Floor Statements

Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Wyoming, a fine Senator and a great manager of legislation.

I have to tell you we pretty well know this card check bill is going down like a lead balloon. We have an issue that has galvanized the attention of the American public--and we will be voting on that at the same time--and that is the immigration bill that we are about to go to.

I think it is odd that the allocators of time allocated a rather small amount of time to Senator Enzi to allocate to those who oppose this legislation.

Let me--since I only have 5 minutes and maybe now 4--see if I can succinctly say to my colleagues why the legislation before us today is a bad piece of legislation. Yes, we need to reform immigration; yes, we need to reform immigration in much the way those who are promoting this legislation say it should be reformed. But the bill we are going to vote on will not do that--very much like 1986, when the promoters of that bill said: Let's give amnesty to 3 million people and we will create a legal system in the future that will work.

Why would I say that, that this bill does not work? Our own Congressional Budget Office, on June 4--this month--did an analysis of the legislation. They concluded that if this bill were to become law, illegal immigration would only be reduced 13 percent. What an astounding number. Only 13 percent? We have been hearing we must pass this immigration bill, and if you don't like amnesty, you must vote for it because that is the only way we are going to create a legal system of immigration in America.

My analysis, before CBO came out with theirs, was that the bill would not be effective; it had loophole after loophole. They concluded the same. They say a 25-percent reduction in the border security and an increase in visa overstays nets a 13-percent reduction. That is in the CBO report, which is available to every Senator. We should look at that. How can we vote for legislation that we know is not going to work as it is promised to work?

Second, I don't know that the American people or Members of this body realize it will double the legal immigration flow into America over the next 20 years, giving twice as many green card statuses, legal permanent resident statuses, as the current law provides. We are not going to get any substantial reduction in illegality. We are going to double illegality. It will cost, according to CBO, the Treasury of the United States $30 billion--not expenses of enforcement, none of that, but for additional welfare and other benefits that would be paid to those who come into the country illegally.

Senator Biden talked about the middle class. This is not a little issue. I don't know that his numbers were exactly correct. But for some time I have been troubled by the fact that middle and lower skilled workers have not seen their income levels rise at the rate that corporate executives are seeing their income levels rise. Friday, when I left this body, right on the street there was a gentleman out there who had gray hair and a gray beard and he had a sign about jobs. I spoke to him. He said he opposed this immigration bill. He was a master carpenter from Melbourne, FL. He told me that he, in the 1990s, was making $75,000 a year. Now he is making a fraction of that. He is going to have to get out of the business. He attributed that solely to illegal immigration, this incredible flow of almost unlimited numbers of workers into his neighborhood, which had made his skill far less valuable.

If we are concerned about the middle class, we have to ask how many workers this country can accept without

seeing a marked drop in their income. The American people do not like this bill. Our phones are ringing off the hook. A decent respect for our constituents, I urge my colleagues, would be to say you have rejected this bill.

I thank the Chair. I yield the floor and urge that we vote against cloture on this legislation.

Madam President, I thank my able colleague from Missouri. He is one of our most valuable and able members in the Senate. I value his thoughts on that and share his thoughts, actually.

I want to move off of that and some of the comments that Senator Dorgan had about working Americans and what they are facing today.

I remember addressing this point last year in the debate on immigration. I think it was at night when not many people were on the floor. Senator Kennedy was here. I raised the question of what was happening to wages of working Americans as a result of large-scale immigration, and quoted professors and experts who had demonstrated that where those areas--where immigration reached its highest levels, wages had gone down for workers; they hadn't gone up.

Now we are told that businesses cannot get workers, and we are told we are at full employment, but apparently something is awry if wages are not going up in many areas.

I want to mention to you what we have with regard to the immigration bill that is coming before us. We will have cloture vote on it in the morning. This is what I want to say to my colleagues. The legislation promises that it will bring legality to the system. They say we have an illegal system and we have got a comprehensive plan to fix it.

What does our own Congressional Budget Office say? They just did an analysis of it. The Congressional Budget Office looked at the legislation that is proposed. They made an opinion about how much it would cost the U.S. Treasury. It was about $30 billion over the next 10 years; not for the cost of enforcement, just the cost of additional social and welfare benefits provided to those who are here illegally, who will be made legal.

They made that analysis, and they also made one more analysis that is so stunning and so remarkable that I remain baffled that my colleagues have not picked up on it. What the Congressional Budget Office, our own budget office--a budget office that answers to the House, answers to the Senate, answers to the majority leader, Harry Reid, answers to the Speaker, Nancy Pelosi--the Congressional Budget Office concluded that net illegal immigration, after the passage of this bill, would only be reduced 13 percent.

Now what kind of reform is that, I ask my colleagues? I submit to you this is not a reform. A fix that is supposed to bring legality to a system that only reduces illegality by 13 percent. Last year we arrested 1 million people entering our country illegally. These are huge numbers. I would have thought we would want to see an 80 or 90 percent reduction of illegality at our border. This is a bill that by our own evaluation does not bode well.

There is another factor that many of my colleagues probably do not know, have never understood. My staff has worked very hard to account for the actual flow of legal immigration into the country. In the next 20 years, this country, if this bill is passed, will see a doubling of the legal permanent residents in America. That is the number of people who are given a green card. That is the next step to citizenship. Anybody with legal permanent residence can move on to citizenship. It will double the number of legal permanent residents, which is what we call green card holders.

So we are not going to have any reduction in illegality, and we are going to have a major increase--a doubling of legal immigration. I am worried about that. We have been talking here about this debate about card check and unions. What it is about is wages and fairness for American workers, is it not?

Mr. Tonelson testified at one of our hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee. This was a hearing I requested and asked for. We were able to get him, and he testified about areas in construction, in meat packing, in restaurant work, where there was high level of immigration from 2000 to 2005. Wages went down. You bring into this country more wheat, the price of wheat will go down. You bring into our country more cotton, the price will go down. Bring in more iron ore, the price of iron ore will go down. You bring in more labor, the price of American labor will go down. That is a fact.

I support a legitimate guest worker program. I believe we do have certain needs in certain industries and situations such as Hurricane Katrina where the need was so dramatic on the gulf coast. I know there are needs for some guest workers, temporary workers. I am prepared to help write legislation which would meet that need. I believe in immigration into America in general. I am not asking that we slash the amount of legal immigration into the country. But I doubt most Americans, when they hear about the great group I affectionately call the ``masters of the universe'' who met in secret and wrote this bill, had any understanding that their promise of comprehensive reform of the illegal immigration system we have today--and that is a fair way to describe it--they had no idea this bill would only reduce illegal immigration by 13 percent. I don't believe they had any idea it would double the numbers who were coming in legally.

That brings me to my point. The longer this legislation has been out for review, the less the public has liked it. I can see why. If you remember, Senator Reid first called the bill up. He actually called up the old bill that the House wouldn't even look at last year. He let it sit for about a week and then plopped down, on a Tuesday, an entirely new bill, over 700 legislative pages, and wanted us to vote on it by Friday of that week. Why? That is what they attempted to do. We pushed back and said: No, this is a big issue;

we can't vote on Friday; we are not going to vote this week. We fought that, and they backed off. We had a week's break and came back. We got back on the bill and proceeded with it and had some amendment votes and were moving along, and then Senator Reid pulled the bill off the floor on a Thursday night. So we thought maybe that was the end of it.

But after working on it, they decided to bring it back up. It is going to be brought back tomorrow. The bill is filed. Cloture was filed. We now find ourselves prepared to vote tomorrow on whether to invoke cloture on the motion to proceed, go to this bill, and actually discuss it on the floor. We know there are probably 51 Senators who have committed to vote for final passage of the bill. I think they have made a mistake. Some probably didn't understand it fully. I am sure some are uneasy about that commitment. But more than 50, I am confident, are committed to voting for the legislation. Some really think anything is better than the current system. Maybe this is better, they say. They are prepared to vote for it. So by going to the bill, we are setting ourselves on a pathway that leads to final passage of legislation I believe is not worthy of the U.S. Senate.

More than that, I urge my colleagues to think about this. We have been told--and if I am mistaken, I ask the majority leader to tell me I am wrong--that an unprecedented procedure will be utilized to eliminate as much time of debate as possible and to completely control the amendment process to this legislation in a way that has never been done before in the history of the Senate. It has never been done this way. The majority leader is going to fill the tree. He is going to file a second-degree amendment. That amendment will be divisible into a number of different amendments so he can say which amendments will be voted on and which will not, and other amendments will not be allowed to be voted on. It is complete control of the process. They will say: We adopted some of your amendments, you complainers. We have some of your amendments in that group.

This process has been prepared with the care and precision of the Normandy invasion. This has been prepared meticulously for weeks, how they are going to move this bill through and how they are going to control the amendments. The amendments that will be allowed, I am confident, will be amendments they are confident they have the votes to defeat or amendments they don't care if passed. But they will not allow amendments to go to the core of this agreement by those masters of the universe who put it together, anything that would actually threaten this legislation's agreement they put together.

Some have been told: Don't worry, Senator, vote for cloture tomorrow, and we will let your amendment be voted on. If your amendment is selected, it is likely that they have the votes to vote it down or the crowd that put this bill together doesn't object if it passes. But anything that really goes at this mechanism, this special agreement they have put together in secret without committee hearings of any kind, will not be allowed to be voted on. That is a big mistake.

I say to my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, I have been in the Senate 10 years, most of which Republicans had the majority. This procedure was never used against the Democrats when Republicans were in the majority. This is the first time it has been used in the Senate. What if it is used against Senators in the future on both sides of the aisle? The great free debate this Senate is so proud of would be eroded.

So for two reasons I urge my colleagues tomorrow to vote against cloture. First, we need to have this bill pulled down. We need to go back and review what it is that has caused the American people to reject it so overwhelmingly. We need to find out why the Congressional Budget Office has concluded that it will reduce illegal immigration by only 13 percent. My goodness. We need to ask ourselves, do we really want to double on top of that the legal immigration into America?

What are we afraid of? Why is there this obsession to move this flawed piece of legislation through, utilizing the unprecedented procedural gambit to do so? I ask why?

Three weeks before we had the final vote and Senator Reid pulled it down, after the debate continued a couple of weeks ago, a Rasmussen poll showed support for the bill in the high 20s. Then fell to 23 percent, and the last poll showed only 20 percent of Americans supported this bill. Only 20 percent of the American people said we should pass this bill. A decent respect for the opinions of the people who elect us, I suggest--if nothing else, maybe for our own self- interest--would call on us to say: What is it that people are worried about? Why don't we pull this bill and see if we can't make a decent piece of legislation that we could be proud of and move it forward? What possible reason is there to be obsessed with just ramming it through this Senate? I am amazed. It takes my breath away. There is every kind of reason to suggest that we should pull the bill down and work on it.

I will conclude with these thoughts. Let's don't go forward tomorrow. Let Members of the Senate say to those who are promoting the legislation--one former law officer called them mandarins; I jokingly called them the masters of the universe--this legislation will not work. They are good people. They think they were doing good. But the product they produced won't work, and the American people don't like it. I say vote against cloture tomorrow because a vote for cloture is a vote ultimately to move this bill passage.

No. 2, I say vote against cloture tomorrow because unless the majority leader declares otherwise, we will have to assume that what we have been hearing is correct, and he will use an unprecedented procedure--a procedure dubbed ``the clay pigeon''--to completely control the amendment process and to bring this bill up for final vote with amendments only he has approved in a minimal amount of time that can be expended on such legislation. Any legislation this big deserves time. Any legislation this big or with this many flaws deserves a lot of work.

I urge my colleagues, in light of these factors and others they may personally care about--and there are many more problems--to reject cloture tomorrow. It would be a clear message to the leadership that is trying to move this legislation that we are not going to have it. We want better legislation, if you want us to pass it.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, I want to share some thoughts about immigration and the situation in which we currently find ourselves and offer a bit perspective, I think fairly, on where we are.

We are the world's most free nation and are having one of the strongest periods of economic growth--maybe our strongest ever. Billions of people all over the world, however, are in poverty and live in countries that are corrupt and backward. One expert has said that all would live a better life if they came to the United States. I think that is a true fact.

We are indeed a nation of immigrants, and that heritage has caused us to continue one of the most generous legal immigration systems of any nation in the world. I submit, however, that immigration policy is an issue of national sovereignty, as Canada, Mexico, Spain, Japan, England--all nations understand and respect. This is an acknowledged fact. I chaired the Mexican-American Senate Interparliamentary Group for 2 years. We talked about those things. Everybody understands setting immigration policy is your nation's prerogative.

It is amazing to me that our majority leader--in this case, our Democratic leader--will use the power of first recognition to call up an immigration bill again, just two weeks after the American people have basically rejected it. In fact, the polling numbers show that support for the Senate bill is dropping further and further. He then will use, I understand, an unprecedented, never-before-used procedure that would block amendments. This is the so-called clay pigeon procedure others have described. He will file a first degree amendment, and then file a second degree to it to fill the tree, so no other second-degree or unapproved amendments will be allowed votes. He will divide his own second degree into 20 or so amendments and then work every procedural trick in the book to ensure that the underlying bill and its 20 hand picked amendments move the

legislation through this Senate as fast as possible. The mandarins who are managing this piece of legislation want it out of here. They don't want any more calls from their constituents. They don't want any more talk show people explaining some of the things that are in it. They want it off their plate. Good policy? Well, they say, that is for another day. We just want the bill out of here.

Well, the opposition to this bill is gaining momentum. Thoughtful Senators who wanted to vote for something are analyzing the fine print of the bill and realizing that the ``vision'' bill supporters describe is not supported by the text. Senators are announcing that they will be voting no. Senators who participated in the debates and wanted to vote for something and hoped to be able to vote for this bill after examining it in more detail are indicating that they are going to vote against it.

It is quite clear that the same special interest forces who produced the 1986 bill are the ones who worked behind the scenes to produce this one. It was produced in secret meetings of politicians without any public hearings. It did not go through a single committee markup. But you can be sure the activist open border immigration forces, and the business interests, were having their voices heard in these meetings. Does anybody doubt that? What about the American public? Were they in the room? Were their opinions sought after? What about experts in law enforcement, were their opinions sought after? I suggest not.

The mandarins, in their faux wisdom, treated this as a political problem that could be solved by compromise. We have to pass something, they said. That was the mantra. So in the end it seems that passing something means passing anything, regardless of whether, in the end, it will work to end illegality or establish good policies that will serve our long-term national interest.

This Senator will never support a bill that will fail as spectacularly as the 1986 legislation failed. I have to tell my colleagues, my best judgment, and we looked at this hard, is that this one will fail. Even the Congressional Budget Office, our investigative analysis arm, in its June 4--just a few weeks ago--cost estimate, says that illegality after the passage of this bill would be reduced a mere 13 percent. Mr. President, 8.7 million illegal aliens would be expected over the 20-year period instead of 10 million under current law. That is what their estimate is.

So our masters--and I say that affectionately; I call them masters of the universe. These are good friends and good Senators. They have tried to do something. They got it in their head that if they just all met and they just put out the realpolitik and they worked out the political deals and split the babies and all this, they could do a bill that served America's interests. I watched with interest. I thought some of the things they said they wanted to accomplish were good improvements over last year's bill. But I have to tell you, I don't believe it worked. I don't believe they got there.

They don't want to pay attention to those of us who question what they have done, you see. They believe they are wonderful and bright and thoughtful and love America and are compassionate. The rest of us, they say you see, we are nativists. They say we just oppose immigration-- despite the fact that we don't oppose immigration. They say we don't like immigrants. They say we don't have courage. How many times have I heard that? You have to have courage to vote for this turkey, I guess. That is supposed to be something that would be good. But sometimes I think hanging in here and opposing the machinery of this process takes a little gumption on the part of those of us who oppose it.

They say we do not believe in immigration or we lack compassion. I want to reject those charges flatout. They are false. I believe in immigration. I believe in a guest worker program. But I want a guest worker program that will work, will not be an avenue of expanded illegality, as the CBO said this one will.

In fact, because of the guest worker program, the Congressional Budget Office has said visa overstays, those people who come in legally but do not go home when they are supposed to, will increase under this bill, not decrease.

I thought we were supposed to be fixing illegality not enhancing illegality. So I wish to say to my colleagues, first, it is indisputable that the passage of this bill will not create a lawful system of immigration. This bill does not live up to their promises. Our good friends the masters came out of their secret meeting, and they announced they had fixed immigration; they announced that they had a comprehensive plan that is going to fix immigration, and that we are finally going to end this illegality.

But their own Congressional Budget Office that responds to them, that responds to the Democratic leaders, Senator Reid or Speaker Pelosi, it is pretty much a nonpartisan group, but they are under the control of the Congress. This group under the control of the Congress says it will not work, says visa overstays will increase and the net impact on illegal immigration only be to reduce illegal immigration by 13 percent.

Now, I consider that one event so significant, so earth shaking, that I cannot see how the Majority Leader could still take up this legislation and jam it down the throat of this Senate through an unprecedented procedure to pass it, especially when the American people do not like it either.

So it will not create a lawful system. We can be sure of that. We felt that when we analyzed it. My chief counsel, Cindy Hayden, and others looked at it, we found loophole after loophole. I made a speech of about 20 loopholes that were in the legislation. There were many more than the specific 20 I talked about. But we knew it was not going to be an effective law enforcement bill. It was not going to secure the border. So what does the CBO say? They agreed with our analysis.

Secondly, what else is fundamentally in here? The legislation fails to move to a merit-based system and, in fact, triples low-skilled and chain migration over the next 8 years. The promise was made that the bill would move us to a system more like Canada has, which makes so much sense; a system that Canada is very proud of. They believe it serves the Canadian interest.

They still have the same number of refugees and humanitarian immigrants that they always did, but they have--with regard to the rest of their immigration policy--reached a point where 60 percent of the people who enter into Canada have to come through a point system. If you are admitted and come in, you can bring your wife and children, but to do that, you basically have to first demonstrate that you can contribute to Canada.

One of the things they gave you points for, in an objective evaluation, is education. We know that if an immigrant has had any college courses, they do much better economically. They ask if you speak English or French. You get extra points if you do that.

You even get extra points if you are younger. You get extra points if you have skills Canada needs. They even give you points if you move to areas of Canada that are underpopulated and have a particular job shortage.

That is the way the deal works. They promised we would have that in this legislation. That was part of the announcement. But when you read the fine print, you see that was eroded away in the political compromise. The bill's merit based system will not have any substantial effect until 8 years after this date. So I don't know what will happen in 8 years. You never know. But we would like to see this kind of thing in the bill.

I congratulate the people who produced it, that they began to discuss it because last year it was not even discussed. I talked about it on the floor repeatedly. I asked how we could debate comprehensive immigration reform and nobody even ask what they are doing in Canada. So they put the Canadian system in here. But it is so weak that it is a great disappointment.

Well, I indicated that illegal immigration would only drop 13 percent. What about the proposal for legal immigration on the legislation? Well, it is going to go up 100 percent. Legal immigration will double in the next 20 years.

Now we have looked at the numbers. I think this is indisputable. We will have twice as many people getting legal permanent residence over the

next 20 years as we would under current law. I am not sure when the average citizen listened to our colleagues and they announced on that big day, the grand bargain, that we were talking about a proposal that would hardly limit legal immigration at all and would double legal immigration, I don't think that is what they had in mind when comprehensive reform was discussed.

What about cost? The Congressional Budget Office dealt with that issue. They have to score legislation. Well, what does the cost factor say? Under the CBO analysis, the cost to the taxpayers of the United States--now I wanted to make this clear, this is not for border enforcement, Border Patrol acts, barriers or anything such as that-- this is costs that will be incurred by the recipients of amnesty, who will be given amnesty under this bill, because all of a sudden they will be entitled to welfare, Medicare, and other types of tax credits and other types of benefits.

They concluded this legislation will add to the taxpayers of America an additional $25 billion in cost over the next 10 years. They have admitted, without any hesitation, those costs will greatly increase in the outyears, because the way this thing is staggered, people's benefits do not come immediately. But as the years go by, they are entitled to more welfare and social benefits.

So they have admitted we are going to have an increase significantly in the future because, in fact, the persons who are here illegally, for the most part, have little education. Approximately half, maybe even more, do not have a high school diploma at all, and their skill levels are low.

We have statics and scientific data on that. I am not disparaging anyone. I respect anyone who works hard and wants to come to America and work hard. I respect that. But I can say with certainty these are basically low-wage workers that are going to be legalized.

My fifth point is, that the way the bill is written, it will reduce the wages of working Americans. We bring in more cotton in this country, the price of cotton goes down. You bring in more iron ore, the price of iron ore goes down. If you reduce the amount of oil coming into the country, the price of oil goes up. You bring in more laborers, the price of labor goes down.

I would submit that if one of the charges I have made out of these five is true, this legislation should be pulled from the floor; it should not become law. But I am going to take a few moments now to demonstrate, I believe with hard evidence, all of these charges are true. The legislation, in effect, will not end the unlawfulness of our current system and will shift the balance against American workers and create another amnesty that will encourage even more illegals in the future.

The effect will be to continue the erosion of confidence by the American people in Congress, and in the Government overall, which is at an all time low, virtually. I am not sure since I have been in the Senate, we have such a large number of people who believe this country is on the wrong track.

I have to believe, and experts have told me, that their distrust and dissatisfaction over immigration is a big part of the way, the cause of this cynicism. Let me take some points here, one by one.

Will this grand bargain we are presented with create an honest, legal, fair system for the future? The answer is no. That was our conclusion after we studied the bill. But let's look at what others might say. I mentioned the CBO study. They said specifically that the bill would limit the amount of illegal flow across our border by 25 percent but would increase illegal visa overstays significantly.

The net result was only a 13-percent reduction in illegals, from 10 million illegals projected to come into our country under current law over the next 10 years, to 8.7 illegals coming in over the next 10 years. That is a 13-percent reduction only. That is not good enough. We should be at the 80, 90 percent of increased lawfulness. Aren't we trying to create a system of law?

I was a Federal prosecutor for 15 years, 12 years as U.S. attorney. This is not acceptable. People come to America because they believe we are a Nation of laws; their rights will be protected. I happened to be at a birthday party reception for a friend of mine. A lady from England there came up to me and she said: I hope you stand up for this. She had a distinct British accent. She said: I thought you ought to play right by the law and people shouldn't come in illegally. I tried to do the right thing.

Well, what about others? What do they say? What experts are out there who know something about immigration? What do they think of this bill? What about Border Patrol officers, people who carry out their daily responsibilities to enforce the border, who have lived with this illegality for so long? They are real experts. I assure you they were not in the meeting with the masters of the universe when they crafted this legislation.

They know what is happening. A group of them, a prominent group of retired Border Patrol officers held a press conference at the National Press Club on June 4. Their purpose was to express their opinion about the legislation. I have to tell you, their opinions are not a pretty sight. I am going to quote from them and show you what they said; not what this Senator said but what they said.

Hugh Brien, the former Chief of the Border Patrol from 1986 to 1989, after the 1986 failed bill became law--He was appointed by former President George H.W. Bush. He is himself an immigrant to America. He came here as a young man. This is what he had to say about the bill. It is, he said:

A complete betrayal of the Nation.

Is that harsh? It was his job. That is what he said about it. He went on to say:

It is a slap in the face.

To the millions who came here legally, such as the lady I met today, such as a lady from India who was written up in the Montgomery Advertiser, I believe, yesterday, who talked about having to hire a lawyer and filing all of the paperwork and taking several years, but she was proud to be here legally, and she did not appreciate people coming illegally, or such as the lady I met at a funeral not long ago who had come into this country after a number of years who said: I hope you make the law enforced for everybody equally; I did it right.

Now don't tell me that when you ignore law there are no consequences. In a real sense, as my experience as a prosecutor says, when you don't enforce the law, you make chumps of the guys who do it right, and when you provide benefits to those who cheat, it is not a good thing for a Nation who respects its legal system.

What else did Mr. Hugh Brien, former head of the Border Patrol say? He said:

It is a sell-out.

He went on to note that in 1986, when this same debate was occurring and he was about to take office as the head of the immigration system, and these are the words he used--it is not funny, he said: Our masters, our mandarins, promised us their bill would work. These are tough words, but these are people who are entitled to express them. They are not my words.

Powerful politicians who are unaware of the reality of what it takes to actually create a legal enforcement system without experience in these matters have arrogantly cut a political deal and they have cut one, unfortunately, that doesn't work. I guess that is not too far from the definition of a mandarin.

Mr. Hugh Brien added these final important words:

Based on my experience, it's a disaster.

He has the experience to say so. He was charged with enforcing the 1986 immigration law which proved to be a disaster and he did, as chief of the Border Patrol from 1986 to 1989.

What about the national chairman of the Association of Former Border Patrol Agents, Kent Lundgren. This is what he had to say. He had some harsh words, too. With regard to the promise that the system will do 24-hour background checks, he said, after studying the bill, there are ``no meaningful criminal or terrorist checks'' in the bill. That is a bad thing. We have been told this bill will make us safer. He says there are no meaningful criminal or terrorist checks in the bill. He knows how the system works and how this 24-hour check will occur. He is scoring the screening procedure set forth in the bill saying ``the screening will not happen, period.'' He added:

``There's no way records can be done in 24 hours.''

As to the promise that this bill will work, he concluded--these are not my words; he is presently the associational head of the former Border Patrol Officers, the national president: ``Congress is lying about it.''

On a separate issue, the provision that allows gang members, even members of the very violent international MS-13 gang, to become lawful permanent residents if they check a box to renounce their gang membership, he said, ``What planet are they from,'' talking about us. Why would our colleagues write a bill that allowed for this?

These are real views, harsh views of a man who led the border patrol association and had a press conference a few weeks ago to express deep concern.

Another one at the press conference was Jim Dorsey, a former Border Patrol agent, who served 30 years. He served as inspector general with the Department of Justice. He was promoted up from the Border Patrol, which is a part of the Department of Justice, to the Department of Justice, and was given responsibility to investigate serious allegations of corruption. That is quite a responsible position to be chosen for that as investigator. He had these things to say: ``The 24- hour check is a recipe for disaster.''

As to the overall legislation, Mr. Dorsey said at the National Press Club: ``I call it the al-Qaida dream bill.''

Roger Brandemuehl, chief of the Border Patrol from 1980 to 1986 under President Reagan--this is another chief of the Border Patrol for 6 years under President Reagan--he said: ``We have fallen into a quagmire.'' He added: ``The so-called comprehensive reform is neither comprehensive nor reform. It's flawed.''

What about the current Border Patrol Association, the Border Patrol union? It is not just the retired patrol officers who oppose the bill; the current ones do as well. In May, the National Border Patrol Council, affiliated with the AFL-CIO, sent out a press release titled ``Senate Immigration Reform Compromise is a Raw Deal for America.'' These are the people who are out doing it every day. The press release stated:

Every person who has ever risked their life securing our

boarders is extremely disheartened to see some of our elected

representatives once again waving the white flag on issues of

illegal immigration and border security. Rewarding criminal

behavior has never induced anyone to abide by the law, and

there's no reason to believe that the outcome will be any

different in this case.

I spent the better part of my professional career as a prosecutor. If you make it clear that you are not going to enforce laws, people assume the laws won't be enforced. In fact, when law enforcement officers don't enforce the law, they de facto wipe out legislative actions and eviscerate policy. You have to enforce the laws.

He goes on to say:

Passage of time has proven the 1986 amnesty to be a mistake

of colossal proportions. Instead of wiping the slate clean,

it spurred a dramatic increase in illegal immigration.

He goes on:

Rather than the meaningless triggers of the additional

personnel and barriers outlined in the compromise, Americans

must insist that border security be measured in absolute

terms.

That is a strong, crystal-clear condemnation of this act by the officers whose lives are on the line this very moment on our border trying to enforce our laws. Are we going to listen to them? Or are we going to listen to our mandarins, our masters meeting in secret, who plopped a bill down here, 700 pages long, that they say will make the system work? I wish it would. I even had hopes this spring, and I said so publicly. I was hoping they might make real progress. But I am afraid we haven't. Talk to the experts. Talk to CBO.

This is a another very significant, but discrete issue that I believe we should think about, and it is a weakness I had not fully comprehended until I read a piece in the Washington Times by Michael Cutler on June 21. He also participated in a press conference, a different one than the Border Patrol one, at the National Press Club on June 19. The event focused on the grave threat to national security the immigration bill represents. Mr. Cutler authored an op-ed in the Washington Times last Friday entitled ``Immigration Bill Is a No Go'' that focused on security issues raised by the bill. People are going to be invited to come in who are here illegally, give their name and so forth, and within 24 hours they will be receiving a legal status in the country, a probationary visa. It will soon be converted into this Z visa that people will have, but immediately within 24 hours, they will be provided that, unless something shows up of a serious nature in their background. But as these experts have told us, it is not possible to do a very effective check in 24 hours, as you can imagine. Even though you can do a computer run, it still has great weaknesses in it. So he focuses on this whole issue and says this:

If a person lies about his or her identity and has never

been fingerprinted anywhere in our country, what will enable

the bureaucrats at the USCIS--

that is the agency that will be handing out the immigration benefits--

to know the person's true identity? If the adjudicators

simply run a fictitious identity through a computerized

database, they will simply find the name has no connection to

any criminal or terrorist watch lists.

I am quoting him now.

What is the true value? Remember, we are talking about a

false name.

Let me continue quoting:

There is absolutely no way this program would have even a

shred of integrity and the identity documents that would be

given these millions of illegal aliens would enable every one

of them to receive a driver's license, Social Security card,

and other such official identity documents in a false name.

Undoubtedly, terrorists would be among those applying to

participate in this ill-conceived program. They would then be

able to open bank accounts and obtain credit cards in that

same false name. Finally, these cards would enable these

aliens to board airliners and trains even if their true names

appear on all of the various terrorist watch lists and ``no

fly'' lists. That is why I have come to refer to this

legislation as the ``Terrorist Assistance and Facilitation

Act of 2007.''

There has been a lot of talk in this Senate about Mexico's consulates throughout the United States issuing matricula cards and that these matricula cards are given based on documents that nobody knows for sure how good they are. Therefore, the cards they have are not really guaranteed to be a valid identity, but they are being utilized around the country as legitimate identification. What Mr. Cutler says is the identification documents we will be giving out under this bill will not be any better than matricula cards. It is going to prove nothing more than what the person said to get the card. He may come here, be one of those people who planned to hijack our airplanes and crash them on 9/ 11. Several of them were apprehended by state and local police. But, under this act, unless we had their fingerprints on record--and I am sure none of those fingerprints were on record--they would be given an official ID from the United States government, giving them complete freedom to go anywhere in the country.

That is why he calls it ``the Terrorist Assistance and Facilitation Act of 2007.'' That is a very serious professional criticism of a core part of this legislation.

How about this? Mr. Kris Kobach, a former Department of Justice attorney under Attorney General Ashcroft and a specialist on terrorism and immigration, agrees with Mr. Cutler. He posted an article on the Heritage Foundation Web site titled ``The Senate Immigration Bill, a National Security Nightmare.'' The article states:

The bill will make it easier for alien terrorists to

operate in the United States by allowing them to create

fraudulent identities with ease.

Wow, is that a charge? Should we be hell bent to go forward tomorrow and move on to a bill that the American people reject and that could be called a terrorist dream bill that would actually allow and make it easier for terrorists to obtain fraudulent identity in this country?

Mr. Kobach, a fine lawyer, now professor, goes on to write:

Supporters of the Senate's comprehensive immigration reform

bill have revived it under the guise of national security.

However, the new public relations campaign is a farce. The

bill offers alien terrorists a new pathway to obtain legal

status which will make it easier for them to carry out deadly

attacks against American citizens. The top priority in this

bill is extending amnesty as quickly and easily as

possible to as many illegal aliens as possible. The cost

of doing so is to jeopardize national security.

That is a statement from a former Assistant Attorney General of the United States of America charged with these kinds of issues, now a professor.

Well, we know this: We know the sheriffs along the border have absolutely been in an uproar over our failure to back them up in their efforts to create a lawful border. Is anybody listening to them? The truth is, the Senate bill is not going to stop illegal immigration or even substantially reduce it. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the new Senate bill will only reduce net annual illegal immigration by 13 percent. There will be additional visa overstays: 550,000 by 2017 and up to 1 million 10 years later, according to the

Mr. President, I wish to share some general comments on where we are with regard to immigration and, really, American workers. I am pleased to see my colleague, Senator Kennedy, here. I know he believes strongly in the minimum wage and in union contracts and strikes and that kind of thing to get wages up. I will just say to my colleague that the real thing which drives wages, which helps working Americans be able to get higher wages and better benefits, is when their product or their labor becomes more valuable.

In this debate last year, I raised that question. I see my former chairman of the HELP Committee--the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee--Senator Enzi. Senator Kennedy now chairs that committee. When Senator Enzi chaired it, we had a hearing in September of 2006 with economists and experts to discuss the impact on working Americans, middle-class workers, the wages they receive as impacted by immigration. I don't think there was a single dissent in that committee--everyone agreed that large influxes of low skilled immigrant labor bring down the wages of the American workers that compete with them. And the Judiciary Committee last year also had one hearing on the matter in April of 2006. Witnesses at that hearing also agreed unanimously that the wages of working class Americans are adversely

impacted by large flows of immigrants into our country. How could it be otherwise? That is a basic economic principle--when supply goes up, the price goes down. When demand goes up and supply remains the same, the price goes up.

When I raised this point on the floor, Senator Kennedy, during the immigration reform debate last year, responded to me. His solution was that we should raise the minimum wage. I responded that it is not my goal to have American citizens making $7 an hour; my goal is to create a free market economy where their labor is worth $12, $15, $18, or $25 an hour. These wage levels are being seen by workers in nonunion businesses in Alabama right now. We absolutely don't need to go back to a system that allows self-interested union organizers to force people into unions when they are already making higher wages then they have ever made before, as they are in Alabama. I absolutely don't believe that unions are the way to see us make progress on wages. But I am concerned that the net effect of large flows of immigration is that wages are being brought down. It is not responsible to have immigration policies that depress the wages of American workers.

Some of the immigrants are legal, but most are not legal. Together, they are pulling down wages of the Americans that compete with them in the labor market. We have had expert testimony to that effect. I cite to my colleagues a professor at the Kennedy School at Government at Harvard University, himself a Cuban refugee, George Borjas. He says that working wages for Americans have been pulled down by as much as 8 percent in the areas where immigration is highest. That is a significant amount. Instead of going up in a booming economy, wages have gone down. Alan Tonelson, a research fellow from the U.S. Business and Industry Council Educational Foundation testified that from 2000 to 2005, in job categories where competition from illegal immigrants is the highest, real wages--those adjusted for inflation--went down, even though demand for labor was going up. How could it be otherwise? Don't we believe in a free market? Does any farmer doubt that if more cotton and corn were brought into this country, the price of their product would go down? Certainly we know that. We deal with that issue every day in the Senate, and we understand it. Why that base economic free market principle would be denied and overlooked when it comes to how immigration effects the labor market is beyond my understanding.

So, sure, immigration is important. We are not trying to stop immigration. Immigrants are overwhelmingly good people, they are hard workers, and they want to make a better life for themselves and their families. But, we have to ask ourselves, what levels and types of immigration serve our national interest? How can we make sure our middle-class workers are not having their incomes substantially reduced in a time when the growth and prosperity of our nation should be putting part of the high profits being made into their pockets? We can make sure that lower and middle class Americans are benefitting from out surging economy if we do this immigration bill right. This bill doesn't do that, and that is why I oppose it.

I had a wonderful day yesterday with President Bush. We disagree on this issue. He made the comment in my hometown of Mobile that a Texan friend of his once said if we agree 100 percent on every issue, then one of us would not be needed. Well, we don't agree on this issue, but he has a good vision for America. He believes we need to do something about immigration and he has high ideals about it. He wants to fix our immigration system and he wants to fix it comprehensively.

I have said repeatedly, in the last 2 years of debate, that we do need a comprehensive fix, we need a guest worker program that actually will work and be effective, one that is responsive to the needs of the market without depressing the wages of the American worker. I have said that we need to replace the lawless system of immigration we now have with a lawful one, one that serves our national interests, and by that I mean the interests of the American worker and the long-term national interests of our country.

Sadly, I do not believe that the bill before the Senate comes close to creating a lawful system that serves our national interests. The Senate bill is a 750-page document that was plopped down here after only 48 hours of notice, without any committee hearings this year. It lacks cohesive policy goals. It is a political baby-splitting document crafted by politicians who were focused on the need to write something that could pass, rather than a document produced by professionals and experts and economists and law enforcement officials focused on how to create a system that will be honest and will work. That is what the debate is all about. Will the Senate bill actually work. So my disagreement with the legislation is not what it aspires to do, if I believed that it would do what it aspires to do--to secure the border and restore the rule of law then I'd be supportive of the bill.

You will hear my colleagues come to the floor and talk about their mama and grandma and that they emigrated from country X and we are all blessed because overwhelmingly, except for Native Americans--even their ancestors at one time came here--we are all descendants of immigrants. I want to be clear. Those of us opposed to the Senate bill are not against immigration. Instead, we want to do it right so that it serves the immigrants who come to America and serves America by selecting those who can be most benefited by the American experience and who will most benefit America.

We are indeed, I am afraid, moving to legislation that would repeat the error of 1986 in which amnesty was given and enforcement never occurred. Three million people were given amnesty then. Now we have 12 million people asking for amnesty again. What is the problem with the legislation? Let me share some thoughts.

First, under this legislation, the number of legal immigrants to be allowed into our country and to be given permanent legal status within the next 20 years will double. The legal number will double. Do you think most Americans understand that? I don't.

Let me briefly mention the history of immigration in our country.

From 1820 to 1879, we had what was called the great continental expansion, where people moved out toward the west. One hundred and sixty thousand came a year. Then it dropped off significantly.

From 1880 to 1924, they called it the great wave of immigration. Immigration averaged 580,000 people a year, a big movement of people into our country, and we continued to expand westward in our Nation. Then immigration again began to drop off, particularly during the Depression, and people's wages were down.

The period of 1925 through 1965 is sometimes referred to as the stop- and-settle period. During that time, immigration was at 180,000 a year, and the large great wave of immigrants that came in the decades before were assimilated into America. They became productive, mastered the language, and became part of a settlement and an assimilation that was important for our country.

In 1965, we developed the new system of immigration now known as chain migration, which resulted in about 500,000 immigrants a year up until 1990.

Since 1990, however, the number doubled, and it has been about 1 million a year. Since 2000, I suggest, counting the illegal flow, it has been at least 1.5 million a year, which is the highest rate of immigration in the history of our country.

This bill would basically double legal immigration and do very little to stop the illegal flow. This gives us no time for a stop-and-settle period but perpetuates the record high rates of immigration for an indefinite period. That is where we are historically, and we ought to understand that. I don't think anybody would dispute, basically, what I just summarized for you.

Let me explain how the Senate bill will double legal immigration. Under current law, 23.4 million immigrants, including 19.6 million green cards and 3.8 million workers, would be admitted and here in year 2027. But under the Senate bill, the numbers would be 47 million immigrants, composed of 38.1 million green cards, twice the 19.6 million green cards that would be issued under current law, and 8 million, almost 9 million temporary workers on top of that. That number of temporary

workers would be here on an annual basis. Some would have to leave every year and return every year but that is the potential number.

I am certain most Americans do not believe that doubling of the immigration levels in America is what was being discussed when people were promised comprehensive immigration reform. Doubling the legal rate, I believe, is contrary to the impression given by the bill's sponsors. People are not being told that reform means this kind of increase. In fact, I would think most people are expecting that immigration reform means we will reduce the rate of immigration which already is at the highest this Nation has ever had.

So this kind of knowledge, when it gets out to people, fuels cynicism about what Congress is doing, it fuels anger at the voters. I repeat, I don't think their anger is focussed at immigrants. I think it is focused at those of us in Congress who promised we were going to create a lawful system that would bring some control to our borders, and it ends up doubling the number of immigrants that come lawfully. That is part of the problem. Some people get mad at the talk shows. All the talk shows are doing is telling the truth, that people did not state clearly when they promoted this bill for passage. People ought to be cynical and they ought to be upset about that, in my view.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak in morning business for an additional 10 minutes.

That is what this is all about. I was under the impression that when the bill promoters came forward from their secret meetings, they thought they had produced a bill that was going to give us a a lawful system of immigration. Didn't you hear that? Isn't that what you expected to be part of the product we would pass, that amnesty would be given but we would have a lawful system in the future, right? This is important. Isn't that what we were basically told by the people who produced this document, the 750-page bill they plopped down here without hearings a few weeks ago?

The sad fact is that the bill language does not keep the promises of its drafters. According to the Congressional Budget Office, a nonpartisan group that works for the Congress that helps us analyze legislation, Cost Estimate released on June 4: Implementing the bill's enforcement and verification requirements will only ``reduce the net annual flow of illegal immigrants by one-quarter.''

So that is a 25-percent reduction, approximately 2 million over 20 years. Twenty-five percent, do you think that is enough of a result for comprehensive reform? But wait, there is more. CBO also estimates that the bill's temporary worker provision will add approximately 1 million illegal visa overstays over the same 20 years. The bill will add an additional number of illegal overstays, more illegal overstays than under current law. That is because we already have a lot of temporary worker visa programs, and when you create new ones that will bring in more temporary workers, then more people are going to stay illegally.

CBO goes on to say this in their careful analysis:

Other aspects of the legislation are likely to increase the

number of illegal immigrants, in particular through people

overstaying their visas from the guest worker and H-1B

programs. CBO estimates--

This is their report--

that another 1.1 million people would be added by 2017 as a

result of the guest worker program, about half of them

authorized workers and dependents, the remainder the result

of unauthorized overstays. That figure would grow to 2

million by 2027.

Twenty years from now. The net result is that according to CBO, a mere 1.3 million less illegal immigrants will enter this country and live in this country in 2027 than would be expected under current law, where we expect 10 million under current law to come illegally.

They go on to say:

CBO expects that the enforcement measure and the higher

number of overstayers would on net diminish the number of

unauthorized immigrants by about 500,000 in 2017 and about

1.3 million in 2027.

What that means is when you take the 25-percent reduction of illegality at the border and an increase in visa overstays illegality, it comes out, according to their numbers, to only a net 13-percent reduction in illegality.

So we are going to double the legal number, see, and as a result we are only going to get a 13-percent reduction in illegality.

I say to the Members of the Senate, that is not what we are getting paid to do, that is not what we promised to do, that is not what we should do. That is not acceptable. I wish it were not so. I wish we had legislation before the Senate that would do better job at reducing illegal immigration, that would comprehensively fix our illegal immigration, but we don't.

I have been warning my colleagues about this and pointing out the flaws in the bill, and other Senators have pointed out flaw after flaw. We have this official report that indicates we have only a 13-percent reduction in illegality, and it is not right. We cannot pass such a bill and then go to our constituents and say we did something good for you, we fixed a broken system. We just cannot do that.

I urge my colleagues, no matter how much they want to see our immigration system reformed, no matter how much they have hoped that this legislation would be the vehicle to do it to consider my comments before you vote. A careful reading of this bill indicates it will not create the system they are envisioning, and we should not pass it.

Once again, didn't the promoters of the legislation promise more than this, that it would actually secure our border, that it would end lawlessness? Isn't that what they promised? Isn't creating a lawful immigration system for America a national imperative? Isn't it something we must do? No wonder the American people are cynical and angry.

Another promise we were given when the bill was introduced, and probably while it was being prepared, was that we would move to a merit-based system; that we would do a better job of identifying those people who apply to our country who have the greatest potential to flourish in America and do well. Canada does this. Sixty percent of the people who come to Canada come based on a merit-based competition. If you speak English or French, if you have some education, if you have special skills Canada can utilize, you get more points and you compete with others who apply. So they attempt in this fashion to serve the national interest. A move toward more skill based immigration is what Canada has done, and they are very happy with it. Australia does it. New Zealand does it. Other countries operate their immigration system in this fashion. They still provide immigration slots for refugees, as they always have, and if the United States moved to this system, we would still have humanitarian based immigration as well. We would not end those programs.

We were told that moving the United States to a Canadian or Australian immigration system might happen in this new bill. I was very interested in it because I urged my colleagues last year to have a point system or a merit based system in the bill. Nothing was even discussed about it last year and there was no hint of it in the bill that was offered then. So when I was told it was being considered this year, that presented some hope.

Unfortunately, the merit-based system that actually made it into the bill does not commence in any effective way at the passage of the bill, instead it will not increase the percentage of immigrants who come to America based on skills until 9 years after passage of the bill.

In 2006, employment-based or skill-based immigration made up 22 percent of our immigrant flow. In 2006, we only had 12 percent. So, recently, skill based immigration has made up 12 percent to 22 percent of annual immigration. As I stated before, Canada has 60 percent and Australia has 62 percent skill based immigration.

Under the Senate bill, skill-based or merit-based immigration will make up about 18 percent of the total immigration levels for the first 5 years. That is not even as high as we had in 2005. Then, for the years 6 through 8 after the bill passes, merit immigration will drop to 11 percent of the total annual immigration level, lower than the 12 percent we had in 2006. Even when the

percentage finally increases after the ninth or tenth year, it only rises to as high as 36 percent based on skilled immigration, which is a little more than half of what the Canadian system now has.

I don't think that is a strong enough move, and it is a strong disappointment to me that this is the case.

Mr. President, I see my colleague from Wyoming, the ranking member of the HELP Committee, is here. I will not go on at greater length. I could do so because what I am pointing out to my colleagues today is fundamental flaws in this legislation. It is those fundamental flaws that one or two amendments are not going to fix.

The difficulty we have with amendments is the bill's sponsors, the group that was in the grand bargain coalition, have agreed that anyone who submits an amendment that changes any substantial part of the agreement they reached in secret somewhere without hearings, without input from the American people, will have their amendment voted down. They basically have said that publically and have told that to me personally. They say: Jeff, I like your amendment, I think it addresses a valid criticism. But, we met and we reached this compromise, and I am going to have to vote against it because we made a pact and we are going to stick together to make sure we move this bill through the Senate without any real changes.

That is what they have said on the floor of the Senate. They said: This violates our compromise. I am sorry, Senator, we can't vote for it. They ask their colleagues to vote the amendment down because it is a killer amendment, one that will harm their deal. They claim that if the amendment passes, the compromise will fail, and the whole bill will fall apart. Jeff, we have told you what we are going to do. Take it or leave it. Vote for it or vote against it.

That is fundamentally what has been said, and that is not right. That is not what this Senate is about. If they had a bill that would actually work, I may be irritable with the way it was produced and brought to the floor procedurally, but maybe I would be able to support it. Instead, I can only judge how valuable the bill is based on what it says and whether or not it will work. CBO says it will not work. I believe it will not work. I believe we are going to have another 1986 situation where we provide amnesty without enforcement. I believe we are again going to send a message around the world that all you have to do is get into our country illegally and one day you will be made a citizen.

There is another concern that I have not talked about much so far, but it is critical. I can show you why the Z visa and the legal status that is given to illegal alien applicants 24 hours after they file an application for amnesty will provide a safe haven and a secure identity for people in our country who are here unlawfully and who are actually members of terrorist groups. The bill provides them, without any serious background check, lawful identity documents that they can then utilize to get bank accounts, to travel, and do potentially fulfill their dastardly goals.

In fact, Michael Cutler, a former investigator with the immigration enforcement agency wrote an article in the Washington Times today titled ``Immigration bill a No Go'' discussing that very point. In careful detail, he explains the utter failure of this bill to protect us from terrorism.

In addition to stating that the bill would not reduce illegality, CBO also found out it is going to cost the taxpayers. You are used to hearing that the bill will make money for us, help us and make the Treasury do better, all claims that I have strongly disputed. But the way CBO scored the bill this year, it is going to be over $20 billion in costs in the next 10 years and may be closer to 30, and those costs to the Treasury will increase in the out years. That is because under this system, we are going to legalize millions of illegal immigrants who are uneducated, many illiterate even in their own countries, and statics tell us that they will draw more from the Treasury than they will ever pay in. I just tell you, that is what they say. And the numbers get worse in the outyears, dramatically worse. In fact, the Heritage Foundation has said, based on the amnesty alone--and I don't know if these numbers are correct but they were done by Robert Rector and he has been known to be very correct on many occasions--based on the amnesty alone, based on the educational levels and the income levels of the people who would be given amnesty, the cost to our country would amount to $2.6 trillion during the retirement periods of the people who came here illegally and would be given amnesty under the bill.

So that is a stunning number. I can't say with absolute certainty it is correct, but that is what we have been told, and we should be talking about it and studying it. We also know this: The net deficit caused by the bill according to the CBO score will grow each year after the first 10 years. They have said so themselves at last August's Budget Committee Hearing chaired by Senator Allard.

Mr. President, I thank the Chair. I hope my colleagues will study this bill carefully. I hope the Senate will reject it, not approve it. I hope we will do a better job in the future.

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

Mr. President, I am glad our country continues to focus on what we can do better to produce energy for electricity, fuel for our automobiles, and the like, in a way that is friendly to our environment and promotes our national security because in many situations, we are far too dependent on nations that are not friendly and are hostile, actually. Huge amounts of our wealth each year, particularly for the fuel that goes into our automobiles, is transferred to nations, such as Venezuela. It has made them very rich in the short term, and as a result, as Tom Friedman, a writer, said: The richer they get, the worse they behave. So we need to reduce the amount of America's wealth being transferred abroad.

With regard to electric power, almost all of that power is generated domestically with our own energy sources and by our own American people. It is not

as significant for us in the economic and national security area as is automobile gasoline, 60 percent of which is imported. That is why I think when it comes to choices, we need to emphasize automobile fuels and what we can do to reduce our dependence and improve efficiencies.

I have been pleased to serve with Chairman Bingaman on the Energy Committee. I just joined that committee. He is a man of intelligence and decency and commitment to doing right. We have had quite a number of hearings. We have not gone into this issue lightly. I am, however, reluctantly compelled to oppose his renewable portfolio standard amendment and would like to share a few thoughts about it.

First, the overall estimate is that in areas of the country that do not have the natural conditions that allow us to expand renewable energy sources there will be huge costs that will be borne. It seems that some like to suggest those costs will fall on the utilities. Nobody likes utilities because they send us a bill every month. We tend to forget they send us electricity every month also. But they send us a bill every month, and if we don't pay it, they will shut off our electricity. It is not a very pleasant thing to hear from your utility. But utilities throughout America are regulated utilities. What they charge has to be approved by public service commissions or commissions of a like nature.

We have a public service commission in Alabama. Those public service commissions monitor their profits and monitor their charges for electricity and disapprove many times requests for rate increases.

There is a principle that each and every one of our Senators need not forget; and that is, if areas that don't have the capacity to generate electricity with renewables have to pay the penalties and have to pay for other ways to get electricity, that cost, which some have estimated to be $100 billion to $200 billion annually, is the equivalent of this Congress taxing the people in those areas of the country $100 billion to $200 billion and directing it to be spent in this fashion whether or not it is the best way to protect our environment.

In an economic sense and in a true sense, we are saying we are not going to tax the people in the country to fund these programs. We are just going to pass a mandate, and we are going to mandate it on these businesses. And if they cannot meet it, then we are going to require them to pay a penalty. We didn't tax them, we are not taxing anybody, and we are going on about our business and we are going to move us to a more renewable portfolio--a good goal, you see.

But if you step back and look at this, it is the equivalent of taxing the people hundreds of billions of dollars, and that tax will be passed on to consumers of electricity. Already their gasoline prices have gone up dramatically, and now we are seeing some rise in electricity rates, and this is going to be passed on. There is no free lunch. It will be passed on, and the people to whom it is going to be passed on to the most are the people in my State because our wind resources will not work.

Wind in some areas of this country will work. It really will. It can be virtually competitive with other sources of electricity, and that is nice; although in areas that are fairly congested with people, people don't like all these wind turbines. But out West, in some areas, I assume there is still potential to expand wind, and I am for that. I just don't like to see us require wind turbines where it is not going to work, or solar panels where it won't work.

In my home State of Alabama, one would think we have a good bit of sunshine, but in truth, we have a lot of clouds, and solar is not effective in our area. It is not effective anywhere really. It is much more expensive than any other form of generating electricity and least effective in the Northeast. Even in the Southeast, because of our thunderstorms and our long periods in which we have cloudy weather, it is an unpredictable source of electricity, and it is very expensive anyway. It will be a great expense.

I share with my colleagues a letter from the Southeastern Association of Regulatory Utility Commissions. These are the people who, for the most part, are elected by their constituents. They represent the States of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee. They are very much opposed to this amendment, not because they are not for renewables, not because they want to defend some utility, but because they know if this amendment is adopted, rates are going to go up on their constituents and with nothing to show for it.

This is their May 31 letter, just a few weeks ago, to the leadership in this body and the House. They say:

. . . to express our concerns about the nationwide,

mandatory federal renewable portfolio standard being

discussed/introduced by Senator Bingaman. As state

regulators, we are responsible for ensuring that retail

electricity consumers receive affordable, reliable electric

service. We are concerned that a uniform, federal RPS mandate

fails to recognize adequately that there are significant

differences among the states in terms of available and cost-

effective renewable energy resources and that having such a

standard in energy legislation will ultimately increase

consumers' electricity bills.

Then they go on to note, quote:

The reality is that not all States are fortunate enough to

have abundant traditional renewable energy resources, such as

wind, or have them located close enough to the load to render

them cost effective. This is especially true in the southeast

and large parts of the Midwest.

They go on to say, quote:

Our retail electricity customers will end up paying higher

electricity prices, with nothing to show for it.

With nothing to show for it.

So the letter goes on, and they say, quote:

While State public service commissions and energy service

providers should certainly consider available and cost-

effective renewable energy resource options as they make

long-term decisions for incremental energy needs, the

imposition of a strict Federal RPS mandate, as contrasted

with a State-driven cost-effectiveness determination, will

only result in higher electric prices for our consumers.

So that is the fundamental concern.

The goal of how we can go about this is complicated. I think we can make progress toward more renewable energy sources, but I don't see how we can omit nuclear power as a major player in this as the source of tremendous amounts of electricity with no adverse emissions into the atmosphere. How we could be ignoring that is difficult for me to understand, I would say to my colleagues.

My goal is pretty simple, in how I analyze legislation. First, I believe we ought to consider our national security. How does it help us remain independent? Does it impact our economy adversely? A healthy, growing economy is good for this country. I certainly think we should not and must not have a goal of raising energy costs, whether it is gasoline at the pump or electricity on the monthly bill. Raising those prices cannot be our goal. It can only make us less competitive in this competitive global marketplace.

Our goal cannot be to raise prices, but I will tell you that it is a secret, unstated goal of many of the people who are driving some of this legislation. They think if they can drive up the price of gasoline, if they can drive up the price of electricity, the average person won't use so much of it because they do not have enough money to pay for it.

Well, that is not good. Our goal as a nation should be to have safe, clean, reliable energy available at a cost as low as possible as part of living a healthy, productive life. Electricity in nations that have it readily available compared to countries where it is not available have twice the lifespan. You have twice the lifespan if electricity is readily available in your country as you do if you don't. It is a tragedy to see countries struggle so badly. So it is a blessing for us. Energy is not something bad. It is a fabulous blessing to our Nation to have it as readily available as we do, and we need to keep that cost down.

The proposal requires all distribution utilities that sell more than 4 million megawatt hours a year to meet targeted levels beginning in 2010. The RPS standard in this amendment requires each such utility to have 15 percent of its load in renewables, and renewables are only solar, wind, geothermal--there is no geothermal out East, either; there is no ocean capability in our area of the country--biomass--some small possibility but nothing like this area--

landfill gas--which is only incremental--and the like. It does not include nuclear or hydro, which is so important.

The Domenici substitute would require 20 percent by 2020, but it would allow for new nuclear and incremental nuclear, new hydropower, and certain efficiency measures to qualify. Even then, I am afraid we cannot reach that number.

According to the Energy Information Administration, current nonhydroelectric renewables only account for 2.3 percent of total generation in the United States. To get to 15 percent of all electricity from this source would require us to increase that production over six times. That is a lot--over six times the current rate. So under these standards, as they are written today, according to the Tennessee Valley Authority, according to the Southern Company and other companies that are in our area of the country, they say there is only one way, one thing they can do, and that is to pay the Department of Energy the two-cents-per-kilowatt-hour penalty to meet these targets.

Let me tell you, two cents per kilowatt-hour is a big deal. Huntsville Utilities in Huntsville, AL, a progressive utility run by the city, a board appointed through the city, states that the Bingaman RPS and even the Domenici CPS would cost them $4.2 million in 2010. This is just the city of Huntsville--$4.2 million; $8.8 million in 2013; $14.1 million in 2017; and $19.8 million in just 1 year--2020. That is a lot of money on a city--$19 million a year, $4 million a year. They are trying to manage their budgets carefully.

The Tennessee Valley Authority, the governmental entity Franklin Roosevelt started back many years ago, the conservative TVA--this is a quasi-government agency--estimates that systemwide it would cost an additional $70 million to comply with the 3.75-percent RPS requirement in 2011 and $410 million to meet the full 15 percent requirement in 2020. That is $400 million for the TVA system per year. That is a lot of money.

I think Senator Alexander had raised some points: Well, what if you used all that money--the $100 billion, $200 billion--how could you use it if you just applied it in some rational way to include renewables and reduce our dependence on foreign oil and keep the cost of energy at a good level and encourage research and development? Man, you could put scrubbers on every coal plant in the country. You could build nuclear plants in large numbers. We could do lots of things. So this is a cost we are imposing, but the movement it will accrue in the direction we want to go is not great. The Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners said, quote, ``There will be nothing to show for it.''

That is the problem I have. I want to move in this direction. I would like to see us use more biofuels, and I believe there is a potential for that. That is the only thing that seems to be viable in my area of the country, is expanded use of biofuels. But this is really such a huge step that I don't think there is any way it can be met except by paying penalties or a tax. Also, the way this thing works is the money may very well end up just going to the Government in the form of compliance payments or a penalty or a tax, maybe as much as $100 billion.

I really am excited about the leadership Senator Bingaman and Senator Domenici have given to the Energy Committee. We have had lots of hearings with some of the world's best experts on energy. We all share a view that if we develop a good energy policy, we can improve our environment, we can strengthen our national security, we can improve our economy, and the like. Any change that can actually reduce our consumption of energy and actually pay for itself over a period of time is a step we clearly should take. But when you are taking steps that are likely to cost far more than the benefit you receive, you have to be very cautious.

Remember, we are not spending Federal taxpayers' money and, therefore, creating a cost. We are passing a law which mandates that the citizens around the country, particularly in areas that don't have readily renewable power, will have to pay more for their electricity to meet this standard. And they are going to have to pay a lot more. The cost is going to be very significant, and the question is, Would that cost have been better spent in other areas? I suggest that it would. Some people have already made some suggestions about how we could spend that money better.

I thank my colleagues for giving me a few moments to talk about this amendment. I am sorry I could not be in agreement with it. The goal is worthy. My analysis of it is the burden will fall disproportionately on constituents in my area of the country, particularly in my State, and therefore I must oppose it. I think we can do better in how to achieve this goal.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

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

I won't persist. I thank the Senator for comments that are very valid for my part of the country.

Mr. President, as a former U.S. Attorney for 12 years and as an assistant U.S. attorney for over 2 years, I am well aware that U.S. attorneys serve at the pleasure of the President and that they are appointed through a political process that involves home State senators conferring with the President of the United States before the nomination is made, and which involves confirmation by the U.S. Senate.

As I have observed previously, the matter involving Attorney General Gonzales concerning the appointment and removal of certain U.S. attorneys arose because at some point there was interest in a substantial change in the persons holding the offices of U.S. attorneys throughout the country. Apparently, some wanted a large number of changes and others did not. To them, it may have seemed like an easy thing to do. The President would simply just remove them and appoint others.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had no previous experience in the Department of Justice at any time in his career and seemed to have very little interest in who were serving as U.S. attorneys. This was an error on his part. Attorney General Gonzales simply did not understand that the removal of a U.S. attorney is always a delicate and difficult process. First, U.S. attorneys have Senatorial support. Their appointment was initially cleared by the U.S. Senator for that State and often the Congressman from that district. Secondly, they have local support among their friends and constituents and they often have built up strong support among local, State, and Federal law enforcement agencies. Those bonds are often strong and the removal of a U.S. attorney often causes concern among those law enforcement agencies and groups. They have also often gained support in the local community with childrens' advocacy groups, crime prevention groups, and victims' rights groups.

Finally, almost every U.S. attorney will have one, sometimes more, sensitive cases that are ongoing at any given time. Anyone familiar with the process will know that removing a U.S. attorney who is in the process of handling some high profile criminal case will often result in quite a bit of political pushback, even if the U.S. attorney has very little hands-on involvement with the case.

One of the problems that the Attorney General had was that he did not fully understand these dangers in removing U.S. attorneys because he had never been involved in it as a member of the Department of Justice. He simply did not comprehend the seriousness of the issue with which he was dealing. If he had, he would have spent a great deal more time on it than he did. He would not have delegated it to his assistants--many of them young and also not experienced--in the reality of this process either.

As a result, there occurred an unseemly series of events that reflected poorly on Attorney General Gonzales and other members of the Department of Justice, and which has damaged the reputation of the Department of Justice. This was not a small matter but a very important matter. I think now he realizes the importance of this process and is sincerely apologetic for allowing it to develop the way it did. He is also apologetic for the way that he responded to the inquiries made about the proposed U.S. attorney changes.

Let me insert, parenthetically, that much of the criticism leveled against the Attorney General, the President and his aides has been exaggerated and sometimes quite inaccurate. But, if it comes from a member of Congress or a Senator, that means you never have to say you are sorry. However, if the Attorney General, in responding to attacks, makes explanations that are in any way less than fully accurate one can expect that he will be attacked vociferously as attempting to mislead or worse. Unfortunately, there is a double standard and it often results in unfairness and this is one of those cases. Many of the complaints against Attorney General Gonzales have been very unfair and unfortunate.

After this spasm developed, I was worried about the Attorney General's capacity to lead the Department of Justice effectively and expressed concern as to whether or not he would be able to assemble an able staff to complete his term and whether or not it would be, in sum, better for the Department of Justice that he step aside. I publicly suggested that he and the President meet together and discuss this issue with frankness. I quoted the Attorney General himself as saying that the matter was not about the Attorney General, but was really about what was best for the Department of Justice.

It now appears that the Attorney General and the President have concluded that the Attorney General committed no offense, committed no crime

for which he should be impeached, and has not made any error sufficient that he should no longer remain as Attorney General. The Attorney General's lack of experience in certain aspects of the Department of Justice were well known before he was confirmed by the Senate. In my personal view, there is no Cabinet member that requires more personal experience and detailed knowledge of the agency they will lead than the Attorney General. It is a very, very tough job and the Attorney General must be able to personally handle a large portfolio of issues and at the same time have a comprehensive grasp of complex legal issues and legal precedents involving the Department of Justice. For example, Attorney General Janet Reno was constantly struggling in the office. Before becoming the Attorney General, she had simply been a county district attorney and had never been involved in the kinds of issues she faced as Attorney General. In the future, I expect to be far more assertive in the confirmation process as I will insist that any Attorney General nominee have significant relevant experience.

In conclusion, I conclude that there is not cause for any censure of Attorney General Gonzales and I conclude that there is no basis whatsoever for him to be impeached.

It has been 120 years since a no-confidence vote has been had on any Cabinet member. That is something they do in Europe. It is not something we do in the United States. This no-confidence resolution is not necessary, it is harmful to our system, and should not be a precedent in the future. Frankly, it is driven by politics and not by what is best for the Department of Justice because this process will greatly magnify any errors that he has made and create a false impression. Attorney General Gonzales is a good man who sincerely wants to meet the highest standards of the Department of Justice.

The process in our government is that the President nominates for the position of Attorney General, and the Senate votes to confirm them or not. After that confirmation, unless he is subject to impeachment, it is not good policy for the Senate to rush in and express formal opinions about the Cabinet officer and his or her performance. Therefore, I have, after considerable thought, concluded this resolution is bad policy and precedent, and is unfairly damaging to the Department of Justice. It is a political overreach and should not be passed. Therefore, I oppose the resolution.

Mr. President, I understand Senator Coburn will be here shortly and has some time set aside. He indicated he will yield some time to me. I will take a couple of minutes.

First, there are not any of my colleagues on the floor, but I assume the objection that was received last night to my request to dispense with the current business and make pending my amendment No. 1323 will still be in effect. I renew it, and if any change has been made with regard to it, I hope they will permit it, but I assume, based on what I know, that there is still an objection to bringing up that amendment.

I have quite a number of amendments, 10 or more amendments, that have been filed but cannot be made pending because it requires unanimous consent to move those amendments to pending status, and that means if cloture is granted later this morning, those amendments will not be on the list and cannot be given a vote.

I am not trying to run around and move something through to which I understand there is an objection, but I want to make the point that a number of Senators have a number of important amendments that are filed but cannot be made pending, and they will fall and not get a vote if we move forward with this premature cloture vote. So I strongly object to cloture. I believe it denies us the right to amend this bill which is seriously flawed.

I note that the particular amendment I want to bring up is named for Charlie Norwood, a Congressman from Georgia, who died recently. He was a tremendous patriot who shared my

concern. We worked together in drafting his amendment that was introduced in the House which was designed to clarify that local law enforcement officers have an opportunity to participate in enforcement of Federal immigration laws simply as they go about their normal course of duties. If they arrest someone for speeding or some offense of that kind, then they could check their records, and if they are here illegally, they could detain them for Federal officials.

Actually, in many instances, that is still doable today, but in a couple of areas it is vague. The lawyers for the departments have objected to their police officers participating because they think there might be a problem.

This is a critically important amendment. If it is not adopted, it indicates to me that the persons pushing this legislation do not want it to work because there are 600,000 to 800,000 State and local law enforcement officers and only about 1,200 ICE agents and only a fraction of them not on the border, 2,000, something of that nature of ICE agents. They cannot cover this country. They have to rely on State and local officers, who, by the way, caught individuals during their crime sprees or plans to attack us on 9/11. They were apprehended in traffic stops. John Malvo was apprehended. Other terrorists have been apprehended for speeding but let go because the local officers were not participating effectively in the system.

One of the weaknesses of this bill is that the professionals who understand how this system works were not invited and were not in the room with the people who wrote this political bill. A bunch of politicians wrote it. They did not understand sufficiently the details that are critical to a successful report.

I note that Kent Lundgren, former chairman of the National Association of Former Border Patrol Agents, has said this is a bill which will not work. ``Based on my experience,'' one individual said, ``it is a disaster.'' Another said that the system will not work as proposed today, that it represents, according to Mr. Hugh Brien, former Chief of Border Patrol for the United States from 1986 to 1989--this is what he said just a couple of days ago: It is a ``sell out.'' It is ``a complete betrayal of the Nation.'' He said it is ``a slap in the face'' to the millions of Americans who come here legally.

He came here as an immigrant legally. He was former Chief of the Border Patrol, and he made these strong statements about this bill.

I see my friend, Dr. Coburn, is here. I know he has an amendment. I am glad to have made my comments beforehand and I, once again, express concern that amendments are not being accepted, and we should not invoke cloture.

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

Mr. President, the legislation before us deals with one of the most important subjects any nation should concern itself with, which is immigration. The American people care about it. Many people are watching it extremely closely. They are cynical about Congress. In 1986, Congress passed a major bill that was supposed to fix so many problems, all of those things they are aware of, and the problem has only gotten worse. They have also discovered that our leadership in Washington, the executive branch and the Congress, really is not committed to creating a lawful system. Some people think it can't be done. Some people think Congress just doesn't want to do it. Some people think it would interrupt the flow of labor. For whatever reason, the American people have concluded this Congress is not to be trusted with this bill. We have had for decades--in the full decade I have been in the Senate and before--Members asserting they are going to fix these problems at the border, and nothing gets fixed. We arrested a million persons last year--a million who were illegally entering the United States. What kind of broken system is that?

So people are not going to go for--they are not going to bite a promise in a poke. They are not going to take a pig in a poke. They are not going to buy into a bill that is not going to work. They expect us this time to do something that works. I really believe we can. This is not impossible. The more I have studied it, the more confident I am that we can make progress and create a bill that would actually end the unlawfulness and create a flow of workers to meet our real needs, without having so many workers that the wages of Americans are reduced; that we tilt, as Canada and Australia and other nations have, to a system that focuses more on high-skilled workers.

So those are the things that are important. Well, how did we get in this fix with this bill that, I suggest, is losing steam? Like that mackerel put out in the sunshine, as the days go by, it begins to have an odor. Well, it started in an unusual way. Normally, a bill is introduced--especially a big piece of legislation--and it is assigned to a committee. The committee brings in expert witnesses and hears testimony. Depending on the complexity of the bill, it could be the subject of many weeks of testimony and hearings.

For example, on the asbestos bill in Judiciary Committee, I bet we had 25 hearings. We had all kinds of meetings outside. We brought in experts and we talked to them about how to solve this very complex and important issue of asbestos in America. I think if the American people were to rate asbestos compared to immigration, they put it on a scale of 2 or 3 and immigration on a scale of 9 out of 10.

What happened? A group of Senators met, along with special interest groups and activist groups that want everybody to come to America, and business groups who want cheap labor. They all met and talked to a bunch of politicians. They didn't have a Border Patrol professional there. Mr. Chertoff, the Homeland Security Secretary, was in and out of the room. They were not involved in the kind of public fact-finding they should have been. They skipped the committee entirely. Last year's bill--the one the House refused to even consider--that passed this Senate, a bill that was fatally flawed and would never have accomplished what it promised to accomplish, should never have become law. That bill was introduced on the floor of the Senate. For about a week, that was the bill. It sort of sat there, but everybody knew there were secret meetings going on among good Senators, good people, who were trying to figure out what kind of bill they were going to write.

So Senator Reid pushed them and pushed them and made it come out before they were ready. They plopped it down in the Senate the Tuesday before Memorial Day recess week. They said it was 300 pages. But it was written in small print, and not the legislative format in which legislation is supposed to be introduced. Had it been printed in the proper form, it would have been nearly a thousand pages. It is over 300 as it is. They plopped this bill down, and nobody knew what was in it except those who had been in the room. It is obvious when they announced it, they didn't even know everything that was in it.

This is a big matter. It is very important. Now we want to rush this through. We had Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday--Tuesday being the day the bill or the substitute hit the floor, the week before Memorial Day. We did nothing on Friday, except a few of us came down to the floor and talked. The next Monday--Monday of this week--all we did was talk. This week, we have been on the bill for a couple of days so far, and a few amendments have been heard.

Mr. President, I had 15 minutes. I see the majority leader here. I know he is busy and his time is short. I respect him. If he needs to make an announcement, I will be glad to yield to him for that purpose.

Let me wrap up and then I will look at it. I am concerned that there is a desire to move this bill through quickly. That is the goal, just to pass something. I am worried if we pass something that is not right, it will not get any better, especially after going through conference committee, where the Democratic leader and the Speaker of the House will appoint the conference committee majority and they will decide what changes get made in conference. I am worried about the legislation.

Let me tell you one thing that is causing some of us to get our backs up a little bit about this. The group that met to decide how to write this bill and put it together--that group made a pact with one another. What they said is this represents the final, real agreement between us. When the bill hits the floor, if anybody offers an amendment that disagrees with anything significant you and I have agreed to, we will all get together and oppose it. You have heard them say it publicly on the floor repeatedly. This goes against the agreement. This goes against the grand bargain. This is a killer amendment because we all got to stick together. ``We'' who? We have to stick together and cannot accept any change.

Let me tell you, this is the Senate. The group that met was not the full Senate. I have had members of that grand bargain tell me: Jeff, that is a good amendment, but I cannot vote for it because it is not in our agreement. I agree with you, Jeff, but I cannot vote for that because it wasn't part of our agreement.

What kind of legislation is that? So we have that factor going here. I am getting tired of it. I wasn't in on the grand compromise; neither were the American people. They weren't in on that deal.

I am pleased to.

Well, I have been here since 1 o'clock and, all of a sudden, I start speaking and they want me to look at an agreement. How many minutes do I have left?

I wish to finish my remarks and then I will look at the agreement, if that would be all right.

I think most of us knew that discussions were going on of that nature. We knew the deal. The deal is what all of you have agreed to. If you reach an accord, you are committed to vote for the deal on the floor, even if you agree with the amendment that is brought up. I was not prepared to tie my hands in that fashion. I submitted ideas because some Members were concerned about it. I don't say everything was blocked totally, but the final print analysis was not available to those not participating and who didn't agree to sign on to whatever was produced between you, Senator Kennedy, Senator Kyl, Senator Menendez, and the others who participated in the agreement.

I think I probably reserved my independence as a Senator to maintain my ability to make an independent evaluation of the legislation that was produced.

Yes.

Well, when the Senator from Pennsylvania chaired the Judiciary Committee, the immigration bill did have hearings--a few hearings--and did have a markup, as the Senator knows. But I will tell you that last year's hearings and markup were quite insufficient, in my view, considering the intensity and enormity of the subject.

I will tell you what I believe needs to be done. It is much closer to what you did, as I mentioned before the Senator came to the floor, with asbestos. When you led the effort to reform and fix the very big problem with asbestos--and I was pleased to support you--you traveled all over the country and had hearings with judges, lawyers, and interest groups. We had hearing after hearing. We had markup days, and recess, and more markup days. It went on for months. It was brought up on the floor and knocked down--and then brought up on the floor again and it went on for months. We didn't quite get it done, but I supported the Senator's view of it.

That is what we need. Even though asbestos was exceedingly complex, this is even more complex and even more significant for the average citizen. So I think that is where we messed up. I know this was a real attempt to get something done. People said we needed to do something. But do what?

We do have a problem, Mr. President. I say to my esteemed colleague, one of the most able Members of this Senate, I have in my mind a framework that I believe would work for immigration reform. A number of the things I thought were critical I was told might be in this new bill this year. But the fine print convinced me it was not there. I believe we have a problem with the American people. They want to make sure this is done in the open light of day. I am not prepared to say at this point in time that I could meet and reach an accord on the overall difficulties with this bill in a matter of hours, or even days.

I think we need to start over with an open process and maybe something else can be accomplished. My inclination is to say let's get it out there and let the American people be involved. They understand the difficult choices that have to be made. They are also principled people and want to be sure we do it right.

I thank Senator Specter for his efforts.

My time has expired.

I am sorry.

Please give me a few moments to review this because I have some concerns.

Amendment 1313

Mr. President, I was looking for whoever had it. They disappeared. And also Senator Grassley has to look at it.

Good. I think the only disagreement we have is perhaps time, and I can make a suggestion on that. Is there someone authorized to talk to me about it? I am looking for Mr. Schiappa.

I think about 45 minutes per amendment. Some of these amendments are very significant. We have not heard opposition to the amendments. Maybe some have spoken in favor of them, but I don't agree with some of the amendments. The amendment of Senator Dodd--I think there are some important reasons that one is not satisfactory.

I am saying that I am not going to be able to support a lot of amendments that are rushed up here to receive votes when Senators have very little time to review them. I think this is important. If we are going through a process just to say we have a bunch of votes, that is one thing, but I think we need an intelligent discussion about these amendments.

Madam President, I want to say a few words. I heard colleagues who have spoken. I have listened at length to some very eloquent remarks evoking sincere feelings and emotions. I certainly respect that. We all in this body are great advocates. We disagree sometimes.

I suggest that we had a couple of problems with the bill, and that is why the bill failed. There are a lot of problems with the legislation itself, and there are a lot of problems that the American people had with it.

The bottom line is, the American people did not have confidence that we were moving legislation that would effectively accomplish what all these great remarks we heard earlier promised it would do. I don't think there is any other person in this body who has personally prosecuted an immigration case. But this Senator has. I did that years ago. I am familiar with the process. I am familiar with the system and the difficulties, including how overwhelmed it has been and why it is not working. The American people were expecting us to fix it.

In my opinion, after studying the bill at great length, analyzing it in detail, I don't believe it would have worked any better than the bill in 1986. So I made up my mind last year and I made up my mind this year that I was not going to support legislation that is not going to work. I was not going to support the 1986 bill. I was not going to vote for a bill that promises amnesty today and law enforcement in the future, and the amnesty occurs but the law enforcement does not. That is the fundamental thing.

Today, somebody handed me some polling data that sheds a little light on this weeks events. The article, posted on the Rasmussen Reports website is titled ``Support for an immigration bill falls.'' A poll conducted Monday and Tuesday night found that 23 percent of voters now support the bill, while 50 percent are opposed. Two-to-one opposed to the bill.

We have heard people say we need to do something, even if it is the wrong something or even if it will not work. We have heard the claim that the American people just want us to do something over and over again. That sounds good, I will admit. We certainly do have serious problems with our immigration system.

The Rasmussen Report says, however, that ``in the face of public opposition, some supporters of the legislation have argued that the compromise may not be perfect, but doing something is better than nothing. Voters have a different view--a solid plurality believes it would be better for the country to pass no bill at this time rather than letting the Senate compromise become law.'' And that is why people's phones have been ringing off the hook, because we are given a responsibility to deal with an important issue.

I love my colleagues. I tease them a lot. I call the group of them that wrote this bill the masters of the universe. They all met in some secret room somewhere, and they started plotting, working, and trying to do the right thing. They met and met and worked and worked, and they decided that they were going to tell America what we needed. They were going to figure it all out, and just explain to us what the real facts were and how this thing ought to be handled.

But, they are a bunch of politicians--good people but still they are politicians. They didn't invite anybody from the Border Patrol into their meetings to give them advice as to what is actually working on the borders. They didn't invite interior agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement to tell them how to fix the interior immigration problems. They did have, of course, direct and regular contact with big business. They had direct and regular contact with special advocacy groups, who had their list of demands. They were actively seeking out ways to gain the political support of this group and that group because that is what they think legislation is sometimes. But they forgot about the American people.

I just want to say that on this bill, the American people watched this process closely. On this bill, the American people kept up with it. On this bill, the American people were expecting this Congress to pass legislation that would significantly and dramatically improve the colossally broken system we have.

They didn't expect them to pass a bill that would double illegal immigration. They didn't expect them to be offering to pass a bill that would, according to the Congressional Budget Office just a few days ago, only reduce illegal immigration by 25 percent. After all of the things they were asking us to accept in this bill, we were only going to get a 25-percent reduction in illegal immigration? The American people didn't expect that the deal makers would offer a bill up that would say that after President Bush put the National Guard on the border, somebody who came across the border and ran past the National Guard and got into our country before January 1 of this year would be given amnesty and put on a path to citizenship in this country. That is not principled.

How can we ever assert the rule of law in America if we make a statement to the world that the border is closed, we call out the National Guard, and then anybody who runs by there and gets in, we say: OK, home free, home free, now you are on a path to citizenship. That is not good.

Last year, the bill said that anybody who got in after January 7, 2004, was not eligible for amnesty. This year, they moved the qualifying date to January 1, 2007. Why? I guess it was a political deal. I guess they didn't ask the American people what they thought was moral and just and fair and responsible and compassionate. The deal makers decided that on a political basis it made sense, I suppose. I am told that this is what it was--give here and give there and before you know it you have a bill.

I suggested last year that we have a legitimate guest worker program, and I was so happy to hear that promises were made this year that we would

have one that could actually work. I was excited about that. But as I began to examine it I didn't believe it would be a practical solution the way it was written.

I emphasized last year that people in a temporary worker program should not come for 3 years, as last year's bill did, with their family, and be able to extend again and again and then be expected to leave the country sometime in the future. So this bill was better in that regard, but it still allowed families to come with the person--20 percent--and others to come and visit, creating all kinds of possibilities for overstays in that regard. That is why the Congressional Budget Office projected a very large increase in visa overstays as a result of the way this bill was written in that regard.

I was very intrigued and excited that my suggestion last year--that we model our legislation on the Canadian system--was being considered. The administration said they liked this merit-based system. They liked the point system. They thought we ought to go more in that direction. Canada admits 60 percent of its people through immigration under a competitive, skill-based system because the Canadians have learned and have proven, if you talk to them, as I have, that persons who come in with any college, with a skill, and with a good work history--and if they speak English or French, they give extra points for that--very seldom go on welfare, very seldom take benefits from the government, and become properly productive citizens who pay taxes and become good citizens for Canada.

We have, at this time, only a mere 13 percent of our people coming in on the basis of their skills. Today, the overwhelming majority come in based on chain migration and family connections. I thought we were going to make a real move toward the Canadian system with this bill. I know Senator Kyl worked his heart out to try to do that, but when the final compromise was reached, he couldn't get a better deal than this, that this merit system would really not take effect for 8 years, and during the interim period, there would be a surge of chain migration numbers for 8 years, perhaps triple the current rate. To me, that was a political compromise too great. That is something I couldn't support.

Let me just speak briefly about how we came to the final vote tonight. I think the majority leader, Harry Reid, maybe wanted to get rid of this bill from the start. He has now begun to say it is President Bush's bill, but it was the Senate's bill. He called it up without a committee hearing. It is Senator Reid's bill, if you want to know the truth. He brought it up under rule XIV. It didn't even go to committee. The majority leader has that power. He called it up directly to the floor.

Yes, it had bipartisan support, but he was the one who enabled that to occur. The new bill was introduced after they called up the old bill. Then Reid tried to substitute a completely new bill, and then we debated that with not a great deal of time. For example, I had 20, 30 amendments filed. I got one amendment up for a vote. I tried to bring up a number of other amendments, and every time I have tried to bring one up, it was objected to. Senator Cornyn, one of the finest, most capable lawyers in the Senate, a former attorney general of Texas and justice on the Texas Supreme Court, got one amendment up for a vote. Senator Elizabeth Dole, from North Carolina, had an amendment dealing with drunk drivers--an important amendment. She tried to bring hers up, and it was objected to. This afternoon, there was only one amendment pending that actually had been called up and had been introduced, filed, and made pending.

So we had this discussion about having some votes this afternoon, and then we were told that we were going to re-vote on cloture tonight. What I want to say to my colleagues and anybody who is listening is that if cloture had been obtained tonight, after a half dozen more votes, no other amendments would have been pending.

So we simply had a little disagreement this afternoon. We said that we wanted to have other amendments pending so that if cloture were invoked, we would have amendments that could be voted on post cloture. In fact, we were working to pare down over 200 amendments that had been filed, to bring in those amendments to under 20 amendments, maybe even lower. That is when the majority leader decided to call another cloture vote, and that is the vote that failed, I would note, on a bipartisan basis. While 7 Republicans voted for cloture, 12 Democrats voted against the majority leader and against cloture.

We had not had sufficient time to debate this bill. We had not had sufficient time to have amendments. It will be almost a thousand pages when put in bill language. That is not a bill that can be passed in a couple of weeks. It needs more debate than that, and it was never taken to committee. The committee did not hear it, and no amendments were offered there. It was brought directly to the floor.

So I would just say that I think we do have a responsibility to treat people who come to our country, even those who come illegally, compassionately, fairly, justly, and according to good principles. We have a responsibility to create a legal system that works in America. I am afraid this bill didn't do it. That is my problem with the bill. I think that the American people agreed. If we come back again, the bill needs to be a vastly improved product. I would be glad to suggest some ways to make it better. In fact, I have before, and I will again.

Madam President, I thank the Chair, and I yield the floor.

Madam President, I wish to remember the life of Mark C. Smith, who was one of the most resourceful and brilliant entrepreneurs in the history of the State of Alabama. His departing this life on March 27, 2007, leaves an irreplaceable loss for his family, his home town of Huntsville, the State of Alabama, and the Nation. Few men in the history of America's free enterprise system have attained such lofty heights in business as Mark Smith. Starting with very little and coming from humble family beginnings, Smith invented, designed, and managed companies under his ownership and tutelage to heights that draw the envy of the corporate world.

Mark was raised in Birmingham, graduating in 1958 from Woodlawn High School. He was the son of parents who were both teachers. During high school, Smith became a ham radio buff and developed an interest in science. Upon winning first place in a science fair at Woodlawn, Smith's prize was a handshake from Dr. Von Braun. The young high school graduate saw this as a grand opportunity and boldly asked Dr. Von Braun for a summer job. Smith went on to attend the Georgia Institute of Technology, and over the next three summers he worked at NASA in Huntsville and Cape Canaveral.

During the summer preceding his last year of college, he was employed with SCI Systems, Inc., and upon earning an electrical engineering degree from Georgia Tech in 1962, he began full-time employment with SCI as an engineering manager. In 1969 his entrepreneurial spirit took hold, and he left SCI to cofound Universal Data Systems, UDS--out of his home garage and with $30,000 in savings. UDS, the first data communications company in Alabama, was quite successful and in 1979, with annual revenues of about $20 million, was sold to Motorola. At that time, Smith became president of the UDS-Motorola Division. In 1985, the proven visionary was ready to take on yet another challenge; he left UDS and cofounded ADTRAN, Inc. As CEO and chairman, Smith led the startup company of seven employees to become a publicly traded company in 1994, the same year ADTRAN announced a $50 million expansion of its facility. Today, with more than 1,600 employees and annual revenues approaching $500 million, the company is a worldwide leader in providing high-speed network access products to the telecommunications equipment industry.

Mark did not live to see the ultimate heights that the electronic communication industry will attain in the future. Entrepreneurs and engineers will someday produce faster and better equipment, but when they do they will use as a pattern some of Mark Smith's ideas, inventions, and procedures.

Madam President, I appreciate the Senator's comments about American law and principles. As a former U.S. attorney and attorney general, I share the general view. He mentions the historic privileges we have in America. But let me tell you, no one has a right to enter the United States of America. We decide who comes in and who does not.

That is a core principle of sovereignty. Every Nation in the world makes those decisions, if they are a functioning state, and you then allow people to enter on your terms, on whatever conditions they may be. The condition may be, you can enter as long as you are enrolled in a college, you can enter for a certain period of time, you can enter on a tourist visa to do a certain number of things.

But those conditions are not such that if you say someone cannot come here you violated the laws of America. If you say you can come to America but not if you have a history of being a sexual predator, what right does that violate? What principle of American law does that violate? I suggest none. We have every right to insist and ensure the immigration system of the United States serves the national interest. The national interest means you do not allow people to continue to stay in our country or to come to our country who have repeat DUIs or who sell drugs or who are associated with terrorists. How basic is that? Nobody has a constitutional legal right to demand entry into the United States of America. How much more basic can it be than that?

So that is where we are confused. It amazes me the lack of understanding and comprehension of what it is all about. We set the standards. We have the most generous immigration laws of almost any country in the world. It has been a big part of our heritage. We are not going to end immigration. Nobody wants to do that, or to act irrationally, and so forth.

But to set reasonable standards, as Senator Cornyn is attempting to do with his amendment, only makes common sense. For example, I have mentioned some of the loopholes. He fixes them. I give him every bit of credit for this: for standing firm, for insisting on this vote, after he has been objected to and objected to and blocked from getting his vote. But he stood firm on this issue. He is going to fix a number of the problems I wish to briefly mention.

Some aggravated felons who have sexually abused a minor are eligible for amnesty under this bill. They have no entitlement to amnesty. Nobody has entitlement to amnesty, whether they are perfectly wonderful citizens and all that. They are not entitled to that. This is a gift we give. So why would you want to give that to somebody who sexually abused a minor?

Well, the child molester who committed the crime, before this bill is enacted, is not barred from getting amnesty if their conviction document omitted the age of the victim. If the conviction document did not put the age down, then they are to be admitted under this bill. After there was some objection to it, they fixed that language for the future but did not fix it for the past or current convictions. So I think Senator Cornyn is correct. I support that portion of his amendment very strongly.

Another provision is that aliens with terrorism connections under this legislation are not barred from getting amnesty. They do not have a right to stay here. If we have any suggestion that someone in this country, now here, or someone who wants to come here is connected to terrorists, they do not have to be admitted. What kind of right do they have to demand to be admitted? If our State Department, in some country around the world, has information that a person is connected to terrorism, they do not have any right to demand to come here. They come at our pleasure, our sufferance.

So one of the things this bill, as written, does is it says an illegal alien seeking most of the immigration benefits must show good character. But last

year's bill--let me say this on the terrorism question--specifically barred aliens with terrorism connections from having the required good moral character to enter the United States. That is one of the things we say. You cannot come here unless you have good moral character. You cannot come here if you are a felon, a thief, a drug dealer or a child molester. Surely, that would make sense. So this bill eliminated that.

Another example, surprisingly, of this bill being weaker even than last year's fatally flawed bill: The bill's drafters have ignored the Bush administration's request that changes be made to the asylum, cancellation of removal, and withholding of removal statutes in order to prevent aliens with terrorist connections from receiving relief. The bill drafters were told about this by the Bush administration and were urged to put different language in, and they refused to do so, for reasons I cannot fathom.

But it begins to show a certain mindset. I think that mindset is we are somehow here to represent people who want to come into our country and stay in our country instead of representing the American people and the interests of the United States.

Last year, we had good moral character as a requirement. Good moral character involved not being connected to terrorists. But according to current law, an alien cannot have good moral character if they are a habitual drunkard, a majority of their income comes from illegal gambling, giving false testimony for immigration benefit purposes, they have been in jail for 180 days, they have been convicted of an aggravated felony or they have engaged in genocide, torture, or extrajudicial killings. That is current law we have. But this year's bill is completely missing these new terrorism bars that were in last year's bill, and the bill no longer requires good moral character. That is a matter that leaves us at greater risk than we need to be. It concerns me.

Another example. Instead of ensuring that members of violent gangs, such as MS-13, are deported, the bill will allow violent gang members to get amnesty as long as they renounce their gang membership on their application. That is the current law. Under the bill, being in a violent gang is not going to prevent you from qualifying for amnesty. The bill requires amnesty applicants to list--to list--you are required to list that gang membership on your application. Then you get a blank that says ``renunciation of gang affiliation.'' So if you check that blank and say you renounce it, then you get to stay in, perhaps.

So why don't we allow this: If an illegal alien has been a member of a violent international gang, such as Mara Salvatrucha 13, MS-13, why don't we say that blocks him or her from being eligible for the amnesty in the bill? Loyalty to the United States should be the requirement, not loyalty to some outside gang that is violent.

The night before last, I happened to turn on C-SPAN and catch a National Press Club conference by a series of law enforcement officers involved in the Border Patrol, the former chairman of the Border Patrol. They were ferocious in their criticism of this bill. I was surprised how strongly they felt about it.

Hugh Brien, himself an immigrant, was Chief of the Border Patrol from 1986 to 1989. He called the bill a sellout, a complete betrayal of the Nation, a slap in the face to millions of Americans who have come here legally like he had done. In 1986, he recalled: ``Our masters, our mandarins promised it would work.'' Of course, the 1986 bill did not. He also said, based on his experience in many years with the Border Patrol: ``It's a disaster.''

Kent Lundgren, the national chairman of the Association of Former Border Patrol Officers, said this: ``There are no meaningful criminal or terrorist checks'' in the legislation. He noted that the ``screening will not happen.'' He added Congress is lying about it.

Madam President, I thank the Chair and support the Cornyn amendment.

I think I am ready, Mr. President.

Mr. President, I thank Senator Kennedy for his courtesy, and I would just like to make some general comments about the earned-income tax credit and why I think this is important. I ask that I be notified in 20 minutes if I have gone that far.

The earned-income tax credit is one of the major--the major, in fact--transfer programs in the Federal Government. It is a payment of monies, in reality. It doesn't work the way it was intended, but in reality, it provides a substantial check every year to persons who are low-wage workers. It is for people who are trying to do well but are not making much money, so they give them a check to encourage work. I have felt for some time--and maybe I will talk with Senator Kennedy one day about it, and we might reach an agreement on this--I think it would be much better if tax credit were paid along with your paycheck. It is designed to increase--it is allowed, under the EITC, but we don't do it that way. You file a return, and the next year, after you have completed your year's work, they send you a large check. On average, the recipient receives a benefit of almost $1,800 a year; that is, the people who qualify receive that amount. Again, the people who qualify are individuals who are working in lower wage jobs, which, in fact, are the types of jobs most of the 12 million illegal aliens are doing. They are working at low-wage jobs. Therefore, we can expect there will be a disproportionate number of persons who will qualify for this tax credit.

Now, the tax credit was designed to encourage Americans to work-- American citizens. When it started in the 1970s under President Nixon, they thought there had to be some incentive so that you would get more money by working than by drawing welfare, or else you would just stay home and draw welfare. There still is a problem with that, in reality. But this bill was supposed to incentivize work, and that is why it was drafted the way it was and has continued to grow and become quite substantial. But, again, it was designed to take care of American citizens, our own people.

Now, we are into an immigration reform bill where we have 12 million people here who came into our country illegally. They are being considered for amnesty. They are going to be allowed to stay in this country and be given that right. Maybe some didn't want it or didn't expect it, but they will be given the right to stay here. But under present law, because they are not legally here, they are certainly not entitled to the earned-income tax credit. Unless they file fraudulent documents and receive it fraudulently, they don't get an earned-income tax credit.

So we say we are going to have a $1,000 fine that people must pay as part of a punishment for being in the country illegally, and it is not really amnesty because they pay a fine, but in reality, the fine can be paid on the installment plan, and only $200 has to be paid the first year when you apply for the Z visa. So under the bill, as I understand it--I think there is little dispute about it--as soon as this bill passes, everybody can come in and get a probationary legal status in America, and then before long, they are entitled to apply for and receive a Z visa that is good for 4 years. It can be renewed indefinitely. At some point, they can apply, if they so choose, for legal permanent residency.

What I want to tell my colleagues is that not only will we be providing amnesty to the persons who came into our country illegally for a $200 payment, we will be giving them--even for the temporary probationary status and the

Z visa, prior to legal permanent residency, the earned-income tax credit. I think that is quite a step. Indeed, you pay $200 for your fine, and you file your tax return next year and get a $1,800 check from Uncle Sam.

Don't be mistaken, the earned-income tax credit is for people who don't pay income tax. It is a gift from Uncle Sam. It is meant to encourage Americans to get out and work, not to encourage people to come into our country illegally to gain this benefit. So I just would say to my colleagues, this is an important principle.

According to the Congressional Budget Office--and they run the numbers on this--it is the largest single benefit program and cost of this bill in the first 10 years--not in the outyears; there are some big costs that aren't being calculated. But in the first 10 years, this is the largest direct single benefit.

Over the 2008 to 2017 period--

Ten years--

the Joint Tax Committee estimates that S.A. 1150 would

increase outlays for refundable tax credits by about $13

billion, the largest direct spending effect of the

legislation. Enacting 1150 would increase the amount of

refundable tax credits mainly by increasing the number of

resident aliens for income tax purposes.

In other words, it would increase the number of people eligible.

Resident aliens are taxed in the same manner as U.S.

citizens and thus could qualify for the refundable tax

credit.

They are taxed, but they are not going to be paying high taxes because many of them are lower income people, but they will get the tax credit.

So my amendment would reduce the bill's direct spending cost, the cost to the American taxpayer. Who pays the big check they get every year? Who pays the check they get every year? They are not paying it. It is the taxpayers, the American taxpayers. It is an additional reward on top of the amnesty that is provided. So my amendment would reduce the estimated cost of this legislation by nearly half, No. 1, and it is right, and it is fair.

Now, last year, my amendment--which I believed was justified, but this Congress didn't agree--said you would not receive the earned- income tax credit until you became a citizen. Why not? How is an illegal alien able to come here, not expecting the earned-income tax credit, and then be rewarded with it by our government? That never made sense to me.

But in this legislation--because I think it is important, and we can make a big difference here--in this legislation I have offered, it would simply say that during the time you have a probationary visa or a Z visa up until the time you become a legal permanent resident, you wouldn't get the earned-income tax credit. How much simpler is it than that?

I hope my colleagues will see that this is a perfectly logical amendment, and I would suggest it reflects on our mindset, our approach to this entire process, if we are not able to draw this kind of line as we go through passing--or attempting to pass--this historic piece of legislation. I really think we should give thought to that and ask ourselves what right does somebody who came into our country illegally, who has been here maybe for a number of years, expect to receive this benefit, where we say: OK, we are just going to give up; we are not going to make you go home; we will let you stay; you can have amnesty. By the way, you start receiving the earned-income tax credit of $2,000. How much sense does that make? I don't think that is good public policy. It raises questions about how serious we are about defining our immigration system in a way that works, that has bright lines, and carries out a logical policy. But I understand that people are determined to see that this goes forward.

Now, Senator Reid has offered an amendment that is going to be a side-by-side. This amendment is very short, and basically all the amendment says is--I don't have it before me. Our majority leader, our Democratic majority leader, is offering an amendment that says: Well, we will comply with all the current laws of the IRS, and you don't get the earned-income tax credit if you are illegal. Well, of course. That means zero--nothing. I have to tell my colleagues, I am amazed at that amendment, unless I have missed something entirely, because that is what it is all about. They won't be illegal when they are given the probationary status or the Z visa status. They become legal and would get it. I was going to meet with some of the White House people to discuss this issue. I don't think they understood it that way, and I am not sure the President understood that this was actually going to happen under the legislation. But if this bill becomes law, they would get it.

So you say: Well, maybe they wouldn't get it. Well, if they don't get it, why wouldn't you vote for my amendment, which quite plainly assures that they don't get it? Follow me?

So I don't understand this cover amendment. It is not even a fig leaf, I say to my colleagues. I don't think you are going to be able to hide behind the Reid amendment because it is not going to do anything but guarantee that persons who are here and are given this amnesty will pay $200 and then they will get to draw nearly $2,000 a year under the earned-income tax credit.

The amendment being offered by Senator Reid makes no sense to me. Maybe I missed something, but I don't think so. I would be delighted to hear what is in play. It is what you call a cover amendment. So what I say to my colleagues is, let's get realistic about what we are doing. Let's understand the cost this legislation is going to have. The Congressional Budget Office has found in their report--although it was written so that it is a little hard to find, but it is perfectly plain--the bill, over 10 years, will cost the American taxpayers $32 billion. A substantial chunk of that amount is the earned-income tax credit. They say the earned-income tax credit is for children. It is not for children, it is for American workers. You may get more if you have children, but it is not for children, it is for American workers.

I thank the Chair and reserve the remainder of my time on this issue.

Will the Senator yield for a question?

My question, I guess, Mr. President, would be something like this: Perhaps it could be true that the large number of job applications received by Wal-Mart facilities is because even though Wal-Mart does not pay great wages, they do have health care benefits and job security, as opposed to construction work. Would the Senator agree that if businesses raised wages at the construction sites, if they had jobs that had a more permanent status to them, and actually offered a retirement plan and health care benefits, they might get more people willing to work at the construction sites?

Is there any other time left?

I will be pleased to yield to the Senator from North Carolina.

I thank Senator Dole for her insight, sharing that important information, and for offering an amendment and demonstrating once again that good amendments dealing with very important issues are not being allowed to be considered. This is not a free and open debate. This is not a free opportunity to amend. The majority leader is controlling his machinery, the train is moving down the track, and very few amendments are being approved.

I have offered and filed quite a number. I have only gotten two amendments, and I said at the beginning that only one would be voted on. We are having the first vote on one I have offered.

Madam President, I ask unanimous consent--I see my colleague, Senator Kennedy, here--I ask unanimous consent that the pending business be set aside and I be allowed to call up amendment No. 1253.

Madam President, we have quite a number of other amendments. That is what we are going to hear when we offer any of them because we now have a cloture motion filed. If cloture is obtained and you don't have an amendment pending, you can't get a vote on it. We know what the game is, and it is not a free, open debate on one of the most important bills in the time that I have been in the Senate that we are considering today.

I would like to share a few more thoughts. Maybe I will have a few minutes left for Senator Lieberman. I know he wants more time than he has gotten so far. Senator Kennedy is maneuvering for me to give him some of my time and maybe I will be able to do that.

The earned-income tax credit will not be taken away from people who are illegally in the country today if my amendment is passed. The earned-income tax credit is a credit given to working individuals who have lower incomes to encourage people to work. That is what it is all about. It is for Americans and people legally here.

So what I propose is that we do not provide this, on average, almost $2,000-per-year paycheck from the U.S. Government, to people who came into the

country illegally and were given this probationary card status through their Z card status.

I am not offering an amendment to take the earned-income tax credit away after they become legal permanent residents. So if they become a legal permanent resident, they would be entitled to have the earned- income tax credit.

Last year I offered an amendment that said that you would not get the earned-income tax credit until you became an actual citizen. That was voted down. Why? I still am not sure. I still don't think that was a good vote. But at least we ought not to give this credit to someone who was here illegally a few days ago, and now we give them some sort of probationary status and they immediately start getting paychecks from the Federal Government.

I don't think that is what this system is about. People would be given a great thing. They would be given amnesty, they would be able to stay in the country legally, continue to work, and any family gets to stay with them. All of this is in this piece of legislation.

A lot of people think that is too generous, but that is what this legislation does. The next question is: What else do they obtain by virtue of having this legal status bestowed on them when they were illegal? They are not receiving the earned-income tax credit now. It is not something that is being taken away from them. It is a question of when are we going to bestow that additional benefit on people who were in our country illegally and how much of an incentive does this payment to them create for other people who want to come into our country illegally?

That is some of the confusion we have. In my view, the first thing you do to reduce the flow of illegal immigration into the country is to quit rewarding it by Federal largesse. That is the first thing. If you cannot go out and arrest everybody--and that is not practical--and we are not going to do these other things, at least don't give people extra financial benefits as a reward to coming into our country illegally.

I am very concerned about that. I think that it is not a little bitty matter because the--Madam President, I would ask that I be notified when there is 5 minutes remaining.

So what I would say to my colleagues is, this is going to cost a lot of money. You do not have to be trained in economics to understand that money comes from somebody. Who does the money come from? It comes from American workers and taxpayers, many of whom are having their wages depressed as a result of this huge flow of illegal labor. They are being asked to pay an earned-income tax credit check of $1,800, on average, to individuals who were illegal a few months before and possibly still have not completed the full background check. They still may not have completed the process to go to even a Z visa. Then they may be in a Z visa status for some time.

I know it is said it is not amnesty because they have to pay a fine. How much is the fine? $1,000. They pay a $1,000 fine. Well, they do not actually pay a $1,000 fine. When they get this probationary status visa, they only pay $200. They pay the rest of it on an installment. Nobody has stated and set out how they are going to pay it. Presumably, they can pay it for 8 years or more.

So a person here illegally under the legislation that is now before us, that person would obtain legal status in the country, be able to work, and would then be entitled to receive an earned-income tax credit.

So they would receive that earned-income tax credit, which would be, on average, almost $2,000, and they would pay only $200. Now, that is a pretty good deal, if you can get it, it seems to me. It is not necessary. It is not necessary as a matter of law, and it is not necessary as a matter of morality. It is certainly contrary to sound principles of Government. We should not do that.

I urge my colleagues to support this amendment. It is an amendment that would impact our Treasury by perhaps, according to the Congressional Budget Office, $10 billion in the next 10 years--$10 billion. So it is quite a sizable chunk.

Madam President, I see my friend, Senator Lieberman is here. I yield the remainder of the time I have left to him. How much time remains?

Mr. President, this is not a cover vote. It is not a cover vote at all. It leaves the bill exactly as it was. The problem with the legislation is that those people who are today illegal and would be made legal through the probationary status visa or the Z visa would be entitled to receive the earned-income tax credit, which is, on average, nearly $1,800 per recipient. That earned-income tax credit is a direct payment from the taxpayers of America.

This amendment--unlike the vote you cast last year when I raised it-- would allow the earned-income tax credit when you get a green card but not when you are on a Z visa or probationary visa. So this is less far- reaching than the amendment I offered last year.

I urge that this amendment not be accepted.

Mr. President, the earned-income tax credit was designed and has been in effect as a support for American workers. That is what it is. Four million people who do not have children receive it.

This amendment says those people who are here illegally today who are made legal under this bill through the Z visa or the probationary status who have not yet obtained legal permanent residence would not get this benefit. The people are supposed to pay a fine, $1,000. They only have to pay $200. They pay that $200 fine, sign up, and they get a $2,000 earned-income tax credit, which is basically a check from the United States Government.

The people who are here illegally would be, under this bill, made legal, be allowed to work. They are not receiving earned-income tax credit today. There is no moral, legal, or principled reason to give them that in the future until they become a legal permanent resident.

I move to lay that motion on the table.

The motion to lay on the table was agreed to.

Amendment No. 1194

Mr. President, I have offered amendments on a number of occasions and had asked those amendments be made pending, and set aside the pending business to make certain amendments pending. I have had objection.

At this time I once again ask that amendment No. 1323, which we referred to as the Charlie Norwood amendment, that deals with empowering State and local law enforcement officers to participate through the normal process, if they choose, be in order.

Mr. President, it is pretty clear what has been occurring is very few amendments have had the opportunity to get a real debate. This is an important amendment. It deals with whether local law enforcement can actually participate in any meaningful way in the enforcement of Federal immigration laws. I will tell you what the facts are, with the help from my fine staff chief counsel, Cindy Hayden.

We wrote a law review article for Stanford University Law School that dealt with this issue, and it is a very important issue. It is one well-understood by the legal professionals who have been behind the scenes crafting this legislation.

The ninth circuit has held that visa overstays, which make up 40, maybe 45 percent, and in the future, if this bill becomes law, maybe more than 50 percent of the people illegally in the country, would be visa overstays.

Those persons, if involved in some traffic accident, like many of the terrorists were before 9/11--they were stopped for traffic violations by local police officers, but because that is not a normal criminal violation, as is the case for people who have come across the border, they are not detainable under the ninth circuit ruling by local police officers.

So it is a weird thing. Several other circuits seem to have held differently. But the ninth circuit case was most on point. Lawyers for police departments all over America are telling their police departments: You may not have authority to hold anybody, so even if you apprehend someone you are concerned about who could even be a terrorist, like those people involved in 9/11, or like John Malvo, who was involved in those murders, was stopped for traffic violations, we do not have a system in place to even allow local police to detain them for even a short period of time until they are turned over to the Federal authorities.

That is the way the system ought to work. There are 600,000 to 800,000 State and local law enforcement officers in America. We are not trying to mandate that they do anything. But in the course of their business, their normal duties, if they come upon people in violation of the law, they ought to be able to hold them and turn them over to the Federal authorities.

I am disappointed we are not getting to move forward on that amendment, very disappointed. We had this matter sort of fixed in Judiciary Committee last year. Then an amendment came up--somebody figured out the significance of it, and that amendment took it out. Ever since, any effort to get that to be made a part of this fix has been undermined and blocked.

I say to my colleagues, I do not believe anybody can say they have a commitment to having an enforceable immigration system if they throw roadblocks up that undermine the ability of State and local law enforcement to participate in their normal course of their duties by detaining people they come upon who are here illegally. You would think that would be an easy thing to get done. I have said before, it seems when it comes to immigration, many things can be accepted, many things people approve of. But if you come up with something that actually is very effective, that is what gets objected to. This is something that is critical. It is a testament and a test of our will and our seriousness as a body.

If we are not prepared to pass legislation like the Norwood amendment, named after former House Member Charlie Norwood from Georgia, who died recently, if we are not prepared to do that, we are not serious about this.

I will say one more thing. Time and time and time again, I have heard Members of this body say: Oh, we cannot vote for this amendment, or you must vote against that amendment. Why? Because we have an agreement. A compromise. It violates our compromise. Well, who was in on that compromise? I am frankly getting tired of that. That is not satisfactory to me.

The question really should be, is this amendment good or not good for the legitimate interests of the Nation? No one small group of people have a right to meet in secret with special interest groups and write an immigration bill and ram it down the throat of this Senate. I oppose it. It is not right. You can agree or disagree on these amendments, but do so on the merits, whether or not it actually makes sense, not on some deal made by some advocacy group or some business interest. That is not what this Senate is all about.

I hope today the people will begin to see that a small group of Senators who meet in secret and plot out a bill, that if printed in actual bill language would be 1,000 pages, don't have the power to say we can't have amendments and we can't change it, and if you do get an amendment up, we are all going to stick together and vote it down because it doesn't comply with our little compromise.

The masters of the universe are playing a tough game here. I have called them that affectionately. I respect the Members who have attempted to do what maybe they thought was right. But when you look at the bill, it is a product of a political compromise. A group of politicians met in secret and wrote a bill that is exceedingly technical, exceedingly important.

Let me tell you who was not there in this meeting. The American people were not there. Who was advocating for the American people?

I will tell you another group who was not there. That is the law enforcement agencies that are charged with enforcing our laws at the border. They weren't there. As a matter of fact, they had a press conference a couple of days ago. They were at the national press club and made a presentation. These are senior retired officials who had many decades of experience in enforcing our laws at the border. They uniformly condemn this legislation, as do the Border Patrol Agents Association. They condemn it roundly. Hugh Brien, himself an immigrant, became chief of the Border Patrol from 1986 to 1989. I started making notes on C-SPAN the night before last. I just happened to

turn it on. He said this bill is a ``sell out, a complete betrayal of the nation, a slap in the face to millions coming here legally.''

He referred to the people in 1986 who passed the 1986 act and promised it would do things as our masters and our mandarins, who said the bill was going to work and it never worked. He said:

Based on my experience, it's a disaster.

Kurt Lundgren, national chairman of the Association of Former Border Patrol Agents said this:

There are no meaningful criminal or terrorist checks in the

bill.

He said:

Screening will not happen.

He said:

Congress is lying about it.

With regard to the proposal that record checks would be performed within 24 hours, he said:

There's no way records can be done in 24 hours. As to the

proposal that Senator Cornyn tried to fix that allows gang

members, MS-13 international gang organization groups to get

amnesty by simply saying they renounce their allegiance to

the gang, he said:

What planet are they from?

Jim Dorcy, an agent for 30 years and inspector general with the Department of Justice that handled investigations into all these areas involving the Border Patrol, internal investigations, he said:

The 24-hour check is a recipe for disaster.

Referring to the bill, Mr. Dorcy, 30 years with the Border Patrol said:

I call it the al-Qaida dream bill.

Roger Brandemuehl, chief of the Border Patrol from 1980 to 1986, second one I am calling on here that was chief of it, said:

We have fallen into a quagmire.

He said:

The so-called comprehensive reform is neither comprehensive

nor reform.

He said:

It's flawed.

He set forth some principles that he thought would actually work. When asked had he been consulted by the masters of the universe who cobbled this bill together, a bunch of politicians who have never arrested anybody in their lives, they joked about it. They never have been consulted. Nobody wanted to know what they knew or cared about.

I will just wrap up and say I am not comfortable with the way this bill is going. I think we have been slow-walked in the way the majority leader and the group that is trying to move this bill forward is doing this. They are objecting to having amendments pending. So when cloture is filed, if an amendment is not pending, it fails. It can't be voted on postcloture. So this way they have been able to maintain control over the amendment process and will be able to maintain it, even if cloture is obtained tomorrow. I don't know what will happen tomorrow, but I know this: There are a lot of good amendments. I have seen some of the amendments Senator Cornyn has that are important. I know some of the amendments I have are important to having a good, lawful immigration system. There remain major flaws in this legislation. We should not pass it in its present form.

In rebuttal to the constant refrain that somehow this bill is going to end the lawlessness and create a lawful system, I point out that the Congressional Budget Office, just 2 years ago, issued their analysis of the bill and concluded there would only be a 25-percent reduction in the number of people coming into our country illegally. We have gone through all this, and we are only going to get a 25-percent reduction in the number of people who come here illegally, when we arrested last year over a million people. What kind of system is this?

I wish the principles and goals contained in the talking points that were bandied about early on in this process could have been achieved. I had hoped they would and said some good things about it because I thought some of the principles involved in this year's process were a bit better than last year, but the truth is, when you read the fine print, very little progress was made in those directions, and the major flaws continue. I just wish it weren't so. But that is my opinion of it. I don't think we are on the road to improving the bill. I don't think we are proceeding effectively to allow full debate and amendment.

I yield the floor.

Amendment No. 1311, as Modified, to Amendment No. 1150

Madam President, I thank Senator Kyl for his good remarks. I thought perhaps tomorrow I would have the ability to focus on our

loss, but I will attempt tonight to say a few words about our colleague, Craig Thomas. I loved Craig Thomas. He was a person who came from the West. He understood where he came from. He understood the values with which he was raised, and he reflected those daily in his work in the Senate without ever bragging about it or talking about it. People just knew it. He was a man of character and integrity, a man who, as Senator Kyl indicated, never allowed personal ego to interfere with his commitment to serve his constituents and his Nation.

We had a visit to Iraq together not too long ago. Things had not been going well. He would ask penetrating questions. He would ask: When are the Iraqis stepping up and how much are they doing so? How long do we continue to put our troops at risk if they are not carrying their load?

He did it in a way that was sincere and raised fundamental questions of great importance.

Craig liked issues. He believed in a series of principles that made America great. He cared about those principles. For a time, he volunteered to come to the floor and be a part of a message team for the Republican Senate Members and spent a good bit of time at it--over a year or two. During that time he would articulate the basic premises and values that I think are foundational for the Republican Party and for most Americans.

I would say to our wonderful friend Susan, our prayers and our sympathies are with you. We can only imagine the loss you have sustained. We have watched in these past months the courage that Craig had displayed as he suffered from the terrible disease that he had. We saw the strength that he had, his refusal to stay at home but his determination to be at work. I had several examples of it in which I talked to him, and I said it is not necessary for you, you need to rest up. He knew he was susceptible to infection. But he was determined to fulfill his responsibilities as a Senator and he did so in a way that all could be proud.

He ran the race and he fought the fight. He served his country with great skill and ability. Our respect and love is extended to the family and our prayers are with him and the family.

I yield the floor.

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

I ask to speak as in morning business.

Mr. President, a number of things continue to be revealed as we analyze this monumental piece of legislation which purports to comprehensively reform immigration law in America and, indeed, any comprehensive reform bill would be extensive because it is an incredibly complex subject with many moving parts, many legal niceties and complexities, all of which, if we are going to have a system that works, need to come into place.

It has been stated repeatedly by those who have proposed and promoted the legislation which is before us today that this legislation will secure the border and we will have a lawful system of immigration in the future. Those claims have been made repeatedly. The proponents have said they are going to have additional Border Patrol agents, and so forth. Indeed, the PowerPoint that the White House used to make their presentations early on promised to ``secure U.S. borders'' and ``not to repeat the 1986 failure.''

Others are saying the same thing. One of the Senators who is involved in the process said, ``I am delighted we are going to secure the border.'' Another Senator said, ``This legislation will finally accomplish the extraordinary goal of securing our borders.'' Another said, ``The agreement we just reached is the best possible chance we have to secure our borders. In this legislation we are doubling the border patrol; we are increasing detention space.'' Another Senator said, ``This will restore the rule of law. Without the legislation, we will have anarchy.'' Another one said, ``We started out with 18,000 additional border patrol officers. We will increase the detention capacity.'' And so on and so forth. Even our former Governor Jeb Bush and Ken Mehlman wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal and said, ``It will make sure our borders become secure.''

``We have had broke borders in this country for 20 years.'' That is the truth. ``It is time we get them fixed.'' That is the truth.

Then they add, ``And this bill will do just that.''

Okay. There are many more I could quote along that line. But I hope, therefore, that every member of our body who understands the Congressional Budget Office and the work that organization does, how it is designed to analyze statutory language in our legislation to give us a budget score and other analysis of what that legislation is all about, they made a tremendously significant announcement yesterday, one that is quite frightening and all of us should pay attention to.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, the new Senate bill will only reduce net annual illegal immigration by 25 percent. It will add 550,000 visa overstays to the illegal population by 2017, and up to 1 million visa overstays by 2027.

In the section titled ``Effects on the United States Population,'' the CBO states, and I quote their article, their report:

CBO estimates that implementing those requirements

[enforcement and verification requirements] would reduce the

net annual flow of illegal immigrants by one-quarter.

Twenty-five percent. Then they go on to note the problem with visa overstays, in addition, saying this:

Other aspects of the legislation are likely to increase the

number of illegal immigrants, in particular, through people

overstaying their visas from the guest worker and H-1B

programs.

CBO estimates that another 1.1 million people would be

added by 2017 as a result of the guest worker program, about

half of them authorized workers and dependents, the remainder

the result of unauthorized overstays. That figure would grow

to 2 million by 2027.

What I want to say to my colleagues is--and those people who have worked hard on the bill to try to create a piece of legislation that politically they think can be passed, and they worked together with special interest groups and everybody but the U.S. Border Patrol, and everybody but the American people who had an interest in immigration, they all plotted on how to write this thing up so they can eliminate political problems and split babies in half--all of that is supposed to create a system that first and foremost would create a lawful system of immigration, would eliminate the illegality and create border security.

Now we have the Congressional Budget Office telling us that at best it is only going reduce illegal immigration 25 percent. As a price for that, we are supposed to grant amnesty to 12 million people who are here, provide options for chain migration to continue for 8 years, denying during that time highly competitive people from all over the world who want to come here an opportunity to come here, and delay some of the things in the bill that I think are positive and ought to become law.

I want to tell my colleagues once more, think about this as you consider whether you can justify supporting the legislation. Because if it is going to reduce the illegal flow into this country by 25 percent, and actually through the guest worker program is going to allow more people to overstay, then we have got a problem. You see, visa overstays are already nearly 40 percent of the illegal population. Those are people who come into the country legally, they stay here through their allotted time; they just do not leave when the time is up. They stay, they overstay.

Under the plan we have here that has a temporary guest worker program, that would have after the first year some 400,000 temporary workers here at a given time, their parents could come to visit them, their spouses could come to visit them. Even spouses could come to visit if the spouse does not certify they intend to return and stay in their home country; a real tipoff that they intend to stay illegally in the United States if they are not entitled to stay; they want to stay illegally. So I think those are matters that are important to us.

I also note there is a glaring omission in the trigger language of the legislation, and that omission is the U.S. exit visa, the U.S. visa exit portion. In other words, when you come into the country with a biometric card, you are approved to work as a temporary worker at some place, and you do your duty, you are supposed to stay 1 year, a season, you are supposed to stay 2 years, and then return. What happens when you return or do not return?

Ten years ago we required that by 2005, we have a recording system that records your exit from the country, like you may have when you go to work and you record your time clock out when you leave work. Therefore, we know if the person who came left when they were supposed to leave, and you know if they did not.

That is not in the bill. That is not required as a part of the requirement before the amnesty takes place. I wanted to share that with my colleagues. I think it should cause a great deal of uneasiness for all of us. It makes you wonder how committed the drafters of this legislation--and frankly, a lot of lawyers and people with experience in immigration and some of them not even Senators, were deeply involved in all of this in writing the legislation. I am not sure everybody caught all of these things. We are just now hearing what is in the bill, frankly.

So however they drafted it, whoever wrote this in, time and again you see provisions in the bill--and I have listed 20; we will soon have 25 loopholes of this kind and nature that I think indicate the drafters were not as committed to enforcement as they have suggested. Oftentimes, as I noted, drafters are not the Senators who did not do all of the fine-printing themselves.

I want to note one thing in the CBO report. It has been stated more than once.

Mr. President, I see the majority leader here. I can delay other activity.

I wanted to raise this issue. I would be glad to yield to him. I will wrap up and say one more thing.

It was repeatedly noted that the score by the Congressional Budget Office indicated the bill had minimal cost to the taxpayer over the first 10 years. Now we knew without dispute that in the second 10 and even in the decades that go beyond that, the cost surges. But even in the first 10, they said there would be little, if any, cost. But if you read their latest report in detail, you will note that is only true if you consider Social Security taxes paid by those people who are legalized under this bill.

But, you see, that should not be counted and will not be counted in a budget situation, because the money paid to Social Security is set aside for that person's retirement. If they pay into Social Security now, they are going to draw it in retirement later. That is an off- budget matter. That is a Social Security matter. That income should not be counted. When you eliminate that money for Social Security, you come out with a $33 billion cost in the first 10 years of this legislation, according to our own Congressional Budget Office. Those numbers will surge in the decades to come.

I yield the floor.

The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Menendez.) The majority leader.

Mr. President, as I understand the procedure the leader has been exercising, it is only one or two amendments are allowed to be placed in the pending category, and if one attempts to bring up an amendment, leadership objects.

I tried to bring up an amendment Friday, and there was an objection to make it pending. I tried to bring up an amendment Monday. There was an objection on a very--we are sort of being slow walked. I would ask the leader, would he allow us to bring up a substantial number of amendments and get them pending, so if he files for cloture and got it, you would have a chance to get those amendments voted on? If they are not pending, we will not get to vote on them.

Mr. President, there are two problems with the legislation, as detailed in a 5- or 6-page memorandum from the Department of Justice, Richard Hertling, the principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General who opposes this legislation. First, it falsely asserts in the findings matters that slander America incorrectly. It finds that thousands of individuals were subjected to devastating violations of civil rights through arrest, internment, property confiscation, deportation, and detrimental effects still being experienced; whereas, the Department of Justice asked the senior historian at the U.S. Holocaust Museum about this language and he found that language was outrageously exaggerated and was inaccurate.

That is in the legislation. When asked would Senator Feingold accept an amendment that prohibited reparations--and reparations have been done in some of these cases--that language was not accepted.

I am sorry, I did not hear the majority leader.

Mr. President, with regard to that, I have amendments I offered last Thursday and Friday and Monday that were not accepted. I was going to ask if those amendments could be made pending in addition to the nine amendments which were filed this week which I would like to make pending so we can have votes on them.

Mr. President, for clarification, two amendments are basically the same amendment. We would only vote on one pending that I offered last week. In addition, last week, I filed two more amendments, and an objection was made to making them pending. So I renew my offer to at least make those two amendments pending. I filed them this morning.

Mr. President, I take that as an objection to my request.

Would the majority----

Mr. President, I appreciate the role of the majority leader. I have great affection for the majority leader. He is an effective leader for his agenda. But with regard to what is happening now, we need to fully understand that by utilizing the ability he has as a leader and as other members of his party--they have objected to calling up amendments and making them pending. When you object to making an amendment pending, all you have is a filed amendment. And when you file cloture, amendments that are not pending are not entitled to be voted on.

So, in effect, we are at the mercy of the majority leader. He has not allowed a full and vigorous offering of amendments and votes on those amendments. I know people can sometimes ask for too many votes and abuse the process, but we really are dealing with a monstrous bill that is very complex and has a loophole here and a loophole there that can place the bill in such a situation that it really is not enforceable and will not work, and there are a host of problems, a host of loopholes in the bill. This bill has been moving forward to passage under the railroad system we have here.

Let me remind everybody how it happened. First, 2 weeks before we had our recess, the old bill, last year's bill that the House refused to even take up, was brought up without committee hearings this year and brought up by the majority leader under rule XIV for consideration and debate. So about a week goes by, and then come last Tuesday before our recess, Tuesday morning, he plops down on this floor an amendment but really a complete substitute. If put in proper bill language, it would probably be nearly a thousand pages. It is a substitute, a bill never seen before, a bill--except maybe a few days by people who got their hands on it--a bill that has never gone through committee was put down, and the majority leader indicated he wanted to vote on it that week and we were going to have

a vote on Friday, and there is was a lot of push back. He agreed to put it off.

We only had a few votes last week. We didn't vote last Friday. We didn't have the bill up even on Monday. So for only 3 days the week before the recess, we were engaged with actual amendments on this legislation. Then we come back, and on Monday of this week, we had a few Senators show up, no votes, and a few of us talked a little bit, and that was it. So nothing was done Monday. I recall I did offer to bring up amendments and asked to bring up amendments and make pending amendments last Thursday, last Friday, and Monday of this week.

I just want to say that we are not moving in a legitimate way. This was a completely new bill which was offered as a substitute to last year's bill. Senator Specter, the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, who supports this legislation, said in retrospect we should have gone to committee with it. I say that would have helped to have had a little bit of sunshine on it. But as we examine the bill in more depth, as we look at it more closely, what we see is that as sunlight falls on the mackerel, it begins to smell more and more, I have to tell you.

As it was promoted to me by the White House talking points and by Senators who thought it was a good piece of legislation, I had some belief that it could be progress over last year. Indeed, I thought there was a real potential to make a bill this year that I could support and with which we could make progress. But as we have examined it, it fails to meet the promises that were contained in those principles set forth as they were writing up the bill. It just does not. It does not have good enforcement. It does not. The trigger mechanism that guarantees enforcement before amnesty is weak and ineffectual. The shift to merit-based, skill-based immigration is ineffectual, and it puts off for 8 years, and we have people offering amendments to weaken that even further. So those were good principles that were stated but did not become reality.

I saw part of the debate on the TV in the cloakroom a few minutes ago and people were saying this is going to make the country safe, and we need to pass it because it is going to make us safe. Well, let us talk about some of the loopholes that are in this legislation still. I have listed 20. I think we probably have a lot more than that which we could have listed, but I will share some of the weaknesses.

This is as a result of the fact that individuals in the U.S. Border Patrol were not consulted in how to write the bill. If they had been consulted, some of these weaknesses wouldn't have been here. It is interesting, however, that some of these weaknesses were pointed out and complained of, but the drafters refused to listen. Why not?

For example, loophole No. 5: Legal status must be granted to illegal aliens 24 hours after they file an application--must be granted legal status--even if the alien has not yet passed all appropriate background checks.

Last year, the bill called for 90 days to complete the background checks. Yes, some aspects can be completed within a few minutes or a few hours, but a lot of things cannot. What if the person is named John Smith? There are a hundred John Smiths. How are you going to check those? A thousand John Smiths. I think this is a weakness.

In fact, the Border Patrol experts who called a press conference yesterday raised that particular point in a number of ways. Kent Lundgren, the national chairman of the Association of Former Border Patrol Agents, was contemptuous of the bill and said there are ``no meaningful criminal or terrorist checks'' in the bill. He said, ``There is no way records can be done in 24 hours.''

Jim Dorcy, an agent with 30 years experience, and who has also moved up to inspector general of the Department of Justice, said: ``24-hour check is a recipe for disaster.''

Then he went on to say, ``I call it the al Qaeda Dream Bill.'' That was from a TV program I happened to catch last night on C-SPAN, a National Press Club presentation by a group of former Border Patrol officers, and I am going to quote from them a little more in a minute.

Look at loophole No. 7. They say this bill will make us safer, but under the bill that is before us today, illegal aliens with terrorism connections are not barred from getting amnesty. An illegal alien with terrorist connections is not barred from getting amnesty. An illegal alien seeking most immigration benefits normally would have to show ``good moral character.''

For all its flaws, last year's bill specifically barred aliens with terrorism connections from being able to meet the definition of ``good moral character.'' How simple is that? And from being eligible for amnesty. But this year's bill does neither. This is another example of a provision in this year's bill that make it weaker than last year's bill, and I am finding this more and more.

We were told this bill was much better than last year's bill. I even told people that I think this is going to be a better bill than last year's. I am interested in what is contained in it. But repeatedly I am finding provisions like this one that indicate this bill is weaker than last year's.

Additionally, the bill's drafters ignored the Bush administration's request that changes be made in the asylum, cancellation of removal, and withholding of removal statutes in order to prevent aliens with terrorist connections from receiving relief. Last year's section 204 of the bill added the new terrorism bars to good moral character.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that I be given an additional 20 minutes.

Last year's bill added new terrorism bars to the good moral character requirement and required that an alien prove they have good moral character. Under the Immigration and Naturalization Act, the INA, an illegal alien must have good moral character to receive most of the immigration benefits, such as cancellation of removal from being here illegally.

But according to the current law, the law in effect today, an alien cannot have good moral character if they are habitual drunkards, get the majority of their income from illegal gambling, have given false testimony for immigration purposes, have been in jail for 180 days, have been convicted of an aggravated felony, or have engaged in genocide, torture, or extrajudicial killings. Those are some of the things that bar you from good moral character. This year's bill, however, is completely missing these new terrorism bars, and the bill no longer requires good moral character as a prerequisite to amnesty.

I wonder what this tells us about the mindset of the people who are actually putting the pencil to paper and drafting this legislation. Surely our Senators didn't fully understand it. But I have to say I am particularly troubled, because the Bush administration, as much as they have wanted a bill that would be exceedingly generous to immigrants, wanted this language strengthened, and the committee, the group that wrote the bill, rejected their request, which is hard for me to believe.

Additionally, during the course of the negotiations, the Bush administration requested that language be added to the bill to make sure that terrorism bars kept aliens from being granted asylum, cancellation, and the withholding of removal. Those requests should have been included and they were not. So one of the amendments I want to see voted on would be to restore the bars--the same or similar language we had in last year's bill that they took out over the objection of the administration.

Another example of a weakness in our provisions is some aggravated felons who have sexually abused a minor will be eligible for amnesty under this bill. A child molester who committed the crime of molestation before the bill is enacted is not barred from getting amnesty if their conviction document fails to state the age of the victim. The bill, after someone raised this problem, corrected this problem, but it was only for future child molesters and did not close the loophole for current or past child molesters.

In some States, the sexual abuse of a minor can result in a misdemeanor conviction. Those convictions are not

always considered an aggravated felony for immigration or deportation purposes. This is not an uncommon problem. There have been lawsuits and appeals over this very issue. This is not uncommon.

One study, according to these Border Patrol experts at their press conference yesterday, indicated a report out of Atlanta found that 250,000 of the 12 million illegal aliens here may have been involved in the sexual abuse of a minor. That is a lot of people. Why should we give amnesty and citizenship to those who may have been involved in those kinds of criminal violations? Citizenship in the United States requires good moral character.

We don't have to accept everybody who wants to be a citizen. We don't have to allow anyone who broke into our country to ever become a citizen. If they have broken into our country and are here illegally and they ask for amnesty, we have every right to say you don't get it if you are a child molester or have terrorist connections.

Look at loophole No. 8. This one is a bit amazing, I think, for anyone, and I find it difficult to believe. I am not making this up. This is in the bill on page 289. Instead of ensuring that members of violent gangs, such as MS-13, are deported, the bill will allow violent gang members to get amnesty as long as they renounce their gang membership on their application. It has a question there: Are you a member of a gang? If you said yes, the next question is: Do you renounce your membership? And if you say yes, I renounce my membership, you get to stay and become a citizen. Under this bill, it will not prevent amnesty. On page 289, the bill requires that you list gang memberships.

Why do we allow this? If an illegal alien will be a member of a violent international gang, such as the Mara Salvatrucha 13, the famous MS-13, a violent international gang involved in murders, drugs, and all kinds of crimes, why don't we say that blocks him from being eligible for amnesty under the bill? Now, if they are a citizen, OK, they get to stay in the country. They can be a gang member. But if they are not a citizen and they are here illegally and are petitioning to be given amnesty, I would say they shouldn't be given it. They should be prohibited.

Obviously, the loyalty to these illegal criminal gangs is such that it is contrary to the ideals of American citizenship in which your loyalty is to the United States of America. As Kris Kobach, a former top attorney at the Department of Justice, stated in a Heritage Foundation Web memo, posted after the new substitute bill was introduced, titled ``Rewarding Illegal Aliens: Senate Bill Undermines The Rule of Law'':

More than 30,000 illegal alien gang members operate in 33

States--30,000 illegal alien gang members operate in 33

States--trafficking in drugs, arms, and people. Deporting

illegal-alien gang members has been a top ICE priority.

It is one of the top priorities of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement organization. That is what they do. The Senate bill would end that. I am quoting Mr. Kobach.

To qualify for amnesty, all a gang member would need to do

is note his gang membership and sign a renunciation.

I ask again, what kind of mindset is at work here? Is our goal to please every illegal alien, to make sure every illegal alien gets to stay in the country regardless or is it to serve our legitimate national interests? I suggest any immigration bill we pass should serve our national interest. There is nothing wrong with that. Our responsibility is to America, to the people in America. Somehow we have gotten that confused.

There are good people in this body who are more concerned about how not to exclude anybody, to make sure everybody who is here gets to stay. And somehow, some way, through a maneuver or signing a document saying you renounce your gang membership, you will get to stay. It raises serious questions in my mind about how this bill was written.

Let me mention we may have a vote on this, I think tomorrow. This is amazing to me. Aliens who have already had their day in court, those who have been given and received a final order of removal, who have signed a voluntary departure order, or had reinstatement of their final orders of removal--that is they got a delay on their final order of removal and they got a stay--they are eligible for amnesty under the bill.

The same is true for aliens who have made a false claim to citizenship, for those who have engaged in document fraud. More than 636,000 alien fugitives could be covered by this one loophole--page 285 of the bill waives the following inadmissibility grounds. It waives these grounds that would normally be a basis for inadmissability.

No. 1, ``Failure to attend a removal proceeding.'' You have been released on bail. They said: You are believed to be here illegally. The court hearing is going to be 3 weeks from today. We will release you on your own recognizance. You just sign a document or post a small bail and you show up at the court hearing 3 weeks from today, 2 weeks from today, 2 months from today.

What if they don't show up? What if they didn't show up, they were apprehended, ordered to show up in court and didn't show up--amnesty-- OK, that is excluded.

Another category, ``Final orders of removal for alien smugglers.'' If you have been apprehended, you have been ordered removed because you were proven to be involved in alien smuggling, smuggling of other people into our country--coyotes: You are OK. That is OK. You get to stay, too.

``Aliens unlawfully present after previous immigration violations or deportation orders.'' You have been caught for previous violations. You have been ordered deported. You are back again. You are excluded and you get to stay. And aliens who have previously been removed--we spend a lot of money. We fly people back to Brazil and Honduras and Indonesia and China. What if they come again? Do they get amnesty, too? Yes, they do.

This language appears to be in conflict with another statute that suggests otherwise. But when you read it, my legal team and I agree that the court would clearly rule that this specific language would be such that those individuals would get to stay in the country.

The list goes on. Loophole No. 10. The talking points we were provided with that indicated this to be a good bill and that we should be supportive of it emphasize that the new bill we have would promote greater assimilation of those who come here to our country and greater English proficiency--both of which I think are good ideas and we need to work on and should be a part of any immigration legislation that is passed. I believe that. However, the bill doesn't do it. Illegal aliens are not required to demonstrate any proficiency in English for more than a decade after they have been granted amnesty.

You have heard people say we are requiring English. We are not requiring it for 10 years. Learning English is not required for illegal aliens to receive the probationary benefits or the first 4-year Z visa or the second 4-year Z visa.

The first Z visa renewal, beginning on the second 4-year visa, requires only that the alien demonstrate an ``attempt'' to learn English by being ``on a waiting list for English classes.'' Passing a basic English test is required only for a second renewal, the third 4- year Z visa, and then the alien only has to pass the test ``prior to the expiration of the second extension of Z status,'' 12 years down the road.

The bill's sponsors claim they have to learn English before being granted amnesty. That is not true. Nothing in the bill requires the illegal alien to have any English skills before receiving probationary status, before receiving the first Z visa that lasts for 4 years. Only upon filing for renewal of the Z visa up to 6\1/2\ years down the road does the illegal alien have to meet any language requirement. At that time, the requirement is fulfilled with the most minimal effort: ``Demonstrating enrollment in'' or being on a ``waiting list for English classes.''

Second, when the alien applies for a second Z visa renewal, which would be 8 to 10 years from now, is there any real English requirement. At that time, the alien must ``pass the naturalization test.'' It is common knowledge that the test is not a real English proficiency test-- it is not. So there is not an emphasis on English. Even then, it is not clear that passing the test would be required before the second extension of Z visa status is granted. As a matter of fact, on page 295 the bill states that:

. . . the alien may make up to three attempts . . . but

must satisfy the requirement prior to the expiration of the

second extension of Z visa status.

As the bill is written, there is no real English requirement until 12 to 14 years down the road, and it is not as strong.

I don't know why we are so concerned about that. Is it a pandering? Is it some attempt to please people who are here illegally? Good policy, I submit, the right policy--both for the United States and for those here receiving amnesty--would be to encourage them to learn English sooner rather than later. How long does it take? Twelve years is too long, and I think that is a mistake in the bill.

Mr. President, I see my colleague, Senator Kyl here. I will be pleased to yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak in morning business for up to 15 minutes. I believe Senator Bingaman wants to speak after that.

Mr. President, I would just say to my friend, Senator Reid, the able Democratic majority leader in the Senate, that I hope we don't continue in a debate about the Iraq situation in ways that are destructive to our Nation but that we can conduct the debate in a positive way.

For example, I know there has been an intelligence report that has been produced, but it also had within it projections of things of a positive nature, some of which occurred and some of which didn't. It had within it projections of things of a negative nature that did not occur. Even with regard to its prediction of violence and persistent violence and sectarian strife that could occur that report predicted it would be phasing down after 3 or 4 years. So predictions are predictions.

I don't think those possibilities were not discussed in the debate leading up to our giving authorization to the President to conduct this war. To suggest that this intelligence report was some sort of smoking gun that raised issues nobody had even discussed, and that somehow the President misled the public, is wrong and it hurts the President of the United States, whoever he or she may be; and who, right now, we assume will be traveling the world and meeting with leaders of foreign nations. To make those kind of accusations is not healthy, in my view, and not responsible.

Now, we had a vote week before last, fortunately, to provide funding through the emergency supplemental for our soldiers, sailor, airmen and marines in Iraq. That was too long in my view, but we did it. And we voted to send General Petraeus to execute the surge that the President has called for, and that was the funding that we approved week before last to fund that surge. He is to give us a report in September on how the situation is in Iraq, and we are all watching with a great deal of anxiety because we are concerned about what is happening in Iraq. We know the United States has only limited ability to affect what we would like to occur there. We have done a great deal to help that nation establish itself, and we want to continue to utilize our resources wisely, but this was a surge and we need to evaluate the situation in September.

What I would urge my colleagues on the other side to do, even though they may be concerned about it, in the debate on the Defense authorization bill, and perhaps the Defense appropriations bill that will occur later on this summer, we ought not to utilize rhetoric and language that undermines what our soldiers are doing right now, what we directed them to do, and what we have funded them to do, and that is to help create stability and more security for the people of Iraq. We ought not to debate in such a way that it makes it harder for them to succeed.

Don't we all want that to occur? Don't we all want to see a stable, decent Iraq occur? They have had elections, but they are having a very difficult time bringing that country together in a stable fashion, as we all know. So I would encourage my colleagues, in the course of the debate, that we conduct ourselves in such a way that we don't place at greater risk our soldiers and that we don't make our foreign policy that we have in a bipartisan way authorized more difficult to achieve and provide any ability for the enemy to think that they are able to prevail by lack of resolve on our part.

I want to spend a few minutes talking about the immigration bill that is before us. I think it is a critically important piece of legislation. The American people are concerned about it. They are following it quite closely. They know we have a difficult time in Iraq, and they do not expect an easy solution there. They know we have difficulties with energy prices and other difficulties, and they want us to do what we can in that regard.

With regard to immigration, they are rightly of the view that we can do something about it. We can create a lawful system of immigration that serves our national interest if we desire to do so. If we, as a Congress and the executive branch, want this to happen, we can make it happen. Don't let anybody suggest otherwise. It is not impossible. It is absolutely possible, and we ought to be working on that. That is what they have asked us to do, and I hope we will.

Let me just mention the debate so far has been sporadic and desultory. Members have not had a chance to be very engaged in the matter. We were off last week for Memorial Day, but the week before that we were in debate on the bill. The week before that, the old bill, last year's failed bill, was introduced and sat on the calendar until Tuesday morning of the week before the recess. They then plopped down a complete substitute, a completely new bill last Tuesday.

On Monday, we talked about immigration. I talked about it at some length, but there were no Senators here, really. The only vote we had was on the motion to proceed to the new bill. We had a mere six roll call votes last week, and we didn't do anything Friday even though we were in session. A few hardy souls, myself included, came down and spoke, but nobody was here to really listen. There were no votes, and most Senators had already gone home for the recess.

Here we are again, now on the Monday after recess, with very few Senators here and no votes scheduled for today. All of these days though, even though we did not do anything, are going to be counted, you see, as time we spend analyzing and amending the immigration bill that is before us.

I suggest that at this painfully slow pace of amendments, the bill can't be done this week, that we need a great deal more time on this bill before final passage.

The way the bill was brought up was that our colleague, Senator Reid, under rule XIV, just introduced it and immediately brought it up. It did not go to committee. It was brought straight to the floor. It really had only been written over the weekend, and, bam, here it was on the floor. Senator Reid really wanted to pass it the first week it was on the floor, but there was a lot of push-back on that, and now we are into this week of debate.

I see from his comments today that the majority leader seems to think the bill can pass this week. I suggest it cannot. There is no way it can be done in a week. I think 100 amendments have been filed. To get one brought up, though, is not easy. You have to basically get the consent of the majority leader to get an amendment brought up and made pending. So there are not nearly so many pending as there are problems that need to be fixed.

There are flaws in the legislation. I am going to talk about those at some length. I will be talking about at least 20 serious flaws in this legislation, but I do not want that to suggest that flaws alone are the only problems with the legislation. In this bill, we do not have a principled approach to the future flow of immigrants into America, that is not a loophole, that is a major flaw. We have not thought through philosophically what we want to do about immigration. We have not made the real commitment I had hoped we would to a more merit-based, skill- based immigration system. I am concerned about all of that. I think the American people are too.

The administration and Senator Kennedy and the others who promoted the legislation talked about some principles as a part of talking points they handed out as the foundation for immigration legislation they would be offering. I first say to my colleagues, the bill does not meet the promises contained in those talking points and those principles. It just simply does not. If it did, we would be in much better shape than we are today, because many of those principles were sound. It contains, as I will note, a host of fundamental, serious defects and flaws that make the legislation not one that ought to be passed now.

Finally, I still do not believe the White House and the Congress have heard the American people. They still think we can pass a piece of legislation here on the floor of the Congress, and we can push it through and get it off

our plate, and it will be some years before the American people find out this will not work either, anymore than it did in 1986, and it will be up to the next President, or the next President, and they will be the ones who will have to answer for it, but we will not pay a price. That is just the way they think it is going to be.

Although I believe the American people deeply and strongly and intelligently are committed to a lawful immigration system that is compassionate and will work, I am not sure the leadership in the Congress is, or the White House. Indeed, we have not had a President committed to enforcement of immigration laws in the last 40 years.

Those are the fundamental questions I have.

Let me talk about some of the loopholes. With regard to the trigger, in 1986, amnesty was given. No one disputed it. They said it would be the last amnesty we ever had and that enforcement would occur. Promises were made about enforcement. Those promises for enforcement in the future were never kept. That was the problem. We had 3 million people claim amnesty in 1986; today we have, they say, 12 million prepared to claim amnesty in the United States today. What happened? The promised enforcement did not occur, so more people came illegally.

Some will say you cannot really enforce immigration law. Of course you can enforce immigration law; we just have not been willing to do the things necessary to do that. I reject that concept. But this time bill supporters are saying if we give amnesty, we are going to try to ensure the enforcement does occur and we are going to do that by having a trigger mechanism. This enforcement mechanism will say if you do not comply with the requirements of Border Patrol agents and fencing and other matters, if you do not comply with those, Mr. President, the amnesty does not occur.

That idea made some sense. People believed that was a good idea. I think I originally suggested it in committee last year. Senator Isakson offered a full amendment on the floor in the last year's debate--that amendment was defeated, so last year's bill did not include a guarantee to have any enforcement first. Why would the trigger fail last year? Why would it fail? Does that suggest some people are not serious about enforcement? I think it does.

But look at this trigger this year. The guys who were promoting the bill last year opposed a trigger, no trigger they said--but this year they say we will accept one, they are telling the American people not to worry we are going to have a trigger this bill.

I want to briefly mention some things about it. The amnesty benefits simply do not wait, under this trigger, for the enforcement to occur. After the filing of an application by a person here illegally, under this legislation, and waiting for only 24 hours, illegal aliens will immediately receive probationary benefits. They will be lawfully in the United States, complete with the ability to legally live and work in the United States, to travel outside the United States and to return, and to have their own Social Security card. That is what happens within 24 hours.

Astonishingly, if the trigger requirements are never met--that is these requirements that are supposed to be met first--and green card applications or permanent residents' applications are never approved by the Department of Homeland Security, the probationary benefits granted to the illegal alien population never expire, the cards issued to the population are never revoked, and they will be able to stay in the country indefinitely, forever maybe. After this bill passes, the Department of Homeland Security has 180 days to begin accepting Z visa amnesty applications. They will accept them for 1 year and can extend to accept them for another year and so forth.

I ask unanimous consent for 1 additional minute.

I say to my colleague Senator Bingaman, there is not 30 minutes but an hour equally divided. I will be pleased to yield to the Senator at this time and thank him for his amendment to contain the guest worker--the temporary worker program that was in the bill as introduced earlier, before we recessed. His amendment, as he knows-- although I am not sure a lot of people know--brought the new temporary guest worker program from 400,000 a year to 200,000 a year. Some think that is all it is. But if you read the bill carefully, you knew it was 400,000 for the first year and they got to stay for 2 years; another 400,000 for the second year with an accelerator clause in it, and for both years a certain number got to bring in family members, so in 2 years there would have been almost a million people in the country under that new temporary worker program--far more than it appeared on the surface. I am glad the amendment of Senator Bingaman was agreed to. I think it brought the numbers more in line.

I am pleased to yield the floor at this time.