports. What does this bill say? This bill says, well, we will have electronic entry-exit visas at air and seaports but not at land ports. And if we don't have the land ports in the mix, then we never know who came into the country if they left by land.

The 9/11 Commission says the system will not work. The system will not work.

Proponents of the bill said an individual would have to pay back taxes. That is so ridiculous. That is utterly unenforceable. It is just a talking point. It has no reality whatsoever.

They said a person has to learn English. Not so. A person can be in a English course 6 months before their time comes up. They don't have to complete the course. That is all it requires.

They say no welfare benefits, but there are benefits as scored by the Congressional Budget Office, the largest of which I suppose is the earned-income tax credit.

They said it would end illegal immigration, and the Congressional Budget Office report, amazingly--

I ask unanimous consent for 1 additional minute.

Amazingly, the Congressional Budget Office said the bill that is before us would only reduce illegal immigration by 25 percent. So we are going to give amnesty for the toughest bill ever, and all of this. Then the bill gets in trouble on the floor and they scurry around and they get an amendment that throws in, say, 20,000 agents who are going to be hired somewhere on the border in the future. We promise. We are going to give amnesty first, though, and we promise that these agents will all be hired and the problem will be fixed. They promised to build a fence in 2008. It never happened.

So we are going to read this Hoeven-Corker amendment. We are going to evaluate it fairly. It seems to me it doesn't come close to touching all of the issues necessary to have a lawful system of immigration that serves the national interests in a way that Americans can be proud of.

We believe in immigration. We want to be compassionate and helpful to people who have been here a long time, but we have to have a system we can count on in the future.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, would the Senator yield for a question?

I think the Senator was very wise in raising the question of the budget score. Our colleagues have been blithely asserting that this bill is going to pay for itself. The CBO produced a report. They have cited that report that says it will pay for itself. That is not exactly what the report says, it seems to me. This is the line in the report the CBO prepared: Net increases or decreases in the deficit resulting from changes in direct spending and revenue from the bill. How will it impact increasing the deficit or not? The on-budget deficit, even before the 20,000 new agents, adds billions of dollars in costs. Netted out, it would add $14 billion to the on-budget debt. That is negative. It makes more debt.

Then there is the other one, the off-budget. What is the off-budget? The off-budget is Social Security and Medicare. This is the trust fund money that comes out of your payroll taxes. People pay payroll taxes. The average age of the legalized group is about 35, so most of them aren't going to be drawing Social Security right away. They pay into this and the government gets some extra money. They are counting that money as the money to show the bill is paid for.

Let me ask the Senator one simple thing. If the individuals who are now given legal status are immediately given a Social Security number, immediately eligible to compete for any job in America, isn't the money they will be paying for Social Security and Medicare going to be used by them when they start drawing it? Aren't they going to be eligible now for Social Security and Medicare? Won't this money be available for them? Isn't it double counting to say it is going to be available for their Social Security and then available to pay for all the spending in their bill?

I couldn't agree more. The truth is, that is how this country is going broke. There are two ways the counting is done in our budget. One is a unified accounting process, and the other one shows these numbers in the fashion you and I put forward. They assume the money that comes in for the newly legalized people, Medicare and Social Security, is going to be available for their Social Security and Medicare. They can't then assume it is available to spend on something else. The weakness in our system has been manipulated before. We need to stop it.

I thank the Senator for raising that.

Of course, I remember well how many good years you spent on the Budget Committee, and the Senator understands it very well.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, could I inquire as to what UC just got agreed to?

I appreciate the majority leader. He speaks softly, and I don't hear as well as I should, so I am not sure what we agreed to or what he propounded.

I thank the Chair.

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

Mr. President, here we are with an intent to have an amendment that is supposed to solve all the problems of this legislation, and we had it announced earlier this morning, and we have not seen it yet. So we are now here.

Earlier today we thought we had an agreement to have as many as half- a-dozen votes tonight. So we had some today, and we were going to have some more tonight. We have only had nine votes on this legislation as of today. This is really odd.

So we have not seen this bill. We do not know what is in it. Everything has been stopped, waiting on some agreement, as Senator Schumer said, among the allies. He said they are showing the bill to allies. Apparently, they have not shown it to Senator Lee, they have not shown it to me. So the allies of the Gang of 8 are going through the bill. I do not know if they are going to have Nebraska kickbacks in it or ``Cornhusker kickbacks'' or whatever else they are going to put in it to get somebody's vote on it. I hope that is not where we are going.

But what I am concerned about, having been around here a few years now, is that we will have a vote on cloture on this amendment--they are going to file the amendment, immediately file cloture, apparently, and then have that vote early next week--and then have a couple more votes, and the next thing you know, we are at final passage and no amendments of significance have been allowed to occur.

I have a number of amendments. The House has done a really good job on working on the interior enforcement weaknesses of our current law. They put together some good language. I have taken a lot of it and put it into an amendment. I would like to have a vote on that. We ought to talk about it because there is some feeling around here that the only thing that matters is the border, but that is not so. Forty percent of the illegal entries into America today come by visa overstays, and that is not dealt with at all or in any significant way that I am aware of in this new amendment which we have not seen.

So I am worried about this whole process. The American people deserve an open process. It was promised. I do not know how many amendments we had in committee, I say to Senator Lee. Lots of them. But we have only had nine now, and we lost a group that we were going to have today. And we cannot tell from our discussions with Senator Reid and others if there will be any more amendments next week because, I guess, the powers that be, the masters of the universe, have all gotten together and they have decided this: They have decided that everything is fixed by Hoeven-Corker, and we will just pass that amendment and nobody else will be heard. But that amendment, from what I read in the papers about it, in general, does not fix anything like the loopholes and weaknesses of the legislation.

I say to Senator Lee, I appreciate his elegance on this issue, but I did want to share that I feel as if something is going awry in the open, debatable process we thought we were going to have for a day or two. It seems to have jumped off the tracks completely.

I am afraid it is becoming par for the course. I remember we had a bill, a bankruptcy bill, a fourth of this in size. I think it was on the floor 3 weeks, and we had maybe nearly 100 amendments. Everybody had their chance to speak, and we ended up passing the bill with well over 80 votes.

But the point is that in this new mood in the Senate we have a situation in which the majority leader too often fills the tree and controls even the amendments that are brought up.

Does the Senator think it odd, as a new Member of the Senate and as a student of law and Washington governmental processes, that a Senator cannot come to the floor and offer an amendment without seeking permission of the majority leader? And he says: No, I will not take your amendment; I will only take this amendment. Does that strike the Senator as contrary to what his understanding is historically as to how the Senate should operate?

Yes, we can do that if we just follow the traditional rules of the Senate. The Senator is exactly right. Here we are being told this legislation, this 1,000 pages, is all decided because somebody has an amendment somewhere that nobody has seen--at least nobody who has any skepticism about it has seen. That is going to solve all of the problems. It is just rather remarkable.

On the fundamental question the Senator raised about the Senate, I do believe that we need to begin to appeal across party lines and think more clearly about what has happened. I talked with one of the great historians of the Senate, someone I have known and has been here, worked on the floor, and has written a book about it. He said he hated to say it, but it is kind of getting like the old Russian Soviet Duma where a group of people met in secret and put out the word, then they all went in and voted 990 to 10 for whatever it was their little group decided.

I am worried that has too much relevance to what has been happening here. I really do. A Senator, as the Senator said, is equal to any other Senator. The majority leader has the power of first recognition, but it was never intended that the majority leader should say: You cannot get your amendment, Senator from Alabama; only the one from Maine can get their amendment, and actually be able to execute that.

It is rather stunning. That was not the way it was when I came. This filling-the-tree process started maybe not long after I came. Both parties have used it. But it has now gone to an extent which we have never seen before, and it adversely impacts the whole Senate. I think the Senator is right about that.

I just saw Senator Portman from Ohio. He had worked extremely hard on a very significant amendment dealing with E-Verify in the workplace. He is not sure he is going to get a vote on it. He thought he was going to get a vote on it. It is very frustrating for him that will not be the case.

What is this? We are not going to be in session tomorrow, apparently. Nobody gets their amendments. Maybe, virtually, no more amendments get brought up of significance.

So I am concerned about it. I have a couple of key amendments. I know Senator Cruz has an amendment too. The Senator may have amendments. Amendments are valuable in that they point out weaknesses in legislation. They provide a fix for that weakness. Why would we want to deny people the right to make a piece of legislation better?

The Senator led a press conference this afternoon with a group of tea party patriots. Jenny Beth Martin and a number of other people were there. They came to Washington and had a number of people who had immigrated to America. They spoke from their hearts about laws and rules and proper procedure. Maybe the Senator could share with our colleagues and those who might be listening the gist of that.

I thought it was very moving to have people who came to America, some from countries where they had been persecuted and were so proud of the rule of law, who felt deeply that we need to be careful about what we do in the Senate to preserve the rule of law here.

I thank the Senator for leading that press conference today and letting those individuals, those Americans, speak their minds. Just in general, I would say that whole tea party movement, which many have tried to demean, came right from the heart of America. It represented a deep concern that people in Washington were out of touch, were not connected with the real world, were not following the constitutional processes, were meeting in secret with special interests and trying to win elections and not serving the people in effective ways.

I thought it was good to have them speak out today as they did in opposition to this monstrosity.

I thought that group reflected those concerns very well. I think the whole grass roots movement did. As I recall, Senator Lee was involved in the election in many ways. It was a ramming through of the massive health care bill that nobody had read. We were told: Well, you have to pass it to find out what is in it. That generated that whole movement. Is this not in many ways similar? In the Senator's view, does it feel the same that we are moving rapidly through a bill, a massive consequence of over 1,000 pages, and there is a lack of understanding fully of what is in it?

I thank the Senator for sharing those insights. It is important, because we are getting to a situation where we are delegating extraordinary power to unelected bureaucrats. What we have seen with regard to the current administration and their enforcement laws is one of the most dramatic, willful, deliberate failures to enforce the law I have ever seen.

It has resulted in a most amazing circumstance. The ICE agents, the Immigration, Customs, and Enforcement agents, who are out there trying to enforce the law every day, who took an oath to enforce the law, have been so directed by their unelected supervisors to not enforce the law. They have reached the point where they have filed a lawsuit in Federal court against their supervisors. They sued Secretary Napolitano, and they said she is issuing directives and orders that contradict with our sworn duty as law officers to enforce the law and follow what Congress directed. Some of this simply came down to the fact that they are required to deport certain people if they are apprehended doing certain things. They just issue guidelines that say don't deport people.

Think about it. Secretary Napolitano and John Morton, her ICE Director, who has now resigned, were directing these agents to do things that undermined their ability to do the most basic part of law. They filed a lawsuit in Federal court. The judge has heard the lawsuit and heard the complaints. The Department of Justice sought to dismiss the complaint initially, and it has not been dismissed. The judge has let it proceed. He, in effect, as I read the news article about it, basically said the Secretary is not above the law. I thought we learned that from Richard Nixon. No President is above the law. Nobody is above the law in America. This lawsuit is still ongoing.

It is one of the most amazing things I have seen, and how little it has been commented on and how significant that is.

We have the Citizenship and Immigration Services officers. Like the ICE officers, they have written Congress and told us they cannot do what the law requires them to do in this bill. They can't do what the law is requiring them to do now. They are overwhelmed by the requirements that have been placed upon them. They said the law that is being considered today, S. 744, makes the situation worse. Both of those agencies have written to Congress and said it would weaken our national security and place our safety at risk in America. It wouldn't make things better, it would make them worse.

I think we need to say how did we get here? I believe we got here fundamentally because well-meaning Senators decided if you are going to pass a bill--we had to have La Raza happy, we had to have the unions happy, we had to have the business groups happy, and we had to have the chicken processors happy, and they all met with them. They met with their pollsters, their political consultants, and the politicians.

Chris Crane, the head of the ICE officers association, wrote them repeatedly, saying: Let me come tell you what it is really like out there. They refused to hear from him. They refused to hear from him and his ideas. He tried everything he could. He wrote them and asked if they would meet with him, and they wouldn't do that.

The legislation was written by people not connected to how the immigration system actually operates. The people tried their best every day to make this system lawful, make it effective, and make it something we can be proud of.

Even under the legislation, it does not require people who want to be citizens and want to be given legal status in America to have a face- to-face meeting with a single person.

In fact, the DREAM Act, the DACA cases that are out there, they are not meeting with them face to face. They just give papers, read those papers, and process them in a way that they have no capability of ascertaining whether those claims of legality are legitimate.

It is very clear from experts in the 9/11 Commission that face-to- face interviews make a huge difference. One of the hijackers who was supposed to be the terrorist, who was supposed to be on the plane that may have hit the Capitol of the United States or the White House, the one that went down in Pennsylvania, one of those was identified in a face-to-face meeting by an alert officer. He held him up, and he was not on that plane. Who knows, one more terrorist on that plane might have enabled them to control that plane and succeed in wreaking devastation on Washington, DC. Maybe those patriots who brought that plane down, giving their lives to save this Capitol, may not have been able to do so had there been one more terrorist on that plane. I have to say this is important material. I don't know what the language is about the border and how many agents they have there.

I know this, we have had testimony from witnesses and the 9/11 Commission that we need an entry-exit visa system. We already have most of it. When you come into the country, they

take your fingerprints, and you are clocked into the country. We are not clocking people out of the country.

The 9/11 Commission, in a followup meeting of that commission to review how America had complied with their original suggestions, repeated their concern that we need this entry-exit visa system. The current law that has been passed, about six times, and is current law today, says we should have a biometric entry-exit visa system at all air, land, and sea ports.

This legislation guts that requirement. It eliminates the biometric, which means you don't use something like a fingerprint, which would be the most common thing to use. It would be some sort of an electronic system that is recognized to be weaker, and it doesn't require it to be in place at the land ports. The 9/11 Commission explicitly reviewed that, and they said the system won't work because people can fly in to Houston, fly in to Los Angeles, go back across the border, fly in to New York and exit through New Mexico. They can do these things and, therefore, the system won't work. We don't know who overstayed and who didn't overstay.

What we learned was it is not too expensive. They claimed it was going to be $25 billion. Where did this figure come from? It was raised in committee, you may remember. Senator Schumer said it will be $25 billion. What we found was they did a pilot project in Atlanta and I believe Philadelphia. People came through to get on a plane to depart America. They put their fingerprints on a machine. They go right on by, and those who are in violation have warrants out for their arrest or are on a terrorist watch list, are picked up.

Amazingly, amazingly, in Atlanta they did 20,000 people as a pilot project. They failed 134, I believe, who had warrants for their arrest and got hits on the watch list. Some of these could be serious offenders.

I think that is one more example of weaknesses in the legislation that apparently are not being addressed. This is one more proof that the bill before us today weakens current law, directly weakening our entry-exit visa system that the 9/11 Commission has said we must complete.

There are a lot of things I am concerned about in the legislation. This is one of them. It has to be fixed. I am afraid we are not on the path to do that. Special interests have opposed that over the years. It has been debated, debated, and debated. Finally a decision has been made. Multiple times Congress has directed this to occur, but it still has not occurred.

I wanted to share that. Maybe the Senator has other thoughts he wishes to share.

If the Senator will remember, in committee my able colleague Senator Schumer said this was the toughest bill ever, as I recall. And it was tough as nails. But it looks like now we are being told it wasn't so tough because we have added an amendment that is going to make it tough.

So is that kind of what the Senator is saying when he refers to the talking points, that we have to go beyond the bill? If it was so tough to begin with, why did they have to pass another amendment now to make it a lot tougher now?

It is. I think it is like smelling the sizzling steak that turns out to be shoe leather. It sounds good when they talk about it. I said: Wow, that sounds good. And if it accomplished all the things they promised, I would be intrigued by that legislation. It would have a chance to get my vote.

Well, we made a list, just as Senator Lee did, of some of the things we were told repeatedly about this legislation. We were told it was border security

first. Now, I don't think anybody denies that amnesty is the one thing that will happen. Everything else is going to be promised to occur in the future. So that was not an honest and correct promise.

Then it was said it was going to be the toughest enforcement ever. Well, I would just say to my colleague, this legislation is not as tough as the 2007 bill. As an example, it weakened the standard of enforcement at the border from current law that they are still debating and can't reach an agreement over. It weakens the current law's standard.

As I just established earlier, it weakened the entry-exit visa system absolutely on a key and fundamental point, making the entry-exit visa system not workable; whereas today, if the administration did it properly, it would work.

The Senator just mentioned back taxes. That is a flimflam if there ever was one. We hear that over and over--people are going to pay their back taxes. The IRS is not going to go out and try to run down 11 million people who have been here illegally and have been working and try to find out how much they owe and then collect taxes from them. It is not physically practical. It will never happen. It is a talking point, just as the Senator said, and not reality.

They are going to learn English. That sounds good. We are for making people learn English. But if a person is going to get legal status, a Social Security number, the ability to go to work almost immediately, and 10 years later, if they haven't learned English, under the language of the bill all they have to do is to enroll in a course. They do not have to complete the course or anything. It only occurs when they are at the point of becoming a legal permanent resident. That is 10 years later.

Then no welfare benefits. The Senator just mentioned the biggest is the earned-income tax credit. I offered an amendment to validate the sponsors' promise in the Judiciary Committee, if the Senator will recall, and it was voted down. So they said we are not going to have any welfare, but the Congressional Budget Office--well, it is obvious. The earned-income tax credit is not a tax deduction, it is a direct payment from the U.S. Treasury to people who qualify for this subsidy. So that is one of the biggest ones we have, and it is still protected. They can still obtain it.

Then they say: We will end illegal immigration. That was a firm promise--to end illegal immigration. The toughest bill ever. The Congressional Budget Office report that came out yesterday said it would only reduce illegal immigration by 25 percent. I think it was a difference of we would have 7.5 million people enter the country illegally instead of 10 million people entering the country illegally over the next 10 years. How pathetic is that?

So we are going to give amnesty, benefits, and all of this, and we are going to promise the American people we are going to fix the broken border, but it is not there. The promises aren't there.

We haven't even seen this new amendment. Now we are going to have all these agents, we are going to fix the border, everything is going to be taken care of, and we say: Well, we would like to read your bill. The last time you weren't so accurate, were you? Last time the promises weren't fulfilled in your bill. Now you are scrambling around, your bill is in big trouble, people are asking some real tough questions, you don't have answers for them, and so a group comes together. They are secretly meeting over here today, and now they have the toughest amendment ever, I guess. But when do we read it? When do we see it? We were told we were going to have it at 6 o'clock. It is now 8:30.

So I agree with the Senator from Utah. I don't think talking points are going to cut it. Doesn't the Senator agree the power is in the legislation and not in talking points?

Well, it is going to be that way, it does look like. We have been talking about trying to find out what the plan is and what kind of process we can use to go forward, but the ability to get amendments does seem to be slipping away. And there are a lot of excuses and reasons, but all I would say is we are getting ready to vote on a huge important bill that will change immigration law in America, and the American people deserve to have their Representatives fix it and make it better, if they can.

I truly think there will be no excuse if we get into a rush, as the Senator correctly predicts, I am afraid, next week. That will just slide by if we have

to pass the bill essentially as is, after the experts tell us it has all been fixed now.

So I just would ask the Senator about this border situation. Just as a normal citizen, I would think if the U.S. Government wanted to have the ability to work on the border and do things on the border, it would be easier if the government already owned the land than if it were in the hands of someone else. At a very minimum we ought to be able to protect the border of the United States, our national sovereignty, in that fashion. Not to even be able to use land the government already owns is pretty baffling to me.

I thank the Chair. That is correct.

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

Mr. President, we have another hour waiting now to get this magic amendment we have been waiting for that is going to cause us all to be able to sleep well tonight, and everything is going to be taken care of if the Hoeven-Corker amendment is blessed. Apparently, they are running people into a secret room trying to get them to sign up to vote for it and vote for final passage and promising them some corn, I guess, a Louisiana Purchase or something to try to line them up and get the system done.

But I would indicate that this side had agreed to about as many as 16 amendments earlier. As this exciting new ``superamendment'' came along, it does seem what has happened is the train jumped the track. The amendments we thought we would be voting on even later in the afternoon got jumped off the track. Now we are all waiting on the favored amendment, the amendment that everyone seems to think has to get preference over everybody else; whereas, we could be voting right this minute on many of the amendments. If we started voting on the ones that had been agreed to and cleared on this side, I think we would even be finished long before now.

I would look to Senator Lee.

I think the Senator is making a valuable point. I don't believe there is any justification for the process stopping today.

I would say it is convenient to say to the press and the American people: A big development has occurred. Everything is on hold. We are going to move this amendment. It is going to fix everything that you are concerned about.

That is part of the drive, the vision, the message being put out here.

I suspect a number of Senators--maybe in the majority party particularly--felt like they didn't want to vote on these 16 amendments. Some of them would actually make the bill work better. Some of them have some tough law enforcement provisions in them, tough in the sense they are fair and will work and actually tighten this system that is so out of control, and they didn't want to vote on those amendments. So I am sure maybe they complained to the distinguished majority leader and others.

But all I know is that we were moving along. People were saying from the other side let's get some votes. I said I am ready to vote. Let's vote. So agreements were being reached, and all of a sudden it stopped--on one favored amendment. That is what we are all focused on today.

I agree with Senator Lee that somehow all of us are supposed to be equal in this spot, that one Senator is not

supposed to be better than the others, and we all ought to be able to come to the floor and offer a legitimate amendment, debate it, and get a vote.

It does raise a question. It has really not been properly discussed. I believe my colleague makes a reference to the citizenship path? Is that what the Senator said?

I have given a lot of thought to it over the years. In 2007 it was discussed. I reached a serious conclusion. Other people might disagree. This is what I concluded. I concluded that after 1986, when every benefit the Nation could give was given to people who came here illegally and it did not work and we had even more people come and enforcement never occurred, then really a great nation such as the United States, which is in a position to allow somebody legal status in their country, is not required to give every single benefit to somebody who comes illegally as somebody who comes legally.

In fact, I believe it is very important, as a matter of principle, that the United States say, based on our experience in 1986: You come to the United States lawfully, we will allow you to have a path to citizenship; your children born here, they will be citizens. But if you do not come lawfully, we might agree out of compassion, out of concern to allow you to live here the rest of your life and work and give you a Social Security card and allow you to benefit in America, but you don't get everything. You don't get every honor this Nation can give if you did not follow the law when you came here.

I think that is legitimate as a matter of principle, as a matter of fairness, as a matter of the Constitution and law. That is where I am on that subject.

I really do. I think the American people would feel better about it. I remember after the immigration bill last time, and the ObamaCare, Senator Lamar Alexander, one of our more respected Members, said: We don't do comprehensive very well in the Senate. I think that is right because these matters are so complex. For example, I have offered a very detailed amendment dealing with simply how the ICE agents will have to identify and deport people they apprehend who came in violation of the law. That is very difficult. We talked earlier about the entry-exit visa system. We have been working on it for years. The law requires it now. We simply need to go the last distance and get it done. But this bill backs away from it. It would take some time. It really should be a separate piece of legislation to deal with the entire visa system.

Then you have how many people come and what skills they should bring and should they not be more merit-based. The bill claims to make progress in that regard, but it is very--it is really not because the nonskilled percentage goes up even though we do have more skilled workers. But the percentage still is out of whack because most people will be coming without reference to their skills. That really needs a lot of time, thought, and effort.

Then the border itself is a complex issue.

Then, how should we best create a seasonal worker, guest worker program for our agricultural industry, which does need seasonal workers? And we can create something that will work for them, but, boy, that takes a lot of care too.

This bill says people come--many of them in these guest worker programs--for 3 years with their family, and they get to stay another 3 years and maybe another 3 years. Presumably, if they do not have a job, they are supposed to go home. Do you think we are going to try to round up people and deport people who have been here for 6, 9 years, deport them and send them home if they are out of work for a while? It just doesn't sound like a practical solution. So a real temporary guest worker program, it seems to me, should be drafted with great care, and to the extent possible a person would come without family to do a specific job and then return.

There are lots of other examples in the bill that should have fundamentally separate pieces of legislation, thoughtfully considered, with law enforcement officers participating, economists being considered, and studies being conducted to see the best way to serve the American interests. That should be our goal--serving the legitimate national interests of America, including security. That could be the subject of another bit of it, how to enhance our national security from terrorists and other dangerous people who would enter the country.

I had the pleasure to talk a little with Congressman Goodlatte, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and have followed some of the work they are doing over there. I think they are doing exactly what the Senator has referred to.

The first piece of legislation they are working on--and they have a large number of experienced House Members who signed on to it: former chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Lamar Smith of Texas, Jim Sensenbrenner, and others such as Trey Gowdy, who was a Federal prosecutor for many years, so he understands the law. They have written a bill that deals with the internal interior enforcement.

They heard from ICE officers, they heard from Border Patrol officers, and they studied the reality of the situation. They carefully worked through it, and they produced a piece of legislation that I believe would be a tremendous asset to the effective enforcement of law in America on the internal side--one of the aspects of reform that ought to be done right if we do reform at all. If we do a comprehensive reform, every part has to be done right.

They can't have a bucket, fix two holes, and leave three more or the water will run out. I think that is where we go off base. If you bite off more than you can chew, it becomes a political thing.

So I am selling a vision. My vision is that my bill is going to end illegality, make everybody happy, make money for America, reduce our deficit, and everybody should thank me. But the bill, as the Senator and I have studied it, doesn't do that. There are too many flaws in it because it is too big.

The Members who worked on this bill are busy Senators. They are involved in tax reform, they are involved in Libya and Syria, they have defense issues, and all kinds of issues. They don't have time to rewrite the entire immigration law of America in a detailed, effective way all at one time. So that is what we have. We have a document that seeks to justify talking points, visions, images, and feel-good approaches.

The Senator from Utah is a good lawyer and the Senator knows that what is in the bill is what counts. Will the words actually and effectively accomplish what has been promised for it?

I was a Federal prosecutor for almost 15 years. My judgment tells me it will not work. It is not what has been promised, and we ought not to have the American people saddled with a bill that promises good, but in reality is not good. So that is my fundamental concern about this.

Well, it is now 10 minutes after 9. We were told that this special amendment that is going to fix everything in the bill would be produced at 6 p.m. Apparently, Senators have been going out of the secret room somewhere and being hot-boxed or had their arms twisted or given promises to get them to sign on to this new train that will move rapidly forward. At least that is what it looks like to me.

What we are hearing is--and I don't doubt it--as soon as that amendment is brought forth and filed tonight, some may ask: Why do you want to file it tonight? Well, they want to file it tonight so they can file cloture immediately. They want to file cloture so they can shut off debate immediately so they would be able to move the bill forward early next week. So that is the process, and it is favoring one amendment above everything else.

I am willing to look at it, and I look forward to receiving it, but it is almost past my bedtime. I normally would like to think I was heading to slumberland at this time, if not in the bed, and try to start earlier around here in the mornings.

So here we are, waiting for the bill to be filed. Senators have gone home for the most part. They have already gone home for the weekend. There is no real business or votes going to occur, but they could have if we had started earlier today like the plans were, as I understood it.

I am uneasy, as is my colleague, that this place is not going to be relaxed next week. I think the speed is going to pick up, and we are going to be told: We have to move, move, move, so there is not enough time for your amendment. Sorry.

That is the pattern too often here, and we end up with just a piddly few amendments that are not worthy of the great subject of this debate, and I am just sad about it. I thought for a while there we were going to really get into some amendments this week, and I thought it would be the right thing. We will see what happens.

Constituents have a right to hold us accountable. It has become the mood of the leadership--really of both parties--to protect Members from tough votes. Members say: Of those 16 amendments, there are 2 that I don't want to vote on because I will make somebody mad back home. But we are paid to vote. We are paid to be representatives. We are paid to be accountable.

The American people ought to be able to hold us accountable, and if we don't vote, they have a difficult time knowing what we are actually doing up here. They have a difficult time of holding us accountable--as they have a right to do in a democratic republic where elections count--and they need to be able to judge us before they reelect us or vote us out of office. I think this is a big part of this trend to avoid voting to protect Members.

Now Senator McConnell--a very experienced Senator who loves the Senate--used to always say that the burden of the majority was they have to move legislation. They have to actually move bills, and that means they have to subject the bill to amendments on the floor and Members have to vote. They have to be held accountable. There is no avoiding it. That is what they have to do.

The majority has the responsibility--if they are going to be a leader and actually change the country and advance their agenda--they have to bring legislation to the floor, and traditionally then the Senator would be subject to debate, criticism, and amendment. We have curtailed that in a way that I don't think is healthy for the Republic, as well as making the legislation better, which can occur with votes and amendments.

So I think the Senator has raised some valid points there.

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

Mr. President, before we wrap up, we were told that this special amendment--the one with the highest priority that the leadership all seems to think is so valuable--would be filed at 6 o'clock. Now it is 9:40 p.m. and we still have not seen it. Perhaps they are adding special clauses in to get special Senators' votes before they file it. But I suspect it will be done tonight because the plan, obviously, is to file cloture on it immediately and try to move it to a vote as soon as possible.

I want to conclude my remarks tonight on one subject. The American people are good and decent people. They believe in immigration. They have always supported immigration in this country. But they have been demanding, pleading, praying for this government to develop a good and decent system of immigration that serves our national interests and makes them proud. And for 30, 40 years we have had a situation in which people have been coming in massive numbers illegally, and it is not right. The American people are not happy about it. They are angry with their politicians.

I remember saying in 2007 that the people were not mad at immigrants. They were mad at those of us in Congress and in the White House and in the departments and agencies of government for not doing our jobs.

That is what they are angry about. I saw a poll not long ago that said 88 percent of the people said they were angry at Congress and only 12 percent said they were angry at people who entered the country illegally. I think that is where the American people are. So we promised and promised and promised that we would pass legislation that would end the illegality and that we would make the American people proud of the system we have. It has not happened.

So this amendment claims it has 700 miles of fencing in it, according to the newspapers, although we have not seen the amendment that is about to be here. It was not in the original bill. But now, after it ran into tough sledding--people started reading it, and it began to sink in popularity with the people and with Members of the Senate--they came up with, they say, a bill that adds fencing in it. Not long ago they were saying it was stupid to have a fence. Now we have an amendment that says 700 miles of fencing. Well, let share a thought or two about that.

In 2007, 2008, we passed bills to build fences--700 miles. I was one of the main sponsors. I think I was the sponsor of 700 miles of double- wide fencing. Eventually, it came out of the House, I believe. We did not have money in our appropriations bill to pay for it. We had voted for having a fence, but they did not put up the money. We complained about that and complained about that, so they got embarrassed, and I remember saying: Boy, isn't this clever? You go home and say you voted to authorize a fence, and when it came time to put money up, you did not vote for it. So we put up the money, actually agreed to fund it.

Oh, then they decided: Well, we did not really want to build a fence. We would have a virtual fence. I believe Senator McCain said the other night that we spent $800-and-something million on a virtual fence that never worked. Every bit of it had to be abandoned--some high-tech scheme--and the fence never got built. This was in 2008.

Now, the first bill comes forward, they claim they had fencing in it. But when you read the bill, do you know what it said? Secretary Napolitano was supposed to send forward a plan for fencing--a plan for fencing. But the truth is that Secretary Napolitano is on record publicly--more than once--saying she did not think we needed any fencing. So what kind of plan was she going to submit under this bill?

So we mocked that, made fun of it. But that was their goal. The goal was to pass an immigration bill that pretended to say we are going to build barriers and fencing at the border and not have it in there. That is what the plan was when they offered the bill. But after it hit tough sledding, now we have 700 miles. But it is single fencing, not double, and that is not nearly as good because a person can penetrate a single fence and get by pretty quickly, but if they have to do double-fencing, they have a real problem, and you can run a government vehicle on a roadway between them, and it is very effective.

That was done fundamentally in San Diego a number of years ago. San Diego's area at the border was lawless--drugs, crime, degradation of real estate values, and it was just awful.

They built a good, solid double fence. All of a sudden property values went up, crime dropped, and the area is doing so much better today. So the fences in these kinds of areas are not damaging. Fences can make things better. As they say sometimes, good fences make good neighbors.

I am not impressed with that so much. I do think it is important for us to ask ourselves will it actually get built this time if we pass it. I have my doubts because they do not have the trigger on it, as I understand from the reports; the trigger being you do not get the amnesty until you get the fence built. Then you might get some fencing.

Senator Thune offered a good amendment. Senator Thune's amendment said, before we give the first bit of amnesty, we should build at least 350 miles of the double fencing. Then the other 300 has to be built after that. That was voted down. But after the bill got in trouble, now they have 700 miles in there of at least a single fence.

So that is the why this process has worked. I believe the American people are absolutely right to be unhappy with their government because we have not served them well. They have asked us and pleaded with us to produce a legal system of immigration to end the illegality, and we have failed time and time again to do that which they have asked us to do. That is the truth. I have been here. I have seen the amendments.

What happens time and again is amendments that do not make much

difference but sound good, do not work. They pass. But you put up an amendment that would actually have a substantial impact, such as actually building substantial fencing, and it goes down. It gets voted down. It is almost unbelievable. But I have seen it. My first experience of that was when I learned that people who come for visa overstays--it is not same kind of crime that crossing a border is. It is a civil penalty of some kind.

Some people have contended--I do not think correctly because I did a law review article on it--they have concluded, I don't think correctly, that the local police who apprehend somebody for drunk driving or speeding, they find they are here illegally as a result of a visa overstay, and they cannot hold them. They have to let them go, and they cannot turn them over to Federal law enforcement officers.

So I offered an amendment to make it a misdemeanor to overstay your visa. It does not have to be long. But we need to clarify any confusion that arises from that subject. I thought everybody was going to pass it, until, lo, they figured it out. Someone who was watching the legislation said: Wait a minute. If you pass that, it will help them apprehend and deport people. You cannot pass that. All of a sudden the opposition arose and it went down. That would have worked. It would not have cost us any money. It would have given greater power to do the right thing to the law enforcement community. Boom, it went down.

So under President Bush, he reluctantly came along and got more favorable to a lawful system of immigration. After his bill failed, he agreed to establish a 287(g) program. Governor King may be familiar with that. It was a situation in which local law enforcement officers, people who work in prisons, people at the State trooper headquarters and other officers could go to a Federal training for up to 2 weeks, or maybe more than that, and they would then be trained to properly help the Federal officers do their duty with regard to people who entered the country illegally.

President Bush signed off on it. The program was growing. It was very popular. Alabama was one of the States that sent people to be trained because we did not want to violate anyone's rights. President Obama has basically killed it. They basically ended the program. I will just say to my colleagues, if we do--and at some point I think we will provide legal status for millions of people who are in our country illegally in a compassionate way and try to do what we can--be generous to them, even though they violated the law. If we do that, are we not going to have the ability to enforce the law for somebody in the future who comes illegally?

Is that where we are heading? Because if we do not fix interior enforcement, we are not ever going to be able to do that. We have a larger and larger number each year coming legally by visa and overstaying. Some 40 percent now of the immigrants illegally in our country are here by virtue of overstaying their visa after coming legally. So what do you do about that?

We have to have a system in which we welcome the assistance of State and local law officers. They are not entitled to prosecute people. They are not entitled to deport people. That can only be done by Federal judges and Federal officers. But they have always been able to take somebody who came in across the border illegally, detain them, and then turn them over to the Federal officers for deportation. They do not want that to happen.

This has been blocked systematically. Groups such as La Raza have made this a high priority. Members of the Senate have responded every time they have asked for help and blocked all legislation that would in any way advance the ability of good State law officers to assist the Federal Government in enforcing the law. A State law officer can arrest a bank robber and turn him over so they can be prosecuted in Federal court for bank robbery. They can arrest them on any misdemeanor and turn them over to the Federal Government. They can arrest them on illegal immigration charges and turn them over to the Federal Government. There is no doubt about that.

But the government will not take them, will not come and get them. Ask your local officers what happens if they arrest somebody they know is in the country illegally. They will tell you nothing happens. ICE officers are undermanned. They have policies and rules that do not even allow them to come out and participate. Nobody is participating in the joint Federal-State 287(g) training program anymore. This is over.

In fact, what we have is the Attorney General of the United States suing States that want to be helpful to the Federal Government and try to enforce Federal law. So this is the area to which we have sunk. This is how far we have gotten away from having integrity in the legal process of immigration. The American people are not happy. I hope they are watching this debate because I have spent a lot of time looking at this, this legislation, 1,000 pages.

Who knows what this amendment will be tonight, how many more pages will be added. It will not accomplish what the American people have pleaded with Congress to do. It is focused overwhelmingly, totally has been focused on getting the amnesty first, even though they told us it would be enforcement first. They have to admit it is amnesty first. That is what it is and then a promise of enforcement in the future.

So that is where we are. I wish we could do better. I know we can do better. We can make the border lawful. We can make the entry-exit visa system lawful. We can make the workplace E-Verify system serve the national interests and make it much harder for illegal workers to get jobs.

Remember, under the bill, we will legalize the people who are here illegally. We are talking about people coming here in the future. Are we going to allow them to get jobs? Are we not going to allow ICE to do their job in the future? Are we not going to empower them? Oddly, all of the resources are going to the border but none to deal effectively with the visa overstays.

The Congressional Budget Office that analyzed the bill and gave us a report 2 days ago, the CBO report says this legislation that we have heard is so marvelous will only reduce the number of people entering the country illegally by 25 percent. Can you believe that? Just 25 percent. That is unthinkable, especially after we have been hearing the great promises of how effective it is.

I wonder about that. One of the concerns CBO expresses, the experts whom they have who do the best they can, one of the concerns they express is one I have been talking about since this legislation has hit the floor: We are going to see a great increase in visa overstays if, for no other reason, there are going to be twice as many people coming to America on visas to work under this bill for temporary periods of time than there are today.

Many of them are not going home when they are supposed to go home. That is what the numbers show. Many of them in these programs will come with their families, be able to stay several years, and then they are asked to go home. Fewer of them are going home. They may have children in junior high school. They are not going to go home when the law says, unfortunately. That is the experience we have been seeing. They could go home. They should have every moral obligation to go home, every legal obligation to go home.

A very fine lawyer here wrote a piece I was pleased to read recently. It was the editor of the Yale Law Review, a marine. He said: We tell our soldiers to go and they go. We tell them, go to Iraq in harm's way, 1 year, 15 months, 18 months, and they go. What do you mean, someone comes to America for 1 year should not be made to follow the commitment and the contract we signed? We make our soldiers do it. We are in some sort of deal here. We cannot expect anybody to follow the law. But my experience, and the experience I have seen over the years with immigration is a large number of people are not complying with the law. We can expect that to happen.

So we are going to see a large increase in visa overstays. It is going to be more than the border--over illegal entries at the border. That is going to be a larger and larger part of the problem. CBO basically found that in their recent report. I think that is truly accurate.

This legislation comes nowhere close to fixing it. The key to it is an entry-

exit visa. Current law requires that there be an entry-exit biometric visa that covers air, sea, and land ports. This bill eliminates the biometric fingerprint requirement--eliminates that and says it only has to be effective at air and seaports and not land ports.

This bill is dramatically weaker than current law. We passed six pieces of legislation calling for entry-exit visa systems over the last decade. Never been done. So why should we have enforcement first? That is the reason. We pass a law to build a fence, it does not get built. We pass a law repeatedly that says, let's have an entry-exit visa system. It does not get built. It does not occur.

So we need to put the heat on the people who run this government, including us, to make sure that if we pass something it is going to actually occur. That is why there has been a broad consensus. There needs to be a requirement that enforcement occur before legality occurs. That is why the sponsors were originally saying their bill was enforcement first. There is every reason for the American people to doubt that this Nation will follow through on those commitments.

I am concerned about where we are. I am pleased with the way the House is proceeding. They are moving step by step taking individual parts of our immigration problem and fixing them.

The first one they are dealing with is interior enforcement. I have taken a good bit from their bill, and I have an amendment pending. It will be hugely beneficial to the ability of our ICE officers to enforce law in the United States and help bring this whole system under control. It is a very large part of what we do. I am not sure we will ever get a vote on it. I think I was in the 16 amendments that were going to be approved for a vote.

What is happening? Everything was put on hold today waiting for the favorite amendment. It was supposed to be here at 6 o'clock. Now it is 10 p.m. We still haven't seen it. When are we going to get it? Well, how long will it be? What all will they have in it? We don't know, but it is not going to be a pristine document, I can tell you that.

My staff and I intend to look at it. We are going to evaluate it, and we are going to see if it solves all the immigration problems. We are going to find out if it is great, and we can go home and go to bed at night and know this problem has been fixed. That is what we are being told, but I don't think it is going to show that. Why? Because this bill doesn't, and they said it did. They said it fixed all the problems, but it does not.

They said they didn't believe in a fence. They said the Senator said it was stupid to have a fence. Now all of a sudden we have 700 miles of fence.

They said Senator Cornyn was overreaching. He wanted 5,000 new border agents. Now the bill gets in trouble and they come in with 20,000 border agents and say it is paid for. There is plenty of money to pay for all of this, $30 billion, this article says it is going to go for that. If it was actually needed and it would work out, I would help deal with that.

I have my doubts that this is the best way to spend our money. I think this is a political response to a failing piece of legislation, a dramatic, desperate attempt to pass a dramatic piece of amendment so they can say it does everything you want and more.

We will see. Hopefully it does improve the border. Again, the border is just one part of the overall failure of our immigration system.

The right thing for America to do is to continue to welcome immigrants, to have a legal system that is based on the national interests of America, very much like Canada, where they give points. If you are younger, you get points. If you have more education, you get points. If you speak the language, you get points. If you have special skills, you get points. You get points for that.

I think a majority, maybe 60 percent of Canadian immigration, is based on a merit-based competitive system. People apply, and the ones who are most qualified, the ones who are going to be likely to be the most successful in Canada, are the ones who get admitted--not the ones that aren't able to speak the language, who don't have skills that Canada needs, and who are going to struggle in Canada.

Why shouldn't you choose the ones who have the best opportunity to be successful? This is so basic. We were told this is a move to merit- based immigration.

We have done an analysis of that. I did a speech on it. They said they were moving away from brothers and family connections, and they were going to have a merit-based system. We have looked at it. About 10 to 15 percent of the total flow is based on this merit-based system.

Then we looked at the details of it in this long 1,000 pages. Clever people had written it. If you are two children, two young people in Honduras or Argentina who wish to come to America, one of them has a brother in America, one of them has dropped out of high school, does not speak English, has not held a job before, and has no real skills, the other one was valedictorian of his high school class, he has 2 years of college, speaks English well, studied hard, and is preparing himself to come to America. Let's say he has 4 years, a college degree. Under this merit-based point system, the brother gets 10 points and the young man with the college degree gets 5. It is chain migration by another name. It takes a master's degree to get as many points as having a brother in the United States. We were told we were going to move away from that and more to an honest and competitive system. Even that small part of the bill that focuses on a merit-based, point-based system has huge advantages for people with family connections, and very large advantages for people who come from countries that do not have many people come to America. They get points and things of that nature that don't make much sense, frankly.

I am hopeful the legislation that we are going to have filed tonight, at least we have been promised it will be filed tonight, will enhance enforcement at our border. I am going to read it carefully to make sure it does. Then I am going to be looking very carefully to see if it improves all the other flaws in this system. If it doesn't, I am not impressed. If it doesn't make this system one that is likely to work, I am not impressed. That is not enough, to fix one part of the system.

Finally, let me close by saying what the Congressional Budget Office, our own best advisers on economic matters, told us 2 days ago in their report. This is what they said. They said this legislation that is before us today will reduce the amount of illegal immigration by only 25 percent, not what we were promised, only 25 percent.

They said this legislation that is before us today will reduce the average wage of Americans in this country, reduce wages at a time when wages have been declining regularly. They have said if passed, this bill before us today, and unlikely to be changed by the Corker-Hoeven amendment, would increase unemployment. It would make more people out of work, make more people go on unemployment compensation, go on food stamps, go on SSI, and maybe go on disability if they can get it, because they can't find a job. We will have this very large flow of workers into our country, beyond I think what the country can absorb at a time of high unemployment. Wages will go down. Unemployment will go up. Illegality in this system is only marginally reduced.

I don't think that is a bargain. I don't see how we can go to our constituents and say that is what we are going to pass. I really don't think so.

Let's don't do this, colleagues. Let's stop and push back here. Let's let the House proceed, as they seem to be doing. Let's send our bill back to committee and consider some of these issues such as will it help people get jobs or will it hurt people's ability to get jobs. Will it help their wages go up or will their wages go down. If it is pulling wages down, why are we doing it? This is where I think we are. I believe it ought to be reviewed, reviewed carefully. The American people need to know what is happening here. They are going to have to watch what happens because there is a politically correct movement in this body to move this bill out for all kinds of reasons unrelated to the substance of the legislation.

We are here to pass legislative substance, not some political vision, not some scheme to get votes. That is what we need to be doing. We are not doing that effectively, in my opinion.

This legislation is defective. It should not be passed, and I am confident tonight, if we get an amendment that deals with the border, it still will leave huge parts of this legislation defective and unworthy of support.

The Congressional Budget Office's analysis of the immigration bill of the Gang of 8 confirmed in dramatic fashion our most significant concerns about the bill. Indeed, I would say, through the history of the movement of this bill through the Senate, this is the most dramatic event yet.

Basically, it says these things in explicit phrases after careful analysis:

No. 1, it will reduce the wages of American citizens.

No. 2, it will increase unemployment in America.

No. 3, it will reduce GNP per capita in America. The growth in our economy will be reduced by the passage of this bill.

It concludes that the flow of illegal immigrants will not be stopped but will only be reduced by 25 percent.

So we are talking about a bill that is supposed to be the toughest ever, that is going to promote economic growth in America, a bill that is supposed to make us economically stronger and end illegal immigration in the future. It just doesn't do that.

I have read the bill. I have studied the bill and looked at the bill. I have been concluding and saying for weeks each one of those things, and the score confirms that.

So I would ask colleagues: How can we vote for a bill that pulls down wages of Americans, increases unemployment, and only has a modest reduction in the illegality that is occurring today, reduces GNP, and increases the debt? How can we do that?

For example, the bill would increase welfare spending by $259 billion in the first 10 years and increase the on-budget deficits by $14 billion.

It has been said the overall deficit when we account for the off- budget items looks better. But that is a direct result of counting the Social Security, Medicare, FICA withholding on people's payroll. That money, for the people who are paying in, is being set aside in trust funds to pay for their Social Security and retirement when they draw it in the future. We can't count that money as improving the debt situation of the United States. As soon as the 10-year prohibition or so that limits welfare is off, then the cost of the legislation is going to go up much more.

The bill would make no meaningful reduction in future illegal immigration. CBO estimates about 350,000 illegal immigrants would be added each year. As Senator Cornyn has said, 7.5 million people would enter illegally in the next 10 years instead of the current level of about 10 million. So that is a 25-percent reduction. CBO writes:

However, other aspects of the bill would probably increase

the number of unauthorized residents--in particular, people

overstaying their visas issued under the new programs for

temporary workers. . . .

I have been pointing out for weeks people are going to come here with their families, supposedly to work temporarily for 3 years, with the ability to extend for 3 years, and then who is going to be able to tell them to go home? They are not going to go home in any realistic way. We are going to have a substantial increase in visa overstays. CBO concludes that is correct. It is a guaranteed policy that will not work. So the bill would result in a massive increase in the future legal flow of immigration.

Current law estimates we will add 10 million people in 10 years, including the legalized illegal immigrants. That means 30 million immigrants by 2023. That is the number I have been using. I felt that was a fair, legitimate number. It is complicated.

I asked Senator Schumer twice in the committee: How many people will be admitted in the next 10 years and given legal status? He wouldn't say. The bill's sponsor would not tell us how many, but CBO now has said the figure I have used--30 million--basically is correct. That is triple the number that would be admitted under the current legal flow of immigrants into our country. We admit 1 million a year. That would be 10 million over 10 years, and this would be 30 million. So we have to ask those questions.

Finally, CBO tells us, under this bill: The average wage would be lower than under current law over the first 12 years.

Let me read that again: The average wage would be lower than under current law over the first 12 years. They use the words ``first dozen years.'' So that should be the end of the bill right there.

This is the chart that is included in CBO's analysis and their report. It is the exact same chart they prepared, not the chart I prepared.

I know the Presiding Officer cares about this issue. This is the impact on average wages. This is where we start today at the zero factor, and it drops down to 2024, 10 years of lower wages than if we didn't pass the bill--which only makes sense because we are flowing in a huge flow and supply of low-skilled workers, and they are going to pull down the wages particularly of our lower income workers. This is going to happen. Mathematics and the free markets tell us that.

So the country--the Nation--the Congress should try to determine what the right flow of immigrant labor is and get it right so we are not hammering American workers today who are unemployed, who are struggling for jobs, trying to get better pay. In fact, average workers' pay has declined since 1999.

CBO's estimate of per capita GNP--this is their chart from their report--shows that through 2030, we have lower GNP per capita than if the bill never passed.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, if we have a few more minutes and no one else is seeking the floor, I would note that CBO's unemployment rate `` . . . S. 744 would cause the unemployment rate to increase slightly between 2014 and 2020''--6 years of higher unemployment rates.

We have heard a lot of talk over the years about the declining wages. I do think that it is important for us to discuss. But that decline of wages--which started over a decade ago and is accelerated with this legislation--how is it we are not talking about it?

Senator Menendez, one of the intrepid authors of the immigration bill before us made some remarks earlier this morning that I thought were pretty remarkable. He said not to worry about these first 10 years of lower growth, lower wages, and higher unemployment because the analysis actually gets better in the next 10 years.

But if we look at that and how it plays out, what we would see is this: We would see there is an improvement in the wages in the second 10 years--which, let me tell you, their projections are always better the first 10 years. But in the second 10 years, even if we saw some growth, the growth still does not get back to the level it would have been had the bill never been passed. We have to know that. The growth does not recover from the spot we already are.

Respectfully, the inconvenient truth that he referred to is that this Rube Goldberg scheme that has been hatched will certainly help certain special economic interests and certain political interests will be served for sure, but it will be devastating for American workers at a time they are already hurting. I don't see how we can justify this.

Are we supposed to tell the American people that they are to accept declining wages for another 10 years? How can that be the policy of the Congress of the United States? How can we tell the American person, at a time when

unemployment is way too high, that we are going to pass a bill that makes unemployment higher? How can we tell them the on-budget deficit is going to be increased? Am I hearing this correctly?

To the public I would ask: Can you, the American people, afford that? Can you sustain declining wages for another 10 years? Do you want your Congress to pass a law that will reduce your wages that would increase unemployment?

What about after that? Because of the sustained downward pressure on wages, American wages 20 years from now will still be lower than they would have been had the legislation not passed, and, particularly, as I indicated, it falls on the lower wage people who are falling further behind. The impact of the 1,000-page immigration legislation that is before us today, experts tell us, will fall more heavily on the poorer people and cause them to fall even further behind.

The working people in this country are going to get hammered by this legislation. We need to be passing laws that help them get jobs, help them add higher wages, help them have better benefits and more full- time jobs, not fewer full-time jobs.

I don't see how we owe loyalty to Mr. Zuckerberg, the Facebook billionaire who is running ads telling us what we are supposed to do. Does he know real people who are suffering out there? He doesn't impress me. He claims there is some convention of conservatives running this advertisement. I am not aware that Mr. Zuckerberg is a conservative. Do we all owe our loyalty to him because he brilliantly produced Facebook or do we owe our loyalty to the working men and women who vote for us, who fight our wars, pay our taxes, and serve our country?

I suspect that if Mr. Zuckerberg were to post job openings tonight on Facebook, put out his salaries, what he wants to pay, he would find there might be plenty of Americans who want to take these jobs. I suspect so. I would ask him to do so. Put on your website what kind of qualifications, what kind of salaries you will pay, and let's see if we do not have more applications than you suggest exist out there.

We know we have college graduates in large numbers in STEM fields also having a hard time finding work. We know that is a fact. We have senior engineers and scientists and computer people who would like to go to work too. Maybe they have been laid off. Maybe there has been downsizing. They have experience. Are they not to be considered? We have to bring people in through some of these work programs for a period of time to take the jobs.

A good immigration plan can work. We may need to bring in some workers. We certainly need seasonal workers whom we can bring into America if we do it right, and we need a guest worker program. I support that. I support the million people a year who are admitted into our country who work here every year. But this is a huge increase. The guest worker program will double under this legislation.

I am afraid we are not serving the legitimate interests of the American working men and women--immigrant, native born, Black, Asian, White, Hispanic--who are here today, struggling today. Are we serving them if we bring in more people than the economy can absorb? We can see that will pull down their wages and make it hard for them to have a job.

An author in the National Review wrote recently--I think this is very wise and insightful:

We are a nation with an economy, not an economy with a

nation.

What that means to me is that we represent people, human beings, and we have an obligation to help them make their lives better and not to make their lives tougher. It seems to me we have such a pell-mell rush for amnesty that we have not seen the enforcement, we have agreed to too much legal flow, and we have very little reduction in the illegal flow over the next 10 years, and for that reason the bill should not become law.

That is why the bill is in trouble. That is why we need to be listening to the House. They are having serious hearings, step by step, on this legislation. The first legislation that I have seen them to produce is very good.

We can reform the system. We can make it better. We can have a generous immigration system for America, as we have already had. We can be compassionate toward people who have been here for a long time and not try to deport everybody who has been here and done well but is not legally here. We can do something about that. But we need to be sure that the amount of workers coming in is an amount that can readily be absorbed, that can be assimilated, and we need to be sure that the illegality ends. CBO says it will not under this bill.

Amendment No. 1208, as Modified

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Lee amendment No. 1208 be modified with the changes that are at the desk.

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

Mr. President, the subcommittee, of which I was not a member, gave a lot of thought to this. Their number reduced by half the amount that could be charged. I think it is somewhat higher than in the amendment of Senator Manchin, but it went from--it could have been $900,000 a year and I believe they cut it to under $500,000 a year. The Committee on Armed Services discussed it. I believe the Manchin amendment did not pass. I supported the subcommittee's mark on that. I think they have come to a reasonable number. You are asking top executives maybe to move across the country to lead an engineering project, and maybe that is the right figure.

But I respect the interest of the Senator, and I understand the effort behind his amendment.

Mr. President, I thank the Senator from South Dakota. He is exactly correct. This is a failure of Congress and the administration. As soon as some discretion was given to the administration to not build a fence, they quit building a fence, and we are so far behind what we promised the American people.

I say to Senator Thune, I remember being engaged in the debate in both of those years, 2006 and 2008. We actually came up with a fund. We funded sufficiently the fence construction that needed to be done. We told the American people we were going to do it. We were proud of ourselves. Actually, I remember giving a hard time to my colleagues because in 2006 we authorized the fence but there was no money. So it was later that we finally forced the money to be appropriated because the issue was, you say you are for a fence, you go back home and say: I voted for fencing and barriers, and then you do not put up the money. So the money was even put up, and it still did not happen as required by law.

I say to Senator Thune, I think you said it so clearly. That is why the American people are rightly concerned about amnesty first with a promise of enforcement in the future. Even when we pass laws that plainly say a fence shall be built, we put up money to build that fence, and it does not happen in the future.

So what we are asked to do with this legislation is to grant amnesty immediately. That will happen. That is the one thing in this bill that will happen. But we need to ask ourselves: What are the American people telling us?

A recent poll showed that by a 4-to-1 margin the American people said: We want to see the enforcement first. Then we will talk about the amnesty. Do your enforcement first.

The Senator's question is, How will it work? Well, we have discussed that over the years. The greatest example of how it works is in San Diego. That area was in complete disarray, with violence, crime, drugs. It was an economic disaster zone. There was a very grim situation in San Diego. There were all kinds of illegality at the border. They built a triple-layer secure fence, and across that entire area illegality ended totally, virtually. Almost no illegality is continuing at that stretch of the border today. Crime was dramatically reduced. Economic growth occurred on both sides of the border. It was highly successful.

So several things happen. First, you end the illegality with a good fence. Second, it reduces dramatically the number of Border Patrol officers needed to make sure illegal crossings are not occurring because there is a force multiplication of their ability. So you can save a lot of money by having fewer people. When people see a very secure fence, they decide it is not worth the attempt, so they don't even try to cross. That reduces the stress on the Border Patrol, the number of deportations, and the number of people who have to be sent back. Building a fence reduces costs and saves money in the long run and really achieves what I think the American people have asked us to achieve.

I say to Senator Thune, I think your amendment is very reasonable. It certainly puts us on a path to completing the kind of barriers that are necessary. As the Senator said, it comes nowhere close to saying there is a fence across the entire border. It would just be at the areas where it would be most effective.

I say to Senator Thune, thank you for your leadership in offering a clear legislative proposal that will work. It is my observation

that things that get proposed around here that do not work often are passed; things that will actually work are difficult to get passed.

I say to Senator Thune, I do not know if you realize that all of the sponsors of the legislation have talked a good bit about fencing that might occur, having a report on fencing. What we do know is that it did not require fencing anywhere in the bill. But in case anybody had any doubt about that, Senator Leahy, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, offered an amendment that explicitly stated that nothing in the bill shall require the construction of any fencing at the border. So despite what others have heard about this being the toughest bill ever and it is going to do more for enforcement than we have ever had, it, in fact, weakens and almost guarantees we will not have additional fencing, which would certainly be a component, in my mind, of a stronger, tougher enforcement mechanism.

Fencing barriers do, I believe, help the President, who should lead on this, who should say clearly to the world: Our border is secure. We are building fences and do not come. The number of people who would attempt to come would drop a lot if we made that clear statement.

I thank the Senator for his good work.

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

Madam President, coming up, we will be voting on some amendments. I just want to share a few thoughts as we gather in advance of that. One of the comments made earlier by one of our good Senators indicated a belief that this immigration bill is going to raise the salaries of American workers. I think that is what was said. I have to point out that is not accurate.

This is a very serious issue we are confronting. This legislation does the opposite of what was said and creates an unprecedented flow of new workers into America--the likes of which we have not seen before-- and it will have a direct result of depressing job opportunities and wages of American citizens. It will affect immigrants who are legally here and also looking for work. It will impact the wages of African Americans, Hispanics, and any other group in America.

Here is the reason why: Under our current law, the legal flow of persons to America would be 1 million a year, and that is the largest of any country in the world. Over 10 years, that will rise to 10 million people. At this point, we now have 11 million immigrants here, plus a backlog of approximately 5 million more immigrants, which will total approximately 15 million people who would be legalized in very short order under this legislation.

Some say, well, they are already working here, so there is not a problem on employment. But many of those workers are in the shadows, underemployed, maybe working part-time in restaurants or other places, and all of a sudden they will be given legal status. At that point, they will be able to apply for any job in America. This will be good for them, but the question is, Is it our duty to give our first responsibility to those who have entered illegally? Don't we have a responsibility to consider how it will impact people who are unemployed today and are out looking for work?

Since 1999, we know wages have dropped as much as 8 percent to 9 percent. Wages are declining, not going up in America today. One of the big reasons, according to Professor Borjas at Harvard, is that the flow of labor from abroad creates an excess of labor and that causes wages to decline. It is just a fact, and that is the way that works.

In addition to that, we have our current law that allows temporary workers and guest workers who come for a period of time, and then they can work. What happens to that flow of workers today? They will double the number of people who will be coming in as temporary workers. Everyone has to understand that many of them come for 3 years with their family after which they can reup for another 3 years. They also compete for a limited number of jobs that legal immigrants would be competing for as well as citizens would be competing for.

So there is this bubble of 15 million that is accepted at once and a doubling of the current flow of nonimmigrants. In addition to that, the annual immigrant flow into our country will increase at least 50 percent. It could be more than that. So that would go from 1 million a year to 1.5 million a year. Over 10 years, that is 15 million.

There are 300 million people in this country, and as elected officials, they are our primary responsibility. If this legislation were to pass--the 8,000 pages in this bill--it would allow 30 million people to be placed on a permanent path to citizenship over this 10- year period, and that is well above what would normally be 10 million people. In addition to that, the flow of so-called temporary guest workers will be double what the current rate is.

Madam President, how much time is there on this side?

Madam President, I ask to be notified in 5 minutes.

I believe Senator Vitter's airplane has been delayed. His amendment is projected to come up. I don't know if it will be called up if he is not able to get back.

He has an excellent amendment that deals with a fundamentally flawed part of our immigration system that the bill before us makes worse, not better. It absolutely and indisputably does make it better.

This is the current situation: Six times Congress in the last 10 or 15 years has passed legislation to require an entry-exit visa system. It is required that it be biometric. In other words, it would require fingerprints or something like that. Normally, fingerprints would be utilized.

People are fingerprinted when they come into the country. It goes into the system, but we are not checking when anybody leaves. People legally come on a visa, and they leave. Because we don't use a system when people leave the country, nobody knows whether they left. Forty percent of the people who enter the country illegally are coming through visa overstays. They get a legal visa, and they just don't leave. People don't even know if they left because they are not clocked out.

The 9/11 Commission said this is wrong. We need a biometric entry and exit system at land, sea, and airports.

What does this bill do? It eliminates that language that is already in law, passed by Congress, and inexplicably has never been carried out. The bill merely requires a biographic or electronic exit system. It does not require a fingerprint-type exit system. Not only that, it only requires it at air and seaports, not the land ports. The 9/11 Commission said that would not work because people come in all the time by air and leave by land, so we cannot rely on it. It will not establish the right integrity to know whether somebody overstayed. That makes perfect sense.

Senator Vitter attempts to address that. He suggests that we have an integrated biometric entry-exit system operating and functioning at every land, air, and seaport--not just air and sea--prior to the processing of any application for legal status pursuant to the original biometric exit law, the 2004 Intelligence Reform Act, recommendations. That is what the current law says.

In addition to that, before the implementation of any program granting temporary legal status, the Department of Homeland Security Secretary must submit written certification of the deployment of the system which will then be fast-tracked and approved

through streamlined House and Senate procedures. This amendment is added to the current bill, and it will be effective in accomplishing what we need. In other words, it has a little trigger that says they don't get their legal status until the government does what they have been directed to do by Congress for over 10 years and have failed to do.

We have had a pilot test at the Atlanta airport, for example, where people go to the airport, catch a plane back home to England, Jordan, India or wherever they go, put their fingerprints on a machine, and it reads them as they go through the airport. What they found was that out of 29,744 people in that pilot test, 175 were on the watch list for terrorism or warrants were out for their arrest or other serious charges were against them. They were able to identify them before they fled or left the country, and that is what the whole system was about.

They found it didn't slow down the airport and that it didn't cost nearly what people are saying it will cost. Some have said it would be $25 billion, and that is totally inaccurate. According to this report, it will not cost anything like that. Police officers have fingerprint reading machines in their automobiles. You can go by there, put your fingers on there to read your print, and if you have a warrant out for arrest for murder or drug dealing or terrorism, you get apprehended.

They recently caught a terrorist--actually from Alabama--and prosecuted him in Alabama. He was trying to get on a plane in Atlanta.

I thank the Chair, reserve the remainder of my time, and yield the floor.

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

Madam President, the prime sponsor, I suppose, of the immigration bill before us--this 1,000-page document--Senator Schumer, announced earlier today, based on the Congressional Budget Office report, that lower deficits were promised, and that the bill, indeed, produces lower deficits. I do not believe that is an accurate statement, and I will share with you some of my concerns about that.

We have been through this before, where the budget numbers, in reality, have been utilized in a way that is not healthy, and it creates a false impression of what is occurring here.

Secondly, I do not know that he talked about this--I doubt he did-- the CBO report is explicit. Under this legislation, if it were to pass, the wages of American workers will fall for the next 12 years. They will be lower than the inflation rate. They will decline from the present unacceptably low rate, and continue to decline for 12 years, according to this report. That alone should cause us to defeat this bill.

We have been told it is going to create prosperity and growth, but what it is going to produce is more unemployment, as this report explicitly states. It is going to produce lower wages for Americans, as this report explicitly states. And it is going to increase the deficit.

So I think we need to have an understanding here that something very serious is afoot: to suggest that you can bring in millions of new workers to take jobs in the United States at a time of record unemployment and that will not impact wages, that will not make unemployment go up, goes beyond all common sense.

Dr. Borjas at Harvard has absolutely proven through peer-reviewed research that that is exactly what is going to happen. Wages go down, as they have been going down, and unemployment will go up. So this report confirms that.

I will read some of the things that are in it.

I am on page 7 of ``The Economic Impact of S. 744, the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act.''

S. 744 would allow significantly more workers with low

skills and with high skills to enter the United States--. . .

.

No doubt about that. They say it is a move to merit-based immigration. But it is not a move to merit-based immigration. It increases low-skill workers substantially, as well as increasing other workers.

Taking into account all of those flows of new immigrants,

CBO and JCT [Joint Tax] expect that a greater number of

immigrants with lower skills than with higher skills would be

added to the workforce. . . .

In other words, another group coming in, more lower skilled than higher skilled, just as I indicated and other commentators have indicated previously.

The report said this:

Slightly pushing down the average wage of the labor force

as a whole.

Pushing down the wage of the labor force as a whole. But

they go on to say this. Get this. The next sentence:

However, CBO and Joint Tax expect that currently

unauthorized workers----

Illegal workers, in other words----

who attain legal status under 744 will see an increase in

their wages.

So I think this underestimates, if you read the report carefully, the adverse impact that the flow of workers will have on the wages of American workers and lawful immigrants who are here today. But at any rate, it is clear that is so.

It goes on to say this, dramatically, I suggest:

The average wage would be lower than under current law over

the first dozen years. CBO estimates that it would increase

unemployment for at least 7 years.

So this is supposed to be good for the people we represent? Of course, I would like to ask our colleagues to think carefully about our duty. Who is it we represent in this body? What kind of responsibilities do we have to decent, hard-working Americans who experts have told us have seen their wages decline every year, virtually, since 1999.

Wages have declined by as much as 8 percent since 2009 for a number of reasons. One of the reasons, according to Professor Borjas, is that immigration is already pulling down wages by as much as 40 percent. So this will add to the problem.

This report said, quite clearly, unequivocally, it is going to increase unemployment, and it is going to pull down wages. That is exactly the wrong thing that ought to be happening at this time. How in the world can we justify passing a bill that hammers the American working man and woman who is out trying to feed a family, get a job, that has a little retirement, a little health care, some money to be able to take care of the family, and hammer them with additional adverse economic impacts?

I suggest to you this is not a report that in any way justifies advancing this legislation. Let me just take a moment. I wrestle with these numbers. I see the Presiding Officer who is on the Budget Committee understands these numbers. They say it pays down the deficit. Let me show you what it really says. This is the way they double counted the money to justify ObamaCare.

Basically, they created, through cuts in Medicare, savings and they lengthened the life of Medicare, but they claim they used that same money to fund ObamaCare. At one point, Mr. Elmendorf, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, who wrote this said it was double counting the money. You cannot use the same money to fund ObamaCare and use that same money to strengthen Medicare. How simple is that?

We are talking about hundreds of billions of dollars in double counting of the money. That is what is happening in here. Look at this report. Impact on the deficit over the 10-year period, 2014 to 2023, the budget deficit would increase by $14.2 billion. The debt would increase by $14.2 billion. But then they say the off-budget money would decrease the deficit by $211 billion.

My colleague, Senator Schumer, said this is all great. We have a big surplus now. We have $200 billion in the off-budget account. But what is that money?

What is that money? That is the payroll taxes. That is your Social Security payment and your Medicare payment. When more of the illegal aliens come in and get a Social Security number and pay Social Security and Medicare, the money comes into the government. All right? But is it free to be spent on bridges and roads and aircraft and salaries for Congressmen and Senators? No.

This is money that is dedicated to Social Security and Medicare. This is the trust fund money that goes to Social Security and Medicare. Yes, when people are legalized, they will pay more Social Security and Medicare taxes on their payroll, but it is going to that fund to pay for their retirement and their health care when they retire. You cannot use that money. You cannot spend the money today and pretend it is going to be there to pay for their retirement when they retire.

They are going to pay into Medicare. They are going to pay into Social Security. They are going to draw out Social Security and Medicare when they reach the right age. What we know is, as Mr. Elmendorf indicates, as I have said repeatedly, most of these individuals are lower income, lower skilled workers. Therefore, what we know is in that regard, the lower skilled workers who pay into Social Security and Medicare take out more than they pay in. So this is not going to be positive, it seems to me, particularly when you account for the fact that a lot of people have scored this, but they have not scored it from the fact that most of the workers who will be paying Medicare and Social Security are lower income workers and they will be paying the lower rates. Not a huge difference, but it is a difference.

So I would contend, I think, without fear of serious contradiction, although I expect political contradiction, that the off-budget money is your Medicare and Social Security money. See, you paid into that. The government, if it takes and spends it, does not have anything now to pay your Social Security and your Medicare benefits when you get old. We know it is already actuarially unsound. Those programs are in danger of defaulting a lot sooner than a lot of people think. We need to be saving these programs, not weakening them.

So in the short run you get this bubble effect. You get an extra group of money. Since a lot of the workers are younger, it will look good on the budget for 10 years. It looks good on the budget for 10 years, but this is not money to be spent by the government. This is money that is dedicated to their retirement and will be drawn out by these individuals when they go into retirement.

So I would suggest that this 10-year score, 2014 through 2023, shows that the real impact is a $14.2 billion dollar reduction--increase in the deficit of the United States over 10 years in the general fund account. The off-budget section says it reduces the deficit by $200 billion. But that money is utilized--it has to be in the trust fund to be utilized for future payments to these individuals when they retire. It is not money we can account for.

The mixing of these two matters is one of the most dramatic ways this country has gotten itself into an unsound financial course. We have double counted this money repeatedly. We have money coming in to Social Security and Medicare and we spend it immediately. We pretend it is still there to pay for someone's retirement. This is going to be the same except it is guaranteed to be a financial loser over the long run.

Again, I know Senator Sanders has talked about this, my colleague from Vermont. In a free market world, when you bring in more labor, the wages go down. I think CBO is probably underestimating this, frankly. Professor Borjas at Harvard, his numbers look more grim than these. But this is what they came up with. They have been trying to do guesswork and tell the truth the best they can, but they are getting a lot of pressure from the other side.

A lot of Members here seem to think we can just bring in millions of people and those millions of people will somehow create more revenue. We are going to be like Jack Kemp. You know, everything is wonderful. It is just going to grow. But we have to be prudent. We have to be responsible. What we know is that since at least 1999, the wages of average American people have not kept up with inflation. That means those wages are on a net serious decline.

Professor Borjas says it declined by 8 percent. That is very real. My Democratic colleagues used to be very critical when it was President Bush because it was all his fault that wages were not keeping up with inflation, people were being hurt. So now they do not talk about that anymore. If they do, they blame it on President Bush even though he has been gone 5 or 6 years.

The reality is, I came to believe there is truth to this. It is not just a temporary cyclical thing that workers'

wages have not been keeping up. I think it is something deeper than that. I think it is several things. Businesses are getting very intent on reducing the number of employees they have to produce certain products and widgets. They are getting far more efficient. So we are making more widgets with less people.

If you go into plants like I do, you see these incredible robotics where you get dramatic improvements of productivity for widgets with less people. This creates, in some ways, unemployment.

Last month we had a moderate increase in jobs in May, but there was an 8,000-job reduction in manufacturing. The increase was in service industries like restaurants and bars and that kind of thing. The increase was also temporary. So this is not healthy. You have this unhealthy trend out there when you bring in large amounts of labor, a majority of which the CBO says is low skilled, and you are hammering the American worker.

Further, Peter Kirsanow, one of the outstanding members of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, along with Abigail Thernstrom, a brilliant lady who has written on these matters over the years, they wrote a letter recently that warned that passage of this bill will harm poor people in America, particularly African Americans.

They said they had hearings on this matter. They have had the best economists come and testify. They studied those reports. They say not a single one of the economists they dealt with denied that the wages would be pulled down or unemployment would go up.

That is what CBO told us today: Unemployment will go up, wages will go down. We have good Republican colleagues and they cannot conceive that we are in such a circumstance. They just believe growth is always good, and if you bring in more people you will have more growth. That is correct.

Let me tell you the brutal truth based on the in-depth analysis by Professor Borjas at Harvard. He says the prosperity, the growth enures to the benefit of the manufacturers, of the employers who use a lot of low-skilled labor. Their income will go up, but the average wage of the average working person will go down. That is what large flows of immigration will do when there is high unemployment.

Peter Kirsanow, a member of the Civil Rights Commission, in his letter, said that it is absolutely false that we have a shortage of low-skilled labor. He says we have a glut of low-skilled labor. The facts show that.

The number of people employed in the workforce today has reached the level of the 1970s. That was before women were going into the workplace. As a percentage of the American population, the percentage of people who actually have a job today has been falling steadily, and it has now hit the level of the 1970s. Now they are going to bring in all these masters of the universe, these geniuses who have this plan that somehow is going to fix everything. We will just bring in more people.

We had a Senator today say that it is going to increase wages. How can that be? What economic study shows that? Not any, to my knowledge. CBO says--wages are going to fall. Unemployment is going to go up, and it is not going to fix our deficit either.

I feel very strongly that we have to put on a realistic hat. We are going to have to ask ourselves: Whom do we represent? Are we representing a political idea that is going to bring in more votes? Are we representing people who entered the country illegally? Are those our first priority? Do we have any obligation to the people who fight our wars, raise our next generation of children, try to do the right thing, pay their taxes, want to be able to have a decent job, a decent retirement plan, have a vacation every now and then, and have a health care plan they can afford? Don't we owe them that? Shouldn't that be our primary responsibility right now? I think it is. I think that is our primary responsibility.

One says: Well, don't you care about people who are here illegally?

I say: Yes, I care about them. I care about them deeply.

I think we can work on this situation to not be in a position to say we are going to deport all of those who are here illegally. We can treat people compassionately. We are going to do the right thing about that.

In the future, should we have a work flow every year in that doubles the amount of guest workers who come in for the sole purpose of working and not becoming an immigrant, and should we increase the annual legal flow of immigrants from 1 million a year to 1.5 million a year, increasing it 50 percent? Is that what good legislation would do? I mean, how did this happen?

Thomas Sowell, a Hoover Institution scholar and economist at Stanford University, says there are three interests out here. One is the immigrants. They win. This report says their salaries go up. The other one is the politicians. They have it all figured out. They have written a bill that they think serves their political interests. The question is, Who is representing the national interests? Who is representing the American people's interests? Were they in these rooms when the chamber of commerce was there, La Raza was there, the business groups, agricultural groups, the labor unions and Mr. Trumka were there dividing up the pie, making sure their interests were protected? Who was defending the interests of the dutiful worker who is out trying to find a job today?

There was a report in the New York Times last week about an event in Queens. Apparently, there was a group of jobs that were going to be offered as elevator repair personnel in New York. The line started forming 5 days in advance. People brought their tents, they brought their food, they brought their sleeping bags, and they waited in line for days to be able to get a job as an elevator repair person. We have people saying these are jobs Americans won't do. That Americans won't work, and that's why we need more labor.

Well, I always cut my own grass when I am home, but I am up here a lot, so there is a group that comes and cuts my grass in Mobile. These were two African-American gentlemen in their 40's. They came out, did a great job in the heat in Alabama, and took care of my yard.

What is this--jobs Americans won't do? They want a job that has a retirement plan. They want a job that has some permanency to it. They want a job that has a decent wage. Americans will work, and all hard work should be honored.

I will acknowledge that in seasonal work, temporary work, certain circumstances, we could develop a good migrant guest worker program that could serve this. Maybe in different times, if unemployment is low, we could justify bringing in even more workers than you would expect. But at a time of high unemployment, we have low participation in the workforce, and we ought to be careful about bringing in large amounts of labor that pleases rich businesses and manufacturing and agribusiness groups but doesn't necessarily protect the honest, decent, legitimate interests of American workers. I think they are being forgotten too often in this process.

I wanted to push back to that. This report might look like it's saying that we are creating a service and we are reducing the debt. In one sense, on the on-budget analysis, the way we do our accounting around here, that impression is certainly created. It is a false impression, and it is that false understanding of the reality of the on-budget and off-budget accounting of revenue to America that has gotten us fundamentally in the problem we are now facing.

Again, I repeat, the on-budget deficit, according to the CBO report, goes up over 10 years by $14 billion. It claims, though, that the deficit drops on the off-budget. Remember, that money is obligated. That is your withholding. That is your FICA. That is your Social Security, Medicare--withholdings on your paycheck. It goes up there, and it has been set aside for you, for your retirement, for your medical care when you are elderly. It is not available for us to spend today willy-nilly.

And we think we have now created a circumstance where billions of dollars are being double-counted. Can you imagine that? That is what we are doing in this country. We are counting trillions of dollars--really double-counting it. Money that comes in we count in a unified budget as income to the budget, but it is dedicated income. We owe the people who paid it into their Social Security check, their Medicare coverage. It is owed to them.

What we know is that when you have particularly lower--well, the whole

program is unsustainable, but particularly the lower income workers pay in less than they will eventually take out over a lifetime. Adding all of these workers into the Social Security and Medicare system, where they pay in, will not place us on a sound path.

Again, we need to be honest about where we are. The numbers do not look good. This Congress needs to wrestle with how to deal compassionately with the people who have been here a long time. We need to do it in a right way, but we have a responsibility, a financial duty to the people who sent us here to manage their money wisely and not make our financial situation worse than it is today. We have an obligation to try to figure out a way to reverse the steady, long-term trend of wage decline for millions of American workers. It needs to be getting better. What this report says is that if this bill is passed, this immigration bill is passed, it will make the long-term wage situation of Americans worse. How wrong a direction could that be?

Look, if we let the labor market get a little tighter, we are going to find businesses that are willing to pay more to get a good worker. That is the free market. These business guys don't mind trying--Walmart seeks the very lowest priced product it can get, whether it is China or the United States. They are ruthless about it. It is free market, we say. We value it. OK, we support free market. But if there is a labor shortage, why shouldn't the laboring man be able to get a little higher wage for a change around here? This large flow of immigration will impact, adversely, their ability to find a job--unemployment will go up, according to the report--and we'll get a decrease in wages.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, last week I gave remarks on the floor that pointed out that promises made that the immigration bill before us was a significant move toward merit-based immigration and away from chain immigration--I dealt with that subject. I am not aware that any of my comments have fundamentally been disputed.

The fact is that 30 million people will be given legal status as an immigrant on a pathway to citizenship over the next 10 years--that 30 million is three times the current legal flow of 1 million a year, which would be 10 million a year. It would triple the number of people put on a path to permanent legal residence and citizenship. Only 2.5 million of those would be admitted under this new, small, actually weak, merit-based section of the bill. This is nowhere close to the truly effective and popular merit-based immigration system which Canada adopted a decade--maybe more--ago and which is being followed and adopted in other developed countries around the world.

Evidence has also been introduced that nonimmigrant guest workers-- that is, those who come not for immigration, to be a citizen and be permanent, but come to work for a period of time and return home--that group of workers will double under the legislation that is before us over current law.

All of this is at a time of persistently high unemployment and when virtually all serious academics, economic experts agree that such a huge flow will depress wages of our middle-class workers and increase unemployment. Politicians blithely claim otherwise, but Professor Borjas at Harvard and the Federal Reserve in Atlanta and others have studied this, and they show otherwise with in-depth economic research.

There is a long list of other promises. The reason I raise this is because these were promises that we are going to improve the working conditions of Americans, we are going to shift to a merit-based system. That is not correct.

There are other promises. I made a speech and so have others that have clearly demonstrated that the triggers in the bill do not work. The triggers are supposed to say: You do not get legal status or you do not get green card status until these law enforcement issues are fixed, until the illegality is fixed. The triggers are ineffective. That has been documented. It really is not disputable, in my opinion. All the Secretary of Homeland Security has to do is to submit a plan that she says will work. It does not require any fencing or any other actions specifically. And she gets to determine whether it is working. If it does not meet the standards according to the Secretary, then a border commission is established, but the border commission has no power. It can only issue a report, and it dissolves in 30 days. So these promises that we have a very tough plan that is guaranteed through a series of triggers are not so.

Today I will talk about the DACA program and how that has undermined law enforcement. Surely we can agree that congressional legislation is more than salesmanship, it is more than puffing, it is more than promises. Surely it represents a bill and a bill that must be read.

The words of legislation are not a mere vision designed to touch our hearts. It is not something that the sponsors can come in and say: We believe the American people are correct. They want A, B, C, and D. We have a bill that does it. And then nobody reads the bill to determine whether it does it. So that is what I have been trying to do.

Congress and the good American people do want to solve our immigration problems--problems that our politicians and government leaders have messed up for 30 years. The American people have pleaded with Congress to fix this system for 30 years. Congress has failed to do so. They continue to promise to do so but do not. Now, that is a fact.

But legislative language is the real thing. Legislation is not a vision. Legislation has power--power to fix our broken system or power to allow the lawlessness to continue. Thus, it is legislation, not spin, that we will be voting on. A promise made by a gang is of no value if the bill language does not produce the results they promise. So that is the rub. That is the problem we face.

Presumably there are ads running this very day which claim to be sponsored by conservative voices, founded by Mr. Zuckerberg of Facebook, no conservative to my knowledge, featuring Senator Rubio urging the passage of the bill. Indeed, Mr. Zuckerberg created a front group that is on the advertisement--they are called Americans for a Conservative Direction, that purports to be reflective of conservative thinking in America.

I think that is a bit odd. It is odd right now that Senator Rubio, who is still talking to the American people on those ads and to my constituents in Alabama, is saying all of this on the ad when he has already said the bill is flawed and he cannot vote for it in its current circumstance. I think that advertisement ought to be pulled.

Worse, virtually everything in the ad, especially in the voiceover-- not Senator Rubio--but the voiceover is false. It is not an accurate description of the legislation, what it does, how it will work. It is just not. If it was, I would be intrigued by this legislation and would be interested in thinking it should set sort forth a framework that most Americans agree would be a basis for immigration reform.

So conservatives should be careful, no matter how sincere, in being part of promoting legislation that we do not fully understand or will not do what it claims it will do. A commitment to truth is a conservative value. I like all of the Gang of 8 members personally. I have worked with them for a number of years. I truly admire Senator Rubio. He is a fantastic new Member of the body. I understand the goals they articulate and would support most of those goals. So it is no pleasure for me to raise these uncomfortable points.

But at this very minute, Mark Zuckerberg and his supporters are running these ads promoting legislation as doing something I do not believe it does. I think we should be working on that. I know we have had a number of our colleagues, another one of my good friends this weekend pronounced a political doctrine of the death spiral of the Republican Party. I have to tell you, we have a lot of people who make political prognostications. But the truth is who knows what political issues will dominate in 2016 or 2020 or 2030.

Mr. President, is there a time agreement?

Thank you. I did not realize that. How much time is remaining?

I thank the Chair.

The best politics, in my view, is to do the right thing for the right reason and to be able to explain what one is doing cogently and honestly to the American people, and then the people will decide. If they do not like your decisions over a period of time you are out. So be it.

Is that not the way the system is supposed to work?

It is not wrong to give respect to the opinions of the American people, to ask what they think about issues and how they react to issues. There is nothing wrong with that. Actually, we should do that. But it is not right to poll a large and complex issue to find out what people want and then propose legislation that you say fulfills their desires, when the legislation does not fulfill those desires.

That is not the right thing to do, to promote good policy in America. As a matter of fact, polls show the American people want enforcement before amnesty by a 4-to-1 margin. Polls also show a clear majority actually favor a lower legal flow or the same amount of legal flow into our country from immigration.

They do not favor the huge increase of legal flow that is called for in this bill. Maybe later I will be able to talk about some of the difficulties of enforcement under current law.

I yield the floor.

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