Floor Statements

Mr. President, I thank the Senator for his work on this. It is obvious he has read the legislation and attempted to see what it actually means, which is a good thing, and done too little in this Senate, but it is important especially in this legislation where it is so critical.

Let me say what I understood the whole deal was supposed about. It was put very simply to me how we were going to have a new immigration system, in this new legislation that was going to be better than last year's bill. The way I understood it, from the talking points that were suggested and floated around and that we were briefed with, there would be a temporary worker program that would actually be temporary. To me that means a person would come for less than a year but could come back repeatedly after that, as long as their employer is happy and they have work to come to and they have not gotten in any trouble. And, they would not bring their families with them.

That is what I thought we were talking about. Then we were told that there would be a separate second flow for people who enter America permanently, coming into America to go on a citizenship track. And we were told that track would be evaluated using a different system, it would be more skill based.

In other words, a person would apply, and they would compete for the slots based on the skills they had and that we have in the United States. So I am concerned and share the concern of Senator Bingaman that the temporary worker program which allows 2 years' entry, then says go home and come back 1 year from now for another 2 years and then go home for a year, and come back for the final 2 years and never come back again seems less workable than the temporary seasonal worker program we have today. I am concerned about that.

Remember, we are still going to have the constant flow of people who come in on the citizenship track and get a green card and become permanent citizens. They will also be workers, their family members will also be workers. We are not stopping that. But this bill creates a separate temporary worker program. I believe a system of temporary workers needs to work, needs to make sense, needs to be consistent with common sense, and ought to be in a way that is practical. I am not sure the legislation as introduced does that.

Senator Grassley spoke before we recessed and asked this question: Why is it nobody has said this time, as they did in 1986, that there would be no more amnesties? He said he was here in 1986. He remembered what they said. It was admitted that they were having amnesty and they made a promise we wouldn't have amnesty anymore. People said: If we do it this one time, we won't do it again. He asked why we weren't hearing it said again. Of course, he answered his own question. The answer is, because bill sponsors can not make that promise. How can we say we are not going to have it anymore, after having said we would not do it again, and doing it again, and presumably we would be doing it again after that?

I mentioned the enforcement trigger. This was designed to make sure if we give amnesty, enforcement would occur. We put some things in the trigger that had to be done before some of the benefits of this program would accrue, but a lot of things were left out, and the things left out were quite troubling. They make you wonder how serious we are about creating a lawful system in the future, for example. The enforcement trigger that has the requirements that must be met before the new temporary worker program begins does not require the exit portion of the US-VISIT system, that is the biometric border check-in, checkout system first required by the Congress in 1996, be working. That is a cause for concern because it is already well past the year 2005, when this bill required that the U.S. visa exit system be in effect.

In other words, in 1996, we said: OK, we are passing a law, and we are going to have an exit-entry visa system at the border that will clock you in when you come in with a biometric card, and it will clock you out when you go out, just as you do when you are working at a job. Just like a lot of employment agencies and businesses have those kind of things. OK? It was due to be completed in 2005. Without the U.S. visa exit portion, the United States has no method to ensure that the workers or their visiting families, who are allowed under certain circumstances to visit them, do not overstay their visas.

Senator Bingaman has been talking about his concern over the temporary worker program. Let me ask this: How do we know they are going to go home when their time is expired if the exit portion of the US-VISIT system is not up and working? We don't know. It is a fundamental loophole of monumental proportions, and I am surprised it is not in there. Once again, it suggests those promoting this legislation may not be serious about creating an immigration system that works. They may

like a system that allows virtually anyone determined to come here to come here.

There is another matter I wanted to mention in the trigger requirement. If it is not in the trigger, there is no way to say the bills sponsor really intend for it to happen. The example of the U.S. VISIT system indicates something about the nature of the Senate. Remember, in 1996, this Senate passed legislation that required the US- VISIT exit system be in effect by 2005. Then 2005 came and went. That did not occur. What does that mean? It means you can pass any law here and say you are going to do something in the future, but if you don't fund it or future Congresses don't fund it or future Presidents don't fight for it, it may not ever occur. That is all I am saying. That is why the American people need to be concerned about amnesty coming before all of the needed enforcement items.

Another matter that involves what we are doing here involves having enough bedspace to end catch and release at the border. We passed a law in 2004 that requires 43,000 beds to be in place by the end of 2007. This is to end the catch-and-release section of the bill. Those beds have not been completed. In this legislation, it only required 27,000 beds. We had already required 43,000, but as I said, we are going to have to have 27,500. Then Senator Gregg offered an amendment to increase that to 31,500. We passed legislation in 2004, as part of the Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, to require much more bed space than this, and they have not been completed. Because we pass legislation doesn't mean it is going to happen.

There is another loophole I will mention. I have 25. I should have added the problem Senator Bingaman just mentioned. I could have added many more than 25. Let's look at No. 4. Aliens who broke into this country a mere 5 months ago are provided permanent legal status in our country and are treated better than foreign nationals who legally applied to come to the United States more than 2 years ago. Aliens who can prove they were here illegally in the United States on January 1 of this year are immediately eligible to apply from inside the United States for amnesty benefits, while foreign nationals who filed applications to come to the United States after May 1 of 2005, over 2 years ago, must start the application process all over again from their home countries.

The bill sponsors continue to claim this bill is necessary because illegal aliens have deep roots in the United States and are, therefore, impossible to remove. They claim that they have families here. They have been working here for many years. They can't be asked to leave. There is some truth in some of those situations, for sure, but it simply is not true in all cases. It is simply not true in many cases. The young man who ran past the National Guard out at the border somewhere last December is going to be given amnesty here in this country.

The American people want us to treat the illegal alien population compassionately, I do believe, but there is no reason to lump all illegal aliens, regardless of when and how they got here or how deep their roots are, into the same amnesty program. Last year's Senate bill would have given illegal aliens amnesty if they could prove they had been in the United States since January 7, 2004. A lot of people want us to believe that this is a tougher bill than last year's bill. At least last year they said you had to have been in the country by January 7, 2004. This year the bill expanded the amnesty window by 3 years to 2007. Under this year's bill, illegal aliens who have rushed across the border in the last few years, including those who came 5 months ago, will be given all the amnesty benefits as those who have been living here for decades, have U.S. citizens in schools, and have been good workers.

The January 7, 2004 date, why was that date selected last year as a cutoff date? It was important because that was when President Bush first gave his speech saying we needed a lawful system of comprehensive reform of immigration in America. We knew that when he gave that speech--and he was talking about amnesty for people here illegally-- that that would encourage more people to try to come into the country so they could be provided amnesty too. So they cut off the dates and said: If you came in after the President's speech, you can't get the advantage of the amnesty. That makes sense, I think.

Then even more significantly, last year, in May 2006, President Bush announced the beginning of Operation Jump Start. Do you remember that? That was the program to put the National Guard at the border. He called out the National Guard. So this bill says if you ignored our announcement that we are going to make a lawful system of comprehensive reform, if you ignored the announcement that the border is closed, if you ignored and ran past the National Guard we put on the border to create a lawful system there, as long as you got here by December 31 of last year, you get to apply for full amnesty. You are home free. You are in.

I don't think that is required. I don't think that is good policy.

I ask unanimous consent to speak for 2 additional minutes.

The bill's drafters say amnesty applicants will be at the back of the line and will not be treated preferentially to those who have followed the law. That is not true in a number of cases and in this case. The bill allows the illegal aliens who got here 5 months ago to cut in line in front of people in the family green card backlog who filed their applications after May 1, 2005, 2 years after. Illegal aliens who came to the United States 5 months ago will get probationary Z visa status 1 day after filing a Z visa application. I suppose those who followed the law, who made their application properly, who waited in line may wonder why they didn't come illegally also. Isn't that the message we are sending? So this provision in the bill does not restore respect for the rule of law. It erodes it. At a minimum, no illegal alien should be treated better than a foreign national who applied to come legally. The amnesty date should be moved back to May 1, 2005. I will have an amendment to that effect.

I see my colleague here, Senator Dorgan. I appreciate his insight into these issues and his willingness to ask some tough questions about the system and the bill before us and to point out some of the weaknesses in it. That has been helpful to the debate.

I am not sure I quite understand that.

I wondered if the Senator was going to continue and how long he might speak.

I have no objection, Mr. President.

Mr. President, I express my appreciation for the leadership Senator Kyl has given to this Senate in so many different areas. I am normally one of his righthand guys, but on this deal, I can't be with him.

I don't agree that a small group of Senators can meet in closed meetings and reach a compromise nobody can amend. In fact, Senator Bingaman noted earlier today that he offered an amendment to change the temporary guest worker program. They said that amendment would be a deal breaker. But it passed with 74 votes. So we obviously ought to be able to amend this thing, and hopefully we will.

I will speak briefly, because my colleague from New Mexico, Senator Domenici, is here, and I will yield to him in a moment, but I will add a couple of things.

I do believe we need effective, comprehensive immigration reform legislation, and I support that. I was hopeful the legislation that was being discussed was based on the principles contained in the talking points utilized by members of the President's Cabinet and those Senators who were meeting to discuss the bill. Those principles struck me as being far preferable to last year's legislation, and I said publicly I was most intrigued by it.

I must say, however, that on reading the fine print in this legislation, I have concluded the legislation does not effectuate the promises and principles announced beforehand.

For example, they said this year we would have an effective trigger; trigger being proof that enforcement measures were in place before any amnesty would occur. That was defeated last year. The people this year assured us it would be in there. But reading the language on the trigger, it has very little teeth in it. It is trigger locked. It is not an effective trigger, and I have demonstrated that in earlier speeches.

They promised we would end chain migration and move to a merit system of immigration. However, for the next 8 years, the number of people entering under the chain-migration, nonskill-based status will increase dramatically, almost three times the current rate. Indeed, only after 8 years will the merit-based system have the kind of teeth I had hoped it would have immediately. But I would note that Senator

Obama has indicated he is filing an amendment to sunset the merit system and eliminate even that.

The temporary worker program gives me great concern because I am afraid it will not work. I also note it allows spouses and parents to visit. A spouse can visit a worker even if that spouse indicates they do not intend to stay in the country they are living in--the foreign country. So I am worried about how that will work. Who is going to apprehend those who don't return?

People who came into our country in the last 5 months, who got past the National Guard that President Bush called out, who got into our country December 31 of last year, will be given permanent status in this country. Those who are members of MS-13, an international gang, if they say they are a member of that gang but that they renounce the principles of that gang, will be able to stay and be given citizenship in the United States.

They said the bill would have greater emphasis on assimilation, because we all agree we need to do a better job of assimilating those who come to our country. I believe it is only mentioned once in the bill, and that is at page 300-something of the bill--almost the last page of the bill.

They said we would emphasize English much more. But under the bill, those who would be given amnesty won't have to produce any proof of English skills for 12 years.

They said there would not be a benefit of welfare. But the earned income tax credit will be given to people immediately upon their being given lawful status in the country; not a Z visa, even, but the probationary status. An average recipient of the earned income tax credit gets about $1,800 a year, and that is not chickenfeed. It was designed to encourage work by working Americans, not to provide an incentive for people to come to our country illegally. The document that is required to enable you to prove you were here before January 1 of this year is simply an affidavit by someone. I submit that the Department of Homeland Security is not going to be able to check on those affidavits and we are going to have massive fraud. Indeed, most people, probably, who are working here today carry false documents of some kind or another. It certainly would not be difficult at all to obtain a false affidavit in that regard.

I have listed 20 loopholes or objections I have identified with the bill--actually, 25, and Senator Bingaman pointed out another one earlier today that we did not include in our list. There are many discrete, specific defects in the legislation. But the problem is that the defects and mindset behind the legislation indicate a lack of commitment to creating a lawfully enforceable system of immigration and indicate a lack of commitment to moving to a more skill-based system like Canada's--which system, I note to my colleagues, the Canadian system, was favorably reviewed in a USA Today editorial yesterday. That absolutely should be a part of this legislation.

I salute my colleagues for working to move to a more merit-based system and for taking some steps that would be better from the enforcement side, but I have to say I believe it is not sufficient. I wish it were. It is not. We need immigration in America. We are a nation of immigrants. I do not oppose immigration. I just think we ought to create a system that serves our national interest, that allows talented people from around the world to apply and come here, those persons most likely to flourish in our system. It should serve our national interests and should be effective. I am afraid this bill is not.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, I thank Senator Cornyn for his tireless effort and his great knowledge of the complexities of the issues involved in any comprehensive immigration reform. I know he has worked hard to try to craft a comprehensive bill but one that will actually work. That is the question.

I know the Senator has developed great concerns about that and has offered a number of amendments, some

excellent law enforcement amendments, drawn, I know, from his experience as a former attorney general in Texas and a member of the supreme court in Texas. I believe, as a former Federal prosecutor, those amendments are essential to having a successful immigration program.

I would like to hear why it is that now 3 days into this bill he has not been able to get a vote on those amendments and about other amendments that he has offered this morning, whether he has been successful in even calling them up for consideration.

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

I would just ask this question, through the Chair. Is it similar to the bill last year? Did they not improve the language that basically said if you file a false document for a benefit under this bill, that is really not subject to being examined and investigated and prosecuted?

If an American filed a false claim for hurricane relief or any government benefit, that is a violation of title XVIII, section 1001. I have prosecuted it many times. But persons who are here illegally, noncitizens, can file false statements and then there is a mechanism that blocks that from being actually investigated and perhaps prosecuted?

Mr. President, I wish to just take a moment, and I see my colleague, Senator McCain, is here and prepared to speak, and I will be pleased to yield the floor and allow him an opportunity to speak.

One of the problems we have with this legislation is we have gotten out of sync about our normal process on how legislation becomes law, how it should become law, what should be a part of it, particularly when it is such a massively important, broad, comprehensive bill that purports to be moving through the Senate.

My colleague used a phrase that has been used frequently, that he was concerned about perhaps this amendment because it might affect an essential part of the agreement. Who made an agreement? I have not made an agreement. The American people haven't been in on an agreement. We have not gone through the normal process of moving an immigration bill through committee to the floor with hearings. We had some hearings last year and produced a quite different bill from the one that is on the floor today. This one was cooked up by a hard-working, good group of Senators who thought they could just speak for everybody--self- appointed, I suppose.

Let me display this chart. When this bill was announced, it was said: This is democracy in action. This is what you learn in ninth grade civics. This is good business. But how about our old buddy Mr. Bill who wants to become a law. You have heard him say it. Old Bill has a bunch of holes in him. He has a lot of loopholes in him. I am going to talk about that in a few minutes.

Senator Specter, former chairman of the Judiciary Committee, ranking Republican on the committee, part of this effort that worked hard to try to create a bill they thought would be effective, said the other day that in retrospect, it would have been better had it gone to committee. Old Bill, ask him how a bill becomes law. He says: It is an idea somewhere. Then it gets written up. Then it goes to the floor. Then it goes to committee. The committee has hearings on it and calls witnesses and considers all the details and ramifications and lets the American people know what occurred.

The way this bill purports to become law is a group of Senators got together. I affectionately call them ``masters of the universe.'' They got together and wrote up a historic piece of legislation that, if placed in normal bill language, would probably push 1,000 pages, probably the longest piece of legislation ever brought here. It was not sent to committee. It was filed at the desk, and the majority leader, Senator Reid, called it up without any committee hearing. They had the old bill on the floor. They filed cloture this Monday on the old bill. Then Monday night, for the first time of record, they plopped down this historic and incredibly complex, long piece of legislation. It has a lot of problems with it. It should not become law. That is what this is all about.

Now we have gone a week, and we haven't had many amendments voted on. Thirteen is about all we have voted on by voice, unanimous consent, and roll call. Senator Cornyn, who has been engaged in this deeply and worked hard on it, former attorney general, Supreme Court Justice of Texas, offered some amendments this morning. They were objected to. I was told last night if I put up some amendments to the other side, they would evaluate them, and we would be able to call up one of those amendments this morning. In truth, both have been objected to. I am not able to offer a new amendment this morning. So the first week is gone. In fact, Senator Harry Reid, our esteemed Democratic leader, a person I like and enjoy working with, wanted to complete the bill this week and had it set up to try to complete the bill this week. There was so much push back and objection, he said: We will carry it over for another week.

I don't believe 1 more week is nearly enough for this legislation, frankly. We need to spend a lot more time on it. I can feel the train moving. There is a method in the way the majority is handling amendments; that is, you can

only bring up one amendment at a time. It has to be approved by the other side before you can call it up. If you can't call it up, it ceases to be an amendment that can be voted on postcloture, even if it is germane. So the result is, we could proceed with this process in a way that does not allow it to be improved in a significant way.

I am worried about my friend, Mr. Bill. I don't believe his teachers back there in the civics class would be pleased with how he has been bumped around. They would not be pleased that he had not gone through the normal process. I will point out some of the loopholes in poor, old Mr. Bill, as we go along today. Those loopholes will indicate this bill should not be passed in its present form.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, the failed immigration policies we have now are in need of reform, in need of comprehensive reform. I said that last year. Some of my colleagues said borders first; and I had sympathy with that and it actually would probably have been a healthy process if we started a year or two ago and established border security and gained the respect and confidence of the American people. We could then have been bringing forward a comprehensive immigration bill with more credibility than we have today.

There is a lot of debate going on, and a lot of posturing going on. You see

things, such as my good friend, the Secretary of Homeland Security, Mike Chertoff who is doing a great job--he frames the issue this way: It is a choice between Republican conservatives who want to block the bill by insisting on mass deportations or insisting on deportations that are just not going to happen.

Well, I am not aware of anybody on our side of the aisle calling for mass deportations. That is not so. That is a false setup. That is a triangulation, if you will, good friend, Mr. Chertoff, former U.S. attorney. We served together in the Department of Justice. He is one of the best members of the Cabinet. I do not appreciate it, Mike. You tell me who on this side said we want to have a mass deportation--zero. That is not the question.

The question is whether we will have a decent bill that will actually work. I know you have made recommendations that are critical, Mr. Chertoff, to the passage of the bill that were not included in it. In fact, I have to give him credit. He did criticize the liberal immigration rights advocates by suggesting they will prolong the anguish by holding off the bill also. But I do not think that is the right issue here.

All of us want a compassionate, legitimate piece of legislation that can work and will serve our long-term interests and will be consistent with the principles that are set forth by the people who worked on the legislation. But I am not given confidence. I will repeat again: I am not feeling confident at all there will be a legitimate, full, vigorous debate and a lot of amendments that go to some of the weaknesses in the legislation. I am afraid they are not going to be considered.

I say that because I see the tactics moving along. We have gone a week with only three, four votes. That is not enough time on a bill of this size and complexity. I think we had 40 or 50 votes on the bankruptcy bill. It was nothing more than an updating of bankruptcy law. It went on for weeks and months. It came through the Senate three or four times actually before it finally became law.

There were other bills that had far more extensive debate and discussion than this one. But none of those bills come close to having the impact on America or come close to having the attention of the American people to the degree this issue does.

The reason the American people are angry and upset is simple. They are not angry, they are not upset with immigrants. That is not what I read people to be saying. What I think they are angry and upset with is Congress and the President for absolutely refusing to listen to their natural and proper concerns about immigration. What I am hearing is they do not want to be taken to the cleaners once again.

They do not want to be victims of a bait and switch in which we promise we are going to create a system that will work for lawful immigration, that will allow us to have an immigration policy that serves the national interest, that allows millions of people to come to our country in immigration status--but it would be a number we can have jobs for, without pulling down the wages of hard-working American workers. It would bring in numbers sufficient to make sure we do not cause problems in schools and other areas that we cannot quite handle.

The number ought to be correct, and that they ought to be, insofar as possible, persons who are going to flourish in our economy, people who have the skills, language, and education levels that indicate they will likely be very successful here, like Canada does. That is what they do. We have a touch of that in this bill--far better than last year, I have to say--but I have been so disappointed to read the fine print and to see that movement to follow the philosophy that Canada does has not nearly been strong enough. It is discouraging to see it has not been.

So the individuals who thought they would meet and reach an agreement and plop it on the floor of the Senate--for which all the rest of us folks would just dutifully comply with and ratify and say: Thank you, my elite colleagues. We are glad you have worked out this immigration problem. Thank you so much. We know something had to be done--and it does have to be done--we are just overjoyed you got Senator Kennedy and Senator Kyl and everybody has agreed, and we are going to plop this bill down, and you guys will just ratify it. You can have a lot of little amendments if you want to, but, remember, if anything touches the core principles we have decided on, why, that would be something we just couldn't accept, and every one of us is going to stick together, and we are going to vote against it, even if we might agree with your amendment. We had to compromise that to get this agreement. Yes, Jeff, we like that amendment. I know you like that amendment. I really think you are right on that amendment, but I cannot vote with you because I have agreed with this group over here in this secret session which the public was not involved in. We made a commitment to one another, and we are going to stick together and vote you down.

Now, this is not the way old Bill was taught law was supposed to occur in America. It is unbelievable that you would have a piece of legislation of this historic nature not even go to committee and that this group just met. How quick did we have it? Oh, well, we were going to have the bill last Thursday so people could read it, and then it was going to be Friday. We promise we will have the bill Friday. Then it turned out to be Saturday morning, at 2 a.m., they emailed it and tried to say they put it out Friday. It was Saturday, at best, when the bill was out. They claim it is 300 and some pages. I believe this is it. They say it is 300 pages or whatever the number of pages it is in this stack of bills, but they didn't print it in the normal language. I have never seen a piece of legislation of any size go through here and not be in bill language. This is fine print. If you put this bill in bill language, it would probably be 1,000 pages. A good immigration bill needs to be 1,000 pages. There are thousands of issues involved that need to be clarified, hundreds and hundreds of complex situations that, if not properly addressed, will never work if we don't do it right.

That is all I would say to my colleagues and friends. I love you. I appreciate all your efforts to try to solve the American people's problems. I know you didn't want to bother with them while you met and had your discussions, except I guess the Chamber of Commerce and this special interest group and that special interest group and maybe some pollsters telling this and that; I don't know how that came out. But I don't appreciate the fact that we are not being able to have a full debate on it, and we are not going to be able to have very many amendments. We could probably, without--well, you say: You are trying to file amendments to delay. You want to slow down the process. Well, as Senator Specter said, in retrospect, we would have done better had the bill gone through committee, the Judiciary Committee. At least they did last year. It was rammed through the committee last year because I saw it when I was on the committee. This is what happened last year: They waited until the last minute. Senator Frist, the majority leader, says we are going to bring an immigration bill up next Monday. On the Judiciary Committee, we are working hard. We go to the Judiciary Committee, and Senator Specter has a bill that had some possibilities. It had problems, but it had some attractiveness to it. It wasn't long before Senator Kennedy dropped his bill and substituted and the Specter bill was gone. We had an entirely new bill. Then they dropped an AgJOBS thing on top of that. Then they dropped the DREAM Act, which gives instate tuition to illegal aliens and things of that nature that all got dropped on, passed, pop, pop, pop.

Senator Frist says: Well, if you don't have the bill on the floor by Monday night, I am going to go with an enforcement only bill. So we rush and rush around there and they put the bill down on Monday night and here we go. Senator Reid says we don't want any amendments. Senator Cornyn and Senator Kyl had some amendments. They got their backs up and began to push back and people said: What are we going to do with a bill without any amendments? So finally, Senator Frist pulled the bill. He said: We are not going to bring it back up until the Democratic leaders agree we are going to have some amendments. It came back up for a couple of weeks of debate and cleared this body, knowing the House of Representatives had no intention whatsoever of ever considering it.

It was sort of a gesture because it was not an effective piece of legislation.

This year's bill is better than last year's, although I have been disappointed to see that it has backed up on some issues of significance. I still would say the framework of this year's bill is a good bit better than last year's. Last year's bill should never, ever have become law. It was fatally flawed.

So what were the principles that the promoters of this legislation said should be occurring here? They said we need a lawful system, that we wouldn't have amnesty and that there would be a trigger, which was rejected last year, a trigger and a number of other things they cited as key component principles of a good immigration bill. All right. I agree with that. Many of those principles were sound. But as we read the fine print, our concern is--my fine staff, they have worked hard, including weekends. They get the bill at 2 a.m. Saturday morning. They work Saturday nights and Sunday nights and here we are on the floor of the Senate. The thing does not even get introduced until Monday night, and nobody has had a chance to read it until then. So it is a big problem.

My fundamental concern then is that the bill does not live up to the stated principles that it contains. So what we need in reform are a number of things. We need to recognize--unless anyone misinterprets this--we need to recognize we are indeed a Nation of immigrants. We are. Some people don't believe that, but I don't believe there is a Member of Congress who doesn't understand that. We want and will have a continuing flow of new people into our country, and it enriches us and has proven to be one of our strengths as a Nation. I think we need to restate that again and again and that immigration will continue in the future and that we are going to treat compassionately, even generously, people who have broken our laws and come into our country illegally. But we must do it in a way that minimizes the damage that will be done to our legal system and our ability to enforce the law in the future.

My colleagues have been involved in law enforcement and you get busy and you start giving people immunity for this and that crime repeatedly and people begin to believe you are never going to enforce it. At some point in the future, you get to the point where you would not be able to enforce it. On the floor, I think maybe yesterday, Senator Grassley from Iowa, who is such a great Senator, such a direct speaker, asked this question. He said he was here in 1986 when they promised no amnesty. He is very concerned because it didn't work and he felt responsibility for that. He was not going to be a part of new immigration legislation that doesn't work such as the 1986 legislation. He said: In 1986, they said we are not ever going to have amnesty again, and he asked this question: Have you heard any of the promoters of this legislation say we will not have amnesty again? He said: You are not going to hear them say that. That is one thing you would not hear because after--because if we give amnesty again, what good is it to even say we are not going to do it? Because what principle, what basis on which to stand will we have 10, 12, 15 years from now when several million other people are in our country legally and someone says they are here illegally, why don't we enforce the law and ask them to go home. Oh, well, you gave amnesty before. You gave amnesty in 2007, you gave amnesty in 1986. How can you enforce the law now?

So to not understand as a matter of law and principle that once again, taking the easy amnesty step will make it almost impossible in the future for us ever to enforce the law is a mistake.

I read the debate in 1986--a lot of it. It went just like that. People said: One-time amnesty. We have to do this. Own-time amnesty. The others said: Well, we are not sure about this. We think if you have an amnesty and you wipe out the laws that we had here and the violations that have occurred, you are liable to increase the threat in the future that more people will break into our country illegally on the expectations that they, too, after a period of time, will be allowed to stay legally. If you read that debate, you will see whose predictions were correct. I have to say that. I have to say that.

So I think the Z visa program that allows people who come here illegally to stay here illegally, to come out of the shadows with some sort of status, but not, I would suggest, as it is now written giving them a guaranteed path to receiving every single benefit that accrues to people who come legally, I don't think we should do that. That is my principle. If you didn't follow the rules, somehow, it ought to be clear that you will never get every single benefit of citizenship and participation in America than if you waited in line. If you give up on that principle, we have a problem. So I think if we had the courage and the firmness and the strength in this Senate and would listen to the American people, we would say the principles of 1986 are going to be affirmed. OK. We will figure out a way you can stay, your children can be citizens, you can have all the protections of the laws of our country but not every benefit of citizenship, and we will never, ever again do that. If we give away that position, I think we have a problem.

So what I would like to talk about is some of the loopholes in this bill. I talked about the loopholes last year in the bill and there were quite a number of them. This is not an exhaustive list. You heard Senator Allard earlier this morning make comments about the weaknesses in the legislation, and you heard Senator Cornyn point out some weaknesses in the legislation. I have identified 15. We certainly would not be able to talk about all those this morning that I wish to talk about, but there are many more. It is troubling that we might not be able to have an opportunity to fully amend the bill to fix these loopholes.

Our old buddy, Bill, the ideal way that laws should be written in America, well, he has been forgotten in this process. I will tell you what could happen in the House of Representatives. I don't think they are having any serious hearings over there. This bill could hit the House of Representatives if it came out of the Senate--and it may well come out of this body--it could hit the House of Representatives. They could call it up. They don't have unlimited debate. They don't have a very strong ability to cut off debate. They could vote the bill out. It could go to conference. The conferees will be chosen and controlled by Senator Reid, the Democratic leader, and the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, and they will appoint the people they want to fix any differences in the bill, and they can make virtually any changes they want to. Then the bill is on the floor, and it is either up or down, and it might pass. As one Member of the House said about whether President Bush would sign it, he said President Bush would sign a pork chop if it had immigration reform on it. We have to be careful what we do and what is in this bill.

It can affect what is actually going to become law. There is no passing this off to the House of Representatives, like last year, as if that was going to fix many of the problems that were in the legislation. The House is liable to make it worse. Well, you have heard one of the principles in the bill.

I am glad to hear Senator McCain say there was a trigger in the legislation. He resisted a trigger last year. We had quite a debate on it. Those opposing it last year said you cannot have a trigger because all of us who met and wrote the bill don't want a trigger; you will upset our compromise. I asked then--and I ask today--who was in this compromise? Did you have public hearings? Were people allowed to do what you were discussing? Did La Raza get to put in their opinion? Did the U.S. Chamber of Commerce get to put in their opinion? Who all got to put in their opinion? They didn't ask my opinion--well, that is not totally so; I did talk to a couple of them, whom I expressed some opinions to. Fundamentally, that is just not an open process. Sometimes you can do something like that as a tough nut to be cracked, and people have to make a decision. But this is too big, too broad, too much policy. The American people are too concerned about it, and it is too important to be settled that way.

Let me tell you what the trigger was about. I offered in the Judiciary Committee last year--because it dawned on me that in Judiciary Committee, I offered an amendment to say: Let's add border patrol, and they accepted it. I

offered an amendment that showed how we don't have enough bed spaces to end catch and release, saying you had to have more. They accepted that. I offered amendment after amendment, and they accepted them. I thought, why is this? So I offered amendments to change the policy to make the law actually enforceable, and they got voted down.

Why would that be so easy? Because the brain trust that was proposing that bill last year knew the history of 1986; they knew how Congress worked, and they knew they never had any intention of funding all the Border Patrol agents and the fencing and the prison beds. We could pass an authorization bill to build prisons, and they are never going to get built, I am telling you. I will show you examples. It means nothing.

So I offered a trigger. It finally dawned on me what this was about, how the game was going to be played out. I offered an amendment that said: You don't get any of this amnesty until the Secretary of Homeland Security certifies that he has operational control over our lawless border. They voted that down.

So Senator Isakson, from Georgia, picked that up and wrote it in even more detail when the bill came to the floor and offered the amendment. We had quite a debate over this because it was important--the trigger was important. The cabal who put all of it together said: We cannot do that because it would upset our delicate compromise in the groups that participated in writing this bill--not the American people--and they would oppose it. They voted it down. It was a fairly close vote, but they voted down the trigger because they really didn't want that trigger because they never intended to do the things that were in the bill. The trigger would have said: You have to build a fence, you have to build the prison beds, and you have to hire the people. If you don't do those things--and actually do them--the other stuff doesn't become law, the amnesty. That was the debate last year.

This year, they say: We got the message, we are going to have a trigger. Well, good. I was happy about that. That sounded good. This is one of our principles. This time, we are not going to mislead the American people. We are really going to do what we promised and have a trigger, and you can relax, Sessions, because we are not going to fool you this time. It is not going to be like 1986.

But the problem is that the trigger doesn't get us there. I just have to tell you that. The trigger only applies to the guestworker program and taking illegal aliens off the probationary Z visa, and all other programs in the bill will begin immediately. So if the trigger is never met--if the trigger that is supposed to be met is never met, these requirements we put in there to ensure that we were going to follow through with enforcement, if they are never met, the probationary status in the amnesty group never expires.

After the bill passes, Homeland Security has 180 days to begin accepting Z visa applications. They would accept them for 1 year and can extend the application filing for another year. When the trigger is met, if it ever is, Homeland Security will start approving the applications they have been processing and adjudicating. What happens if the trigger is never met? Will the probationary amnesty end or expire? Those are pretty good questions. If the trigger is never met, I can answer it for you: The Z visa probationary status never ends in the bill.

It is explained on page 291, line 17:

Probationary authorization document does not expire until

``6 months after the date on which the Secretary begins to

approve applications for Z visas.''

So if the trigger is never met, if the Department of Homeland Security never starts approving the applications and the 6-month clock never starts ticking, therefore, the probationary authorization document never expires.

My staff asked about this in one of the briefings by the group promoting the bill. The staffers asked: Does the Z visa probationary card ever expire? The answer was: Well, because the triggers are going to get met sometime, in fact, it is not going to expire.

So, in addition, we need to remember that there is no guarantee that the additional enforcement items--I talked about that earlier--in title I and title II of this legislation that purport to be effective in enforcing the law--there are dozens of things there that are not listed in the trigger. The question is, Will they ever be funded?

You should be aware, sophisticated Americans and Members of the Senate, that there is no obligation or requirement whatsoever that these things ever get funded in the future. The bill itself acknowledges that in many different places.

So with regard to some of the things in the bill that are supposed to make enforcement better and make the system work better, they use this phrase--they say, ``subject to the availability of appropriations.''

That phrase is used 18 times in the bill. What does that mean? It means we are going to increase our prison beds, increase border patrol, and do all these things which are in our law, and we are going to enforce the law subject to the availability of appropriations. Well, somebody probably wants a bridge in their home State or a highway or a university grant in their home district--more money for this or that, good programs or bad programs, but that is how these things get lost out in the competition for spending. They don't get done. They acknowledge that.

The phrase ``authorized to be appropriated'' is used 20 times. So they are saying we are authorizing to be appropriated money to do this, that, and the other. They are going to make this bill good. So our masters of the universe come out and say: Don't worry, American people, I know you think we are not going to enforce the law, but we have new Border Patrol officers and prison spaces and fencing, and they add the phrase. But all it really says in the legislation is that it is authorized to be appropriated. There is no way they can guarantee that Congress next year is going to appropriate the money for what they put in the bill.

All of that was key to the trigger effect. I have to tell you that, in my view, the trigger is not nearly strong enough. It has been undermined, and virtually everything in the trigger has already been completed or is soon to be completed. It doesn't have some of the new things that have been promised here in the trigger.

Loophole No. 2. This is very important. The enforcement trigger does not require that the U.S. visa exit portion of US-VISIT--the biometric border check system that records that you have come into the country-- will be implemented. It was required by Congress in 1996. Over 10 years ago, we required that the US-VISIT exit system be in place; that is, if you have a visa to the United States for 6 months or 30 days or a year, you come in and present your card, it goes into the computer system, like at the bank or like your timeclock where you work, it clocks you in, and then it clocks you out. If you don't exit when you are supposed to, red flags can go up that you didn't exit when you were supposed to. You are an ``overstay.'' It is an absolutely critical step in creating a lawful immigration system that will work. It was required to be completed in 2005. Here we are in 2007, and it is not completed. Did we promise to complete it as part of the trigger? No, no, no. There would be no way to ascertain whether people exit when they are supposed to.

Under the bill, it says a certain number of people come seasonably, or certain people for 2 years, and sometimes family members can come for 30 days, and sometimes family members can come for 2 years--those kinds of things. Who is going to find out if they didn't go home when they were supposed to? Over a third of the people in our country illegally came legally but overstayed their visa, and many have no intention of returning to their home country whatsoever. We don't even know they didn't return because we have no way to clock out when they left. We have no idea who left when they were supposed to leave.

This is why I say the legislation before us was designed to fail. I am not sure the Members all designed it to fail, but the effort, when it came down to it, when confronted with things which would actually work and which are critical to the success of an effective border system, they weren't in there, and that sends you a signal on what is really there.

In 1996, we required, as I said, this US-VISIT system to have an exit component by 2005, and it is still not complete. Do you think that in 1996, Members of the Congress and Members of the Senate went out and told their constituents that we are working on immigration; we passed a bill that will have an exit system in 10 years or 9 years, and that will help us enforce the law, and I am so proud we passed that? What good is it to pass it if it never happens? It hasn't happened yet, and it is not required through the trigger, which is the only thing that can require it to work.

According to the Pew Hispanic Center's 2006 report entitled ``Modes of Entry for Unauthorized Migrant Population'':

4 to 5.5 million of the current illegal alien population

``entered legally'' and are non-immigrant visa overstayers.

Despite what we know about the overstay rates, the US-VISIT exit system is not made part of the trigger. That is a very big loophole.

I don't think we are serious if we don't have an exit system. One might say it is hard to do. We have had 10 years. I will say one thing, if President Bush wanted the exit system to be in place, he would have it in place. If Congress wanted it in place, we would have it in place.

A separate section of the bill does require the Department of Homeland Security to submit to Congress a schedule for developing an exit component. That is not good enough.

Loophole No. 3, one of these little spots in poor old Bill who got shot up because he didn't go to committee like he was supposed to learn in civics class. He is supposed to go to committee. Maybe some loopholes would have been closed if we had an opportunity to talk about it publicly before the whole world.

Loophole No. 3: The bill does not require the Department of Homeland Security to have enough bed space to actually end catch and release at the border and in the interior. It only requires Homeland Security to maintain its current level of bed space and establishes a ``catch, pay, and release'' program that benefits illegal aliens from countries other than Mexico who are caught at the border and who can post a $5,000 bond.

A $5,000 bond is not hard to post if you know how the system works and you are prepared. It can be done any number of ways. But let's say an individual has a cousin or uncle or someone in the United States and they come into the country and are apprehended, and they came from Europe or Brazil or someplace other than Mexico. All you have to do is post a bond and then you are released pending some hearing on deportation.

We have had this problem for a number of years. Secretary Chertoff has made some progress in ending it, and I give him credit for that. There was an article in a newspaper that showed that people other than Mexicans--you see, it is not easy to deport them. It is easy to take a person back to Mexico, but how do you take a person back to Chile, Brazil, Indonesia, or Belarus? It takes some effort to do this. So they were releasing everyone on bail because they didn't have any bed space, and asking them to show up at some given time so they could deport them. If a person is willing to break into the country in violation of the laws, how many of those people are going to show up after they have been apprehended to be flown out of the country? No, not zero; 95 percent don't show up. That is what the number is. In fact, some of the rules smugglers told their people to follow is if you see an immigration officer, turn yourself in because they will take you further inland, they will process you, and let you out on bail, and you never have to come back, which is exactly what 95 percent are doing. It is a mockery of the law and, in some areas, we have made progress, but that is not a part of the trigger.

What about the bed space? You have to have a certain amount of bed space or you can't hold people. Over the past 2 years, the Senate appropriated money for 9,000 new beds, bringing us to a total of 27,500 beds. This is the current funding level, 27,500 beds. We have already funded that amount. Nothing new was added to the requirements of the trigger until the Gregg amendment was adopted earlier this week. Now the trigger requires Homeland Security to reach a detention bed space of 31,500 beds, 4,000 more.

The 27,500 beds, however, are far less than the 43,000 detention beds required under current law to be in place and constructed by the end of this year.

OK, cynics out there, does that provide fuel to your fire? How about that? Does that breach cynicism? We require in the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 that this country have 43,000 beds by the end of this year, but when this bill came up, they only had in the trigger portion, the thing that would guarantee we reach that level, 27,500 beds. Senator Gregg raised the number to 31,500, but in 2004, when Senators went out and bragged that they raised our number to 43,000 detention beds, that was supposed to be met, and we have no intention of meeting it, I submit. Because it is in bill language doesn't mean it will ever happen.

This month, a Federal lawyer who used to be with the Bureau of Prisons, Joseph Summerill, wrote an op-ed piece--he used to be with the Bureau of Prisons, so he knows this issue. As a lawyer, he was a counsel for the Bureau of Prisons, and he now practices with the firm of Greenberg Traurig.

He says the following:

. . . the demand for deportation and removal operation

detention space has grown much faster than available bed

space has. . . .

He goes on:

Despite the fact that high-risk/high-priority immigrants

include immigrants who are associated with criminal

investigations, have committed fraud, or are likely to

abscond, these immigrants are often released because of the

lack of detention bed space. . . .

The lack of detention bed space has resulted in creating a

de facto amnesty program for illegal immigrants who are

subject to removal, particularly those immigrants from

countries ``other than Mexico.''

From 2002 to 2004, he explains:

Mr. President, I wish to make one correction. I think I said we had four or five votes, or three or four votes, or something of that nature. My staff tells me we have had seven votes this week. I think that is better than four, but that would indicate that in 2 weeks we will have had about 14 votes. That is not enough, in my view, to fix the problems in this legislation.

I thank the Chair, and I yield the floor.

Reserving the right to object, I had understood there would be an opportunity for me to speak after Senator Sanders and Senator Durbin. Are we going to be in a situation where I may not be allowed to offer an amendment?

Madam President, I would prefer to have a vote on my amendment tonight, if we could do so. I would be reluctant to have another vote if we can't have a vote on the amendment I will offer.

It is a tough life in the pit here. If I desire to have a vote tonight myself, what would be the difficulty with that? We could do that at the same time as the vote on the Sanders amendment.

Madam President, there will be a number of amendments I would like to have considered and a number of others that need to be considered after we come back.

I would just reluctantly state that if we have a vote, I would need and request that my vote be also tonight; otherwise, I would object to the unanimous consent request.

I am pleased to yield.

Madam President, if I would be allowed to make my two amendments pending and to speak for 15 minutes, I would forgo a request for a vote tonight.

Madam President, I have two amendments. They are both on the same subject. I would rather offer both. I am not sure which one--I would never ask the Senate to vote on both, but I would like to offer both.

Mr. President, I salute the Senator from Illinois for his expertise in extracting that agreement from this confusion.

Amendment No. 1234 to Amendment No. 1150

Mr. President, I ask that the pending amendment be set aside and I send an amendment to the desk.

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

Mr. President, I ask that the pending amendment be set aside and I send an amendment to the desk.

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

Mr. President, one of the more significant ramifications of the immigration bill that is on the floor today is that it will confer immediately on persons in our country illegally the benefit of the earned-income tax credit. This is not a little bitty matter. The earned-income tax credit is the largest aid program for low-wage workers in America. Last year, the earned-income tax credit benefitted over 22 million people who. The average recipient who receives a benefit under the earned-income tax credit receives over $1,700 per year--a very generous event. Last year, we spent $41.2 billion on the Earned Income Tax Credit.

What this bill would do, for the people who are here illegally, is confer on them a Z status, a legal status, and under the impact of the legislation, these individuals would immediately become eligible for the earned-income tax credit.

Let me tell you why this is not good policy, it is not required by morality, and it certainly is not required of Congress as a matter of law or policy. The earned-income tax credit was created in 1975 to provide extra income to the working poor. Before welfare reform particularly, there was a widespread understanding that many people could not work, could stay at home, draw a panoply of welfare benefits, and end up making more money not working than working. It was creating a disincentive to work.

Back when President Nixon was President, Republicans--and I guess

Democrats--moved forward with the earned-income tax credit. It has grown and become a major factor for low-wage working Americans. The whole concept behind the earned-income tax credit was to encourage Americans to work, to affirm their work, to provide aid and assistance to them, unlike welfare. It is tied to their work. Now, I have to tell you, I have looked at it, and I do not think it is achieving quite what we want it to do. In fact, I would like to change that and have suggested it over the years but, regardless, that is the deal.

So how is it, then, that we would think we have an obligation to provide, as a reward to someone who came to our country illegally, a benefit they are not now receiving, did not expect to receive when they came to the country, legally or illegally, and then, just as an additional benefit and reward to their legalization, we provide a $1,700-per-year benefit? It does not make good sense to me. I think it is bad policy, and it has a huge impact on our bottom line in the budget we have to deal with.

I also note that in 1996, when we passed the Welfare Reform Act, after much effort and work--President Clinton vetoed it twice but finally signed it--an effort was made to ensure that persons who obtained a green card did not receive means-tested benefits until at least they had a green card for 5 years. In other words, if you were coming to our country as an immigrant, we wanted to be sure you were not coming for welfare benefits, but to work, and that you would not receive means-tested benefits until you had a green card for at least 5 years.

So what happened was, when they wrote that, it did not touch the earned-income tax credit. I guess that is a Finance Committee matter. It is a tax committee matter. It was not considered a normal welfare- type payment, and that was not included in the list of things a person was not allowed to get. But, in my own mind, I say to my colleagues, it is perfectly consistent in philosophy and in principle with that because the earned-income tax credit is a payment from the Federal Government to working Americans. You file a tax return and obtain the Earned Income Tax Credit after a year's work. When your work shows your income level was below a certain level in America, you reach a qualifying level, and you get a tax refund of $1,700, $1,000, $2,400, depending on the circumstances of yourself and your family. So that is what happens today for working Americans. The individuals who are in our country illegally at this moment have not been expecting to get that, have not been getting it unless they are filing fraudulently, and they should not get it. They should not get it as an additional benefit to receiving a Z visa, which allows them permanent residence in the United States and a pathway to citizenship.

That Z visa would also allow them to obtain quite a number of other benefits, such as food stamps--which would not be affected by my amendment--health care for children, and, of course, anyone who goes into a hospital who has an emergency need will be treated whether they have insurance or legal status or not. So their children would be educated in our school systems. All those things would occur. Nothing would impact those things. But it is not correct as a matter of law, as a matter of principle, and certainly it is not a matter of fiscal responsibility for this Congress to pass an immigration reform bill that confers another $18 billion to $20 billion in earned-income tax credit on people whom we just rewarded with permanent residence in our country. That is not required. There is no requirement of that.

The Congressional Research Service describes the EITC in this way:

The earned income tax credit began in 1975 as a temporary

program--

Typical of Washington, isn't it, that we start something that is temporary, and it is $40 billion a year now--

to return a portion of the Social Security taxes paid by

lower-income taxpayers and was made permanent in 1978. In the

1990s the program was transformed into a major component of

Federal efforts to reduce poverty and is now the largest

antipoverty entitlement program.

I bet most Americans did not know that the EITC is the largest entitlement program on the books.

Now, I have had a fairly positive view of the earned-income tax credit. I think in many ways it is a good philosophy to help Americans get out, get moving, make some work. They often start out at lower wage jobs, and it sounds bad sometimes for them, and they are not making enough to get by. This earned-income tax credit can really be a benefit to them, and if they stay at that job, if they work at it, if they are responsible and they come to work on time and do their duty effectively, most people in America get promoted. Their wages go up, and they do better and better. So I do not think it is a bad program, but it is a very expensive program, and for a number of reasons it could be operated better.

I will again say to my colleagues, I am not of the belief that it is required of us that we should confer on persons who came into our country illegally every single benefit we confer on those who wait in line and come to our country legally. I just do not think that is required. One of the things in particular I would suggest not to be conferred--should not be conferred--upon them is the extensive benefits of the earned-income tax credit.

In other words, we do not want to attract people to America on things other than their wages and salary. We have enough people who need help in America. We have a lot of people out there working who, frankly, maybe did not have a good home life. They have not been as reliable as they should have been. Maybe they have gotten in trouble a time or two. We need our American businesses to take a chance on those people. We need to help them get their lives together and establish a good work history and start making some money. The earned-income tax credit comes in as a refundable tax credit on top of that as a real bonus to them, and that is good. But it should not be an attraction to draw people into our country because most of the persons who come into America as an illegal immigrant, at least in the first years, tend to make the salary levels that qualify for the earned-income tax credit. So there will be a disproportionately high number of persons who will qualify for that.

I see my time is about up. I will reluctantly accept having a vote, as Senator Kennedy suggested we can do early in the next week when we come back, if that will help move us along tonight. But I want to tell my colleagues to think about this amendment--really think about it. This is not a harsh amendment. This is not an amendment to hurt anybody. It is an amendment that says: OK, if you are in our country, just like the 1996 Welfare Reform Act said, and you qualify for the Z visa under this amnesty program, or whatever you would like to call what we have in this bill, you are not automatically eligible for the earned-income tax credit. We absolutely should not allow that to happen. It is not necessary. It is not right to do so. It is a raid on the Treasury of the United States. It draws money from people who have paid taxes for years.

I would have to note, under the bill that is on the Senate floor, the immigration bill before us, are individuals who have been here illegally, some of whom may have made nice incomes and are absolved from paying a portion of their back taxes. So they don't even pay all back taxes. Then we are going to give them, immediately, the next year, an earned-income tax credit that could be a very substantial amount of money, and that comes right out of the taxpayers' pockets, a billion here and a billion there and a billion here and a billion there. It does add up, and it is significant.

So I would urge my colleagues to consider this and hope that they will.

I also wanted to express my support for Senator Hutchison for the analysis on Social Security of persons who come here to work and who violate their stays and overstay, that they should not receive the full benefit of Social Security. One of the things you have to have if you are going to have an effective immigration policy is you must have a situation in which you don't reward people for bad behavior, for heaven's sake. We certainly are not very good at apprehending people who violate the law, who either came in illegally or overstayed and removed them from the country, but surely we ought to set up a system that says if you violate the law, the way you come or stay here, you don't get Federal taxpayer benefits and a reward as a result of

that illegal behavior. If we are not able to make those distinctions and stand with clarity on those kinds of questions, I suggest we are not able to take a stand on most any principle of law. So that worries me.

Senator Cornyn, who spoke earlier and very effectively, asked me to make this note for the record; that his modification corrected--he stated in his remarks that he made a modification to his amendment to correct the page number. He also wanted to make clear that he did also include a technical correction beyond that, and he didn't want to mislead anyone. He asked that I clarify that for him so that there would be no dispute about that.

Also, some people have suggested that the Cornyn amendment would amount to an unconstitutional ex post facto rule because of its retroactive application. Now, that is a pretty harsh thing to say about Judge Cornyn. Senator Cornyn served on the Supreme Court of the State of Texas and he would just suggest this: In order for any immigration provision to have immediate effect, it is imperative that they apply to the conduct and convictions that occurred before enactment.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent for 1 more minute, and I will wrap up.

So, also, I would note on behalf of Senator Cornyn's amendment that if prior conduct and convictions were not covered, you would have an immigration regime that essentially welcomes the following people, and this is not how the immigration system should operate. For example, as recently as 2005--I see my time is up, and I won't go into that. I will just note that Senator Cornyn's amendment as he offered it will meet constitutional muster, and it is not subject to the criticism some have suggested, and please do support it.

I thank the Chair, and I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I am glad this long and unfortunate political process has apparently come to an end, so we can now provide the funding for our troops that has been needed for some time. The failure to do so has created uncertainty and ambiguity and has, I believe, undermined our policies in Iraq in a number of different ways. Historically, politics have stopped at the water's edge. That was a cardinal rule of American foreign policy that you might agree with or not, but you would not criticize fundamental decisions made by the United States while things are ongoing in various places in the world and, certainly, you would not take steps and actions that would undermine our troops in combat someplace in the world.

Vigorous debate is absolutely a part of who we are as a Nation. A lot of people who have been critical of our war efforts in Iraq have made suggestions that have been good. A number of their criticisms have been correct, and it is certainly welcome and a part of our heritage that we would have that kind of debate. I don't mean to suggest otherwise. But the delays we have been seeing now in actually providing the funding necessary for our military men and women in harm's way has been too long. I believe it has had a tendency to embolden our enemies and raise questions in the minds of our own soldiers.

So as I have said a number of times on the floor of the Senate, those soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan today are there for one reason, and that is because we sent them. They are doing tough, hot, demanding, dangerous work. I have been there six times. I have to tell you, I have never been more impressed. They don't complain. They do their work with professionalism. They care about what they are doing. They believe in what they are doing. They want to succeed, and I tell you that with every fiber in my being. It is their desire to help the country of Iraq achieve stability and progress.

They are executing lawful policies of the U.S. Government. That includes the Congress--the House and Senate--as well as the President of the United States. We have, through lawful processes, deployed them to execute policies that we have decided on. This Congress, of course, has the power to bring them home at any moment that we desire. I think people are wrestling with that. Some think they should come home now. Some think that is not the appropriate decision. The President believes that is not the appropriate decision. We have accepted and have fundamentally affirmed the surge that has sent additional troops there. They are there to execute our mission. That is all I wish to say. They are there to execute our mission.

I talked to a mother not long ago whose son was killed in Iraq. She told me her son told her he believed in what he was doing. He told me when they went into neighborhoods, the women and children were glad they were there. They wanted them in the neighborhoods. That is all I am telling you. You can read what you want to in the newspaper. But because it brought a sense of security there, they wanted them there. I know there are limits to our ability to achieve what we would like to achieve, no matter what we would like to achieve; I know we are not unlimited in our ability to achieve it. We have to be realistic, and we cannot commit a single soldier to an effort a single day longer than we conclude is an appropriate thing for them to be doing. If we think it is not justified and worthwhile, we need to bring them home. I certainly agree with that.

This is a serious discussion we have been having, and I don't dispute the people who have different views of how this ought to occur. I will say again that real support of the soldiers in harm's way means we affirm them and their mission as long as we fund their mission, as long as we order them there. You may say we didn't order them there, but we did order them there. We have funded them to stay there, according to the President's tactical decision. But we authorized him to do so, and we can end that authorization as we choose.

But the truth is, we have invested a tremendous amount in Iraq. General Petraeus--what a fabulous general he is--told us the truth, I believe. The truth is it is hard, but it is not impossible. He also has said what we are doing there is important. It is important that a stable, decent government be maintained in Iraq. That is not a little thing; it is a very important thing. The soldiers who have been there-- the soldiers who serve--would be, indeed, in pain and be hurt if we prematurely give up on what they have sacrificed to achieve and what so many of them truly believe in, if you talk to them.

I have to tell you that the surge of troops into Iraq was a bitter pill to me. I remember distinctly when General Casey said in late 2005 he believed we could start bringing home troops in 2006. That was absolutely music to my ears and what I wanted to hear. Then he said he had to delay the troops coming home because the sophisticated, sustained effort by al-Qaida to attack Shia individuals in holy places had created a reaction by Shia, with the formation of a Shia militia, and they were killing Sunni individuals and that broke out into a spate of violence in Baghdad, the capital city, the central focus of Iraq, and that was extremely unfortunate.

So my thinking is this: Benchmarks for the Iraqi Government--if we write that correctly and don't do it in a way that is unwise and counterproductive, as I believe this language is, at least it would be language the President can accept, and I would be prepared to accept the demand that they do certain things. That is all right with me. Our commitment is not open-ended. We cannot continue to try to lift a government that cannot function effectively. We want them to function. We want them to have a healthy, prosperous government. There are some good things that have happened--really and truly, there have been good things. But there are very difficult things also that are not going well. This is a challenge to the Iraqi Government.

I truly hope the benchmarks and language in this funding resolution will be such that it will be a positive spur to the Iraqi Government to confront their reconciliation difficulties, spur them to reach agreements on other constitutional questions that are critical, and be an effective step in helping that Government stand up and assume responsibility for its own fate.

I have to say I am not comfortable and am indeed uneasy with high troop levels sustained in what would be considered an occupation or a stand-in for the democratically elected Government of Iraq. That Government has to stand up and assume greater and greater responsibility. I do hope and pray that they will because it is exceedingly important that they do.

I yield the floor.

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

Mr. President, I inquire, is the pending business the Bingaman amendment?

Mr. President, I will speak on that. I support the Bingaman amendment. It is sort of instructive in a number of different ways for us in the Senate because I don't know how the number 400,000, for the first year of the program, got accepted as the number that we would have in the temporary worker program. The temporary worker program is a new way of doing business that I think has great potential, although I am concerned about how it can be effectuated in its details. The temporary worker program is now in addition to the permanent citizenship track that we have in our country--the track where you get a green card and then move on to citizenship.

So the temporary worker program is designed to create an opportunity for people who want to come into America and work for a period of time but who do not desire or may not be accepted on the citizenship track. It makes some sense to me. We have had a portion of our State damaged in Hurricane Katrina, and Mississippi and Louisiana have been severely damaged; tremendous reconstruction is being done. That created a real shortage of labor. Anybody can say that area of the country--at least for a certain period of time--needs additional labor, and temporary workers could help fulfill that and other needs in the country.

I wish to say that the temporary worker program, as I understand it in the legislation--remember, it was dropped in Monday night; that is the first time it has been filed as part of the legislative process in the Senate, and no hearings have been conducted on it--the 400,000 would be for 2 years. So you would have 400,000 come in year one of the bill's passage. They would stay for 2 years. The year after the first group gets here, another 400,000 would come the next year. So it is 800,000, at a minimum, after the first year. So that is a lot of people who would be coming in on the temporary worker program.

I am not aware that we have ever done any research or gone out and actually studied how many temporary workers we need. Apparently, the conferees--this group I affectionately call the ``masters of the universe,'' who met and came up with this 400,000 number, talked to some interest groups out here, and they got an idea somewhere about how many it ought to be. I don't know how they reached that number. I will say this to my colleagues. Earlier this year, when this proposal was raised about a temporary worker program and expressed to me in a way that could actually work, I thought it was a good idea. That is why I voted--reluctantly--against Senator Dorgan's amendment, because I think we need a temporary worker program. But when I asked how many, a member of the Bush administration said 200,000. So now it is 400,000 and over 2 years it becomes, at a minimum, 800,000, and there are accelerators in it that indicate to us--the way my staff calculated the numbers--and I think we are fairly accurate--it would be, in 2 years, almost 900,000 temporary workers alone, not including their family members. So I am not sure that is correct. Professor Borjas at Harvard, himself a Cuban refugee who has studied immigration more deeply than anyone in the country, I would suspect, has written one of the more preeminent books, ``Heaven's Door,'' that deals statistically and quite methodically with immigration and its consequences and how it works out.

It is calculated that the low-income workers in America have received an 8-percent reduction in their wages as a result of a large amount of immigration. So there is no doubt that more and more immigration has an increasingly adverse impact on the wages of hard-working American citizens. I don't think anybody can dispute that. Where did this come from--the 400,000--really 800,000--really almost 900,000? Where did that number come from? I don't know.

Professor Borjas, who is a part of the Kennedy School at Harvard-- perhaps Senator Kennedy needs to meet him sometime--Professor Borjas said in his opinion, 500,000 immigrants a year is the right number. I don't know what the right number is. He is a Cuban immigrant. He came here as a young man fleeing the oppression of Castro. That is what he says.

Where did this number 800,000, almost 900,000 come from? Actually, I think it kicks in with an accelerator. In the outyears, it goes up even 10 to 15 percent a year. It is complicated to read. We just haven't had much time to figure it out.

I think the deal is set up, actually. I think the people who wrote the bill knew we were not going to approve 400,000 people a year and 800,000 over 2 years--that is in the country at a given time, 800,000 to 900,000. I think they knew that. Everybody has known all along. Senator Bingaman has filed his amendment to cut that number in half, and then we will go to 200,000 a year, and everybody can say we did something, we made this bill better, so now let's all vote for it.

Regardless, if that is what the deal was about, I suggest to my colleagues that certainly the Bingaman amendment is a move in the right direction. Until we have some very good economic data that shows this country needs a lot more than 200,000, we ought not to be doing it because, remember, the 12 million people we see out here today who are here illegally and those who are here legally are not going to be made to leave America under the amnesty we have here.

If someone came in December 31 of last year, they would be able to stay in this country. So now we are talking about, on top of all of that, on top of the 1 million people who come into the country with green cards that we give each year, that permanent track, we are talking about another track for temporary workers which is in addition to AgJOBS, the agricultural and seasonal workers. So this is a big number.

This bill could be two times plus the current rate of legal immigration into America. I don't think the average

American would believe, when we are supposed to reform this broken immigration system, that we would be creating a system that would double the number of people legally coming into the country because even though we certainly hope any legislation that passes would reduce somewhat the number of illegal entries, we know we will still have illegal entries on top of that.

This probably is a very easy vote for colleagues to vote for the Bingaman amendment. I don't see a reason not to do so. I am not aware of any economic study or objective analysis that says we need these kinds of large numbers of immigrants.

Professor Chiswick at the University of Illinois in Chicago testified before the Judiciary Committee, of which I am a member, when we brought up this issue last year. He cautioned strongly that a large flow of low-skilled workers will pull down the wages of American workers. Alan Tonelson, who wrote about a number of job categories from 2000 to 2005, said wages of workers have not gone up, that they actually have gone down, and in each one of those areas, more than half the workers were American citizens.

This is a matter we ought to be careful about. I believe 200,000 is more than adequate based on what I know. And I support the Bingaman amendment.

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

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

Mr. President, I made remarks earlier about my estimation of the number of persons who would be admitted. I would like to be a little more precise and explain it this way. In the first year, under the bill as written, when 400,000 would be allowed in, 400,000 would come for a 2 year period. In the second year, we will have a 15- percent escalator clause. If that is met, the next year would be 460,000 new workers. So we are talking about at that point 860,000 workers. Then 20 percent of the people who come as temporary workers are entitled to bring their families.

On average--and the numbers, I think, are undisputed--when a person is allowed to bring their family, it adds 1.2 persons to the number. So I calculate in just 2 years, the temporary worker program, as written in the bill, will allow for over 1 million persons into the country. I believe that is an honest and fair statement of where the numbers are.

I take seriously these numbers because last year my staff worked their hearts out and concluded and shocked everybody that the bill as originally introduced, the McCain-Kennedy bill, would allow 78 million to 200 million persons into our country in just 20 years when it, at the normal rate, would be less than 20 million. Some objected to those numbers. The Heritage Foundation did a similar study about the same time, and their numbers confirmed our numbers.

At that point, Senator Bingaman offered two amendments and I offered one and it ended up bringing the number down to 53 million over 20 years to enter legally as opposed to this incredible number. With these accelerators and this large a number, I think we ought to be very cautious.

I would also note, again, that the Bingaman amendment does not reduce the AgJOBS people who would be coming under that track or the seasonal worker people who would be coming. So a number of areas will not be reduced. I think it clearly is the correct thing to do to adopt the Bingaman amendment.

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

Mr. President, I thank Senator Salazar for his courtesy. I want to share a few thoughts tonight. In particular, I wish to talk about the Grassley amendment that deals with the granting of visas, which, by error or inadvertence, could in fact involve individuals who are very dangerous, who would get into our country on a valid visa, and then it be determined that they should never have been issued that visa.

That happens quite often. The State Department is concerned about it. The FBI is concerned about it. The Grassley amendment would help fix that in a significant way. In any comprehensive immigration reform, it is my view that should be a part of it.

We have talked about this for a number of years, but somehow we never got around to getting it done. I am glad he has offered it. If we are going to pass immigration reform, it certainly should be a part of it.

I think one of the problems we have had in our thinking throughout this process is an insufficient understanding that we as Senators should place our national interests first, and we should set policy that serves our laws, that serves our financial interests, and should validate those who follow the law properly and have consequences for those who do not follow the law.

In 1986, there was this discussion that led to immigration reform. It was admitted to be amnesty, and it was supposed to be the last amnesty of all time, a one-time amnesty, and we are going to enforce the law in the future. They promised.

Of course, the amnesty took place immediately and the promises of enforcement and funding and enough Border Patrol agents and all the things necessary to have enforcement never occurred for two main reasons. No President of the United States cared to do anything about lawlessness at the border, and the Congress didn't. Congress, every now and then, would rise up and suggest that something should be done, and some Congressman or Senator would talk about it, but nothing ever really got done.

Now we are at a point where we have perhaps 12, maybe 20 million people here illegally, and they desire amnesty. What will happen next? How many years will it be until the next time?

I have a simple view that goes to the core of what this bill fails to do, and that is to affirm the rule of law. My view is that a compassionate and kind and very generous thing to do for persons who came into our country illegally, who have not been forced to stay here but stay here because they choose to stay here--presumably the life and the pay and the benefits they have here are sufficient that they would choose to stay here rather than where they came from--that those persons, as a result of coming here illegally and of their own volition, should not be given every single benefit that we would give to persons who come to America legally. That is just it. We said that in 1986 and this will be a defining moment about whether we mean it.

We could take two positions. One is, this is not amnesty and maybe we can go on and the same thing would be prepared to happen a few years from now, 15 years from now. Or we can say: No, sir, nobody from 1986 and forever hereafter who comes to our country illegally will be given the full panoply of benefits we give to persons who come to our country legally.

I just want to mention two or three things I think about that. One is citizenship. You don't get citizenship if you break into this country illegally. You don't receive some of the benefits we would give, such as the earned-income tax credit. The earned-income tax credit was designed to help people with families, who are poor, but who do work. It was an idea that went back to the Nixon days. The theory was there was not enough distinction between the income you could get staying home on welfare and actually going out and working. So they tried to incentivize and encourage poor people to see the advantage of work and would give them the earned-income tax credit, which a lot of people do not know is $41 billion a year in expenditures, which is a lot of money designed to help poor people.

Conservatives talk about it, others talk about it, but fundamentally it was designed to incentivize work for American working poor, particularly if they had children. The average recipient of the earned- income tax credit in America receives from $1,700 to $2,000 a year. That is designed to help them work.

But if somebody comes to our country illegally, I see no reason they should be rewarded with the earned-income tax credit; nor should they get Social Security benefits if they paid benefits over a false Social Security number, working under a fraudulent name in a business where they were illegal. They should not get those benefits.

One cannot, in America today, go to court and enforce an illegal contract. If a person promises to pay a drug dealer money for dope and that person doesn't pay the drug dealer, the drug dealer can't sue that person in court. It is an illegal contract, a contract for dope.

It is an illegal contract. When a person comes here and pays money using a fake name or fake Social Security number, that person is not entitled to receive any benefits, in addition to the problems we would have in determining who paid what money under what number and where and when. Fraud would be rampant, so we should not do that.

I am worried about this legislation. I think it has some containment of the Social Security, a good bit better than last year, although I am not sure it is real tight. But there is no containment of the earned- income tax credit. Those are some things we need to think about as we analyze the cost of the legislation that is before us today.

With regard to the Grassley amendment, this amendment would revise the current law related to visa revocations for visa holders who are on U.S. soil. Under the current law, visas approved or denied by consular officers in foreign countries are nonreviewable. In other words, if you go into the consular office, as I did with Senator Specter last summer in the Dominican Republic, and happened to meet one and talked with him about how his day was and what it was like--they make decisions. The consular officers ask for information. If they think somebody has a scheme to go into the United States with a visa and never to return back to the Dominican Republic, or whichever country is involved, they deny the visa. The alien whose visa was denied doesn't get to sue the consular officers. That alien doesn't get to complain. This is a discretionary act by a designated agent of the United States of America, a sovereign nation. A sovereign nation gets to decide who gets into its country, who does not get into its country, and under what conditions they come into their country. That is fundamental.

You don't get to sue over it, if you were denied by the consular official in Cyprus or Poland or the Dominican Republic. That's just it.

Madam President, I thank the Chair for recognition and want to continue the discussion on the very important piece of legislation that is now before the Senate.

I do believe the immigration system is comprehensively broken. I have said for some time we need a comprehensive solution to it, to comprehensively reform it, but to reform it in a way that will actually work, that will do it with principles we can adhere to in the future, that will move us from a lawless system of immigration.

Most people may not know but 1.1 million people are arrested each year entering our country illegally. Think about the cost and personnel involved in processing that many people. It is a system that is not working. We know many people are getting by the border and not being apprehended.

It rightly causes the American people to question how serious we are in Congress when we say we want to do something about it. They believe we should do something about it. We say we want to do something about it, but eventually, as time goes along, for one reason or another, little ever seems to occur that actually works.

I have stated more than once we can pass a lot of legislation in this Senate dealing with immigration, but if you offer something that will actually work, to actually fix the problem, to actually be effective, we always have much wailing and crying and gnashing of teeth, and usually those things do not become law.

Last year, I was very critical of the bill that was offered. I said it was fatally flawed. I said it should be withdrawn and urged my colleagues that if we drafted a bill for this session of Congress it should not be based on last year's fatally flawed bill but that we should start over and create a system that would create a genuine temporary worker program, not the flawed program that was there last year, that would move us toward a Canadian-based system where people all over the world could apply to our country, and they would be selected based on their merits and the skills and abilities they bring that would be valuable to our country.

I noted that we needed, of course, effective border enforcement as well as workplace enforcement, and we ought not to create a system that gives someone who enters our country illegally every single benefit we give to those who come to the country legally. The legal people do deserve to be treated in a different way than those who come illegally.

Now, I know as a matter of compassion and practicality we have to wrestle with the 12 million people here. I never doubted that. Nobody doubts that. How we deal with it, though, is a matter that will determine what policies we, as a nation, adhere to. It will send a signal to people all over the world that we are actually going to insist that we have a legal system of immigration and we intend to enforce it.

It is one thing to have a law, but if you are not prepared to enforce it and go through the process that is oftentimes painful to catch someone who violated the law and then have them deported--oftentimes that is a painful process--you either are going to do that or we might as well admit here we have no intention of enforcing any laws.

I do not think that is what we do. Almost every Senator has stated they want a lawful system of immigration, Republicans and Democrats. I do not think we have a problem. I would say yesterday and last week I had a very great concern that a plan was afoot to get cloture on the bill yesterday. The old bill, which I steadfastly believe is not an effective piece of legislation, would then be substituted by a new piece of legislation. That happened last night. It is approximately 300 pages of fine print and maybe 1,000 pages of the kind of legislative bill language we normally use here. It is one of the largest pieces of legislation to be introduced since I have been in the Senate. I think the Presiding Officer, Senator Landrieu, might remember some of the omnibus bills may have been that big, but I cannot remember a single piece of legislation since I have been in the Senate that would be 800 to 1,000 pages.

So the scheme or the plan was to try to move that through this week. I am

glad Senator Harry Reid, a man whom I enjoy working with, did agree last night he would not try to move this bill through this week, that we would be able to talk about it this week, that we would be in recess for Memorial Day, and the next week after that we would have another full week of discussions. I think we need more than that.

Madam President, I see my colleague Senator Inhofe is in the Chamber. I say to the Senator, I know he has a tight schedule, and when he is ready to make his remarks, I would be pleased to yield to him.

We are on the track now to have a full week of discussion. But it would be unfortunate, indeed, if my colleagues in the Senate, if the American people, were not to utilize that time to ask seriously what it is we are about in this ``grand compromise'' that has been proposed for us.

I think there is a possibility that good legislation could yet come out of this that would be worthy of passing. I am aware, as so many of us are, of the language from the supporters of this compromise that, well, they say: Nothing is perfect. The perfect is the enemy of the good. There are a lot of things in the bill I don't like. I think there are things that could be better, and that sort of thing, but I am for it.

I would ask why it is we do not take out those things that are not good? Why it is we do not create a bill we can be proud of and that eliminates weaknesses and problems? Because like jumping across a 10- foot ravine, jumping 9 feet is not good enough. If you jump 9 feet, you still fall to your doom. So let's create a system that will work. Many of the defects are of such a nature that could actually undermine the very principles that have been stated as the basis for this compromise. If we cannot accomplish those principles, why do it?

There are some good things in the bill and some things I am very troubled with. We will talk about them more as we go along.

Madam President, I see the Senator from Oklahoma. We serve together on the Armed Services Committee and I admire him greatly. He cares about our soldiers and has spent more time in Iraq than any Member of the House or the Senate, I suppose, meeting with our soldiers and trying to figure out the best way to handle our efforts there. I admire him greatly, Senator Jim Inhofe.

Mr. President, I thank Senator Inhofe for sharing this with us. I think he understands, and all of us need to understand, as we continue the flow of immigration at a level we have not sustained before in our history. Once or twice we have peaked at immigration levels close to what we have today. Most of those immigrants, in fact, or many of them, spoke English. Regardless of that, we are sustaining a level of immigration that is unprecedented in American history.

People are coming from all over the world, and English is being taught all over the world. What we need to understand is that it is even more important now that we officially and systematically and effectively emphasize that English is the unifying language because, as you have greater and greater numbers of people who don't speak English as a native language, encouraging, requiring, incentivizing English as the national language is the glue that can hold us together and can avoid cultural divisions that we might otherwise have.

I think the American people understand that, as the polling data of Senator Inhofe showed. Hispanic voters, when they are told about this, recognize it is critical for their children who are going--for them to receive the greatest benefits of the American dream, to flourish in our culture and our economy, that they be able to speak English. For some reason, we went through a period--and hopefully we are coming out of it--where we felt it necessary to try to communicate in foreign languages to other people, therefore diminishing their incentive to learn English and weakening our commitment as a nation that English should be the unifying language.

I thank the Senator for raising this subject, and I believe it is important.

I will just say one more thing. A lot of nations do have trouble getting along. Oftentimes, it goes down language lines. We have even seen our neighbors in Canada almost divide over French and English portions of the country. They wanted to separate from one another, and we see that around the world. So if we are to remain a nation of immigrants, and we are going to do that, I think it may be even more important today that we emphasize the unifying language of English than we ever have before.

I think most people when they came here wanted their children to learn English, and they did so. But we have a situation today that could get away from us in terms of transmitting to them the benefits of citizenship, the benefits of our economy because, if they can't communicate, it won't be effective.

The bipartisan negotiations that were carried out in an attempt to reach a good bill set forth some principles. Those principles seem to be the ones that were leaked as part of a PowerPoint presentation that the White House worked on. That presentation was made to me. I thought it was pretty good. I thought it was a much better framework for immigration than last year's bill. I said repeatedly in recent weeks that we had a framework superior to last year's bill that could actually lead us to something important.

Unfortunately, the four main principles that were so often talked about--the trigger, a temporary worker program, the elimination of chain migration, and the creation of a merit system and no amnesty for the illegal alien population--are insufficiently effectuated by this legislation. They have the appearance of doing those things and maybe in a few areas improve over current law or last year's bill, but they don't effectively carry it out. So I am worried about that situation.

I am worried that, yes, our supporters say: We have problems with the bill, but overall it is good. If we have problems with the bill, let's look at those problems, let's see if they can be fixed, and let's make a better bill. Let's not pass a bill that we tell the American people is going to fix the immigration problem in America when it has loopholes and weaknesses that will not work and will not accomplish what we are promising--what some are promising--will occur if it is passed. I worry when people say they disagree with large portions of the bill, yet they are for it.

Let's talk about some of the principles that were asserted.

Last year, when this bill was jammed through the Senate Judiciary Committee, of which I am a member, I came up with the idea--actually, it came to me in an interesting way. I realized, why, when I offer amendments on enforcement and to spend more money on this or that item, people would accept them in committee. If you offered an amendment that would change policy--empower State and local law enforcement officers, for example, to participate--you got a push back from other policy matters, but they would just accept any amendment that would spend more money on enforcement. You ask yourself: Why is that so? That is so because they were not spending any money. We are the Judiciary Committee, an authorization committee. We cannot appropriate a dime. So we can authorize money for border patrol, we can authorize fencing, we can authorize prison systems, we can authorize an entry-exit visa system, but if nobody comes up with the money to pay for it, it never becomes law. Do you see?

So I suggested on the question of amnesty that no amnesty be allowed until we have a certification by the Secretary of Homeland Security that the border was secure and that this would be a trigger. The trigger for amnesty would be a certification that the border laws were enforced. That was the philosophy behind the trigger amendment on which Senator Isakson worked so hard on the floor. It was not adopted in committee last year, and when we had a full debate on it, the people who were supporting last year's fatally flawed bill said: Oh, this goes to the core of the bill. We can't support this. It might be OK, but the coalition that put this bill together won't support it. It will cause it to fall apart. So they voted it down by a fairly close margin, but voted it down.

So now we are told: OK, we need a trigger. So one of the principles of this bill is to have a trigger in it. Let me show why I think there are some weaknesses in that trigger and it is not as effective as it needs to be. As a matter of fact, it is not very powerful at all. It applies only to the new guest worker program, but all other amnesty programs will begin immediately. In other words, the legalization process, the Z visas that allow people to stay here, will be issued before any of these steps are actually taken. See, we want to be sure that steps are not just promised but are actually taken, paid for, and implemented, because in 1986 what happened was amnesty was given--and they did not deny calling it amnesty in 1986--amnesty was given on a promise of enforcement, and they never funded the enforcement. They just never did it. We had 3 million illegal people here in 1986, and we have 12 million today. So Congresses and the Presidents since 1986 and before 1986 have never taken these matters seriously and given them the priority needed to be successful.

We have that weakness in the trigger which I mentioned. The legalization process will occur before any of these items are required to be funded and executed.

Secondly, the trigger only requires enforcement benchmarks already in the works, almost accomplished. So it does not require anything new. It does not require one critical thing, I believe, which is a U.S. visit exit system. You come into the country and show your identification. The new system we should have and proponents suggest is in this bill would say you come in with your identification, you show it at the border, you work. When your time is up, you are supposed to exit the country. But there is no system to record whether anybody exits. This was required to have been implemented by 2005. It has been put off and put off. Why? Because it creates a system, I suggest, that would actually work. It is a key component of an honest, effective border control system. If a spouse comes to visit a temporary worker for 30 days, how do we know they will ever leave? Who is going to keep up with this? Do people think agents are going out knocking on people's doors to see if their visiting spouses are still here? That is not the way the system is going to work. So an exit system is not part of a trigger requirement.

The language we wanted and was in the Secure Fence Act that we passed last year requires the Department of

Homeland Security to attain operational control of the border. That is the fundamental principle of the trigger from the beginning. None of that language is in this bill. It does not require the Secretary of Homeland Security to certify operational control of the border. So we don't have a very great trigger.

Also, it requires under the trigger 18,000 Border Patrol agents to be employed--not that we hire new ones whom we plan to hire even above that but only the 18,000 who mostly are already there now.

Last year, right before the election, we passed legislation that requires the construction of 700 miles of fencing. Will that fence ever get built? I suggest that my colleagues read the fine print. We see already the fence is being undermined. There is no trigger requirement that occurs. Only 370 miles of fencing and 200 miles of vehicle barriers are part of the trigger. These have been in the works and some fencing already exists, and that should be there. But that leaves about 300 miles not part of the contingency, and we don't know if the money will ever be there for this 300 miles which we authorized just last fall. Do my colleagues follow me? Just because we authorized fencing last fall does not mean it will ever be built. If you want to say that is a shell game, I have to agree. It is done all the time around here. It is particularly done on immigration matters.

Bed space: We currently have 27,500 detention beds. What does a trigger require before the amnesty process can go forward? It requires 27,500, what we already have. But the bill, in a separate section of this legislation, would require 20,000 additional beds to be built because we need them. It is an essential part of gaining control of the border. Mr. President, 20,000 is not that large a number in the scheme of things, but it can get us to a tipping point where the border can be brought under control. But that is not part of the trigger. There are other matters in the trigger that are not available.

I will note this: If you want to be dubious about the intent of the drafters of this legislation to follow through on some of the things they promise, let me tell you how the bill words it. It is filled with phrases such as ``subject to the availability of appropriations'' and ``authorized to be appropriated.'' Those words are used in the legislation 38 times--``authorized to be appropriated.'' You can authorize a fence in this legislation, but this is not an appropriations bill. Unless the Congress comes along and funds it, it will never be built. Worse than that, it has ``subject to the availability of appropriations.'' That is a real suggestion by somebody, I would argue, who never intends to see that section funded appropriately. That was one of the principles.

I am disappointed in the trigger. We were told we would have a real temporary worker program this year, one that would fit the needs of businesses, and they do have needs, and the agriculture community, and they do have needs, and we would create one that would actually work. But I am afraid this one is set to fail. It is better than last year's bill in a number of ways. Let me tell you how it is better, and that is the good news.

Last year, the temporary worker program allowed an individual to come to this country as a temporary worker for 3 years, and they could bring their spouses and children with them. Then they could extend that 3 years another 3 years, another 3 years, another 3 years--I think indefinitely. Mr. President, 3 years, 3 years, 3 years, as long as you live, and your spouses and children can be here, and any children born here would be American citizens at birth. The first year the person was here, they could apply through their employer for a green card, permanent legal residence, which would put them on the pathway to citizenship within 5 years. That was a temporary guest worker program.

I say that to my colleagues because we need to be alert to the fact that just because it says we have a trigger, just because we have a temporary worker program, when you read the fine print, it may not be what it appears to be. So that was a disaster. That wasn't a temporary worker program at all. After a family has been here for 8, 10, 12 years, their children are in junior high school. Who is going to come and get them and send them home? That is a program which had no chance whatsoever. But the sponsors went around for months saying we have created a temporary guest worker program. That was not so, and I am glad eventually that came to be exposed for what it was.

This year's bill says, as part of the principles, that we would have a temporary worker program where the temporary workers did not bring families. That changes the dynamics dramatically because if they don't bring families, they have an incentive to go home. If they bring their families, their incentive is to put roots down and stay. It is not a temporary worker program, in my view.

So how did it come out in real fine print? In fine print, what we understand is it is not a 3-year program but a 2-year program; that 20 percent of the temporary workers can bring their families, and of the remaining 80 percent, their families can visit up to 30 days. Well, let's say that your spouse is pregnant and you are working here temporarily. You could ask that spouse to come to America for a visit and have good health care and have a child born who would have dual citizenship, or maybe they would stay in the United States and the child can be a citizen because of birthright citizenship. There are some problems with this.

I am troubled by the 2-year situation and the way it works. You come for 2 years, you would go home for 1 year; you come back for another 2 years, you would go home for a year; come back a third time for 2 years, and then you could never come back again.

What we have in the agriculture community is circularity, where people come for 8, 10, 11 months a year, maybe, without their families, and they work for a season, maybe 8 months, and go home. They are based and their home is among their family and their kin in the town or city or village they grew up in. They go to their church in their neighborhood.

So that is the way that worked, and I was hoping, or thought we would move in that direction. But, no, it looks like it is a 2-year deal, where you can bring your spouse to visit for 30 days, and 20 percent would be able to have their spouses with them the entire stay. They have to post a small bond. But that is not a defining event, I think.

What about the numbers? When I first asked, as they moved the PowerPoint presentation around, how many guest workers, temporary workers was contemplated in this program, I was told about 200,000 by an official in the Bush administration. Well, what do we have now? We have 400,000 to 600,000 workers a year who come up for 2 years at a time and go home for 1 year in between. But if you have 400,000 in this year and they stay for 2 years, and next year you have another 400,000 to go next year, then in years 2 and 3 you are at 800,000, except there is an escalating clause in there that will probably take it well above 900,000--follow me?--instead of 200,000 or 400,000, the real mechanism involved in the temporary guest worker program is to create numbers that amount to almost a million guest workers.

Now, these guest workers are different from the 12 million who will be given legal status here. It is different from the 1 million to 2 million flow of people who will be coming into the country on the citizenship track. This would be 1 million here as guest workers. So you see, we have to get these numbers straight. How many people are being let in by this bill? We are having a hard time getting it out.

Remember, the bill was only introduced last night. A staff offered draft copy of it was produced Saturday morning. So who knows for sure? Who can say for certain what this actually means? I tell you, we intend to look at it, and we intend to make sure the Members of the Senate and the American people understand how big an impact this is.

What we do know, from last year's bill, even after Senator Bingaman offered two amendments that passed, and I offered one to reduce the overall numbers, it dropped from 80 million to 200 million over 20 years. Let me go back and repeat that. Last year's bill, as introduced on the floor, the McCain-Kennedy bill, would have allowed into our country 78 million to 200 million people in 20 years. Now, we only have 300 million in America at this time. Do

you understand the significance of that?

I don't know if they knew those numbers or somebody was trying to pull a fast one, but it was breathtaking. We came up with those numbers. The Heritage Foundation was doing an independent analysis, and they came up with very similar numbers. So Senator Bingaman offered two amendments and I offered one that passed and it reduced the number to 53 million. Real progress; right? Not so fast.

The current rate of immigration over 20 years in our country is 18.9 million, maybe closer to 20 million. So it was at 53 million, which is 2\1/2\ times the current rate of immigration. So I don't think the American people who thought we were reforming immigration ever understood that the real plan was to increase legal immigration by 2\1/ 2\ times.

So I am worried about the numbers in this year's bill, is all I am saying. We are going to look at it. I haven't been able to figure it out yet, but my super staff is getting close, and we are going to keep working on it. But that needs to be acknowledged. I think there is going to be push-back on this huge number of temporary workers, which appears to me to be three times what the administration suggested to me, this year, would be an appropriate number. Of course, the President is bent on having workers for everybody who needs one.

The 2 years, the 2 years, and the 2 years, let us say a person came as a temporary worker and they worked 2 years and went home; worked 2 years and went home; worked 2 years and went home. There are bad things that occur from that program as a practical matter. Is the employer going to depend on this person every 2 years, when that worker has to go home? That is not practical to me. Then they are finished. They, perhaps, had no desire to live in America permanently or become a citizen of America but wanted to be a temporary worker. Yet now they are put in a position where they have to apply for a green card and citizenship and try to compete on this permanent citizenship track so they can keep working. For people who may have no desire to apply for a green card, they would have to, under this system. So I think it creates a magnet for dual citizenship in a way that is not necessary.

I think it would complicate the life of a business to have this break in their employment. I would like to see a system, myself, in which a person could come 10 months a year in America, or less--they may want to work less--and they would have a good ID so they could go back and forth to visit their family or their home as many times as they chose. They would go home each year for several months and could come back the next year, if they chose and if the employer wanted and if they were certified to come back and hadn't been convicted of a crime or done anything else that would disqualify them. That, to me, makes more sense. Maybe the drafters have a better idea than I do on it--I don't think so at this point.

Now, one of the issues we talked about in last year's debate, and I emphasize it because nobody had even considered it, is why shouldn't we go to a merit-based system--a system that is skill based--where we would have people come into this country based on their opportunity for success here, based on their ability to flourish in our economy? What we learned was that Canada does that. Canada spent several years of national discussion, and then their Parliament got together and decided the question. They passed a law that said to the immigration department in Canada, you work with our economics department and you set up an immigration system for our country that says 60 percent of the people who would enter our country would enter based on skills and merit and education that we think are important for Canada because we believe our immigration policies should serve the national Canadian interest. It should make Canada better. We believe this is the right policy.

That was done and is being executed today. I met, in my office last year, with the gentleman who was the director of that program, and he explained to me that it was very popular. They like it in Canada. We had never even discussed it last year. I tried to get a hearing in the Judiciary Committee on it. No, they didn't have time. Senator Mike Enzi, who was chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, agreed to have a hearing on it, and we did that. We had experts testify on that and very little negative was said about it. The witnesses at various hearings we had all said an immigration policy, in their opinion, should serve the national interest, and a skill-based program serves the national interest. That is why they did it.

Australia does the same thing. Australia has 60 percent enter on merit; New Zealand has a similar program; the United Kingdom is looking at it; and I believe the Netherlands and other countries are considering more movement in that area. The developed world is moving in that area, except the United States. Only 20 percent of the people who enter our country with green cards get those permanent resident green cards based on skills--only 20 percent. Sixty percent, almost, get their permanent residence based on family.

Now, no one disputes, and this bill certainly doesn't, and neither do I, that if we give permanent residence to anyone, to a man, to come to America, he should be able to bring his wife and his minor children. But if you choose to come to America--you tell me, I say to my church friends--tell me why, if you choose to leave your extended family and come to America and establish a new life, what right do you have to demand that your aging parents should come with you? What right do you have, what moral right do you have to demand that?

That is what we are doing today. Parents are allowed to come, as well as adult children, as well as brothers and sisters--the siblings. So under the current system of chain migration, a person comes to America and they get a green card, or become a citizen, and they are able then to bring their aging parents or bring their brothers and sisters, who are then able to bring their wives and their children. That is how we get nearly 60 percent of immigration in America not based on skills.

That is the policy question I thought had been established when we adopted the new framework that became the basis for the new bill that was introduced late last night. Does the new bill get us there? It does adopt a point system. I have to say I was excited about that because I believe so strongly that was the right direction for us to go. I was excited about that. But as I read the bill, I was very dispirited.

For example, what happens in the years 2008 to 2012 if this bill becomes law? Skill-based immigration will remain capped at the current level of 140,000 for the first 5 years until 2012. Even out of this 140,000, 10,000 will be carved out for temporary, low-skilled workers. I am not talking about temporary workers now but people on a track to citizenship--green card, permanent residence, and then citizenship. The 140,000 green cards we have set aside for that track, they have taken 10,000 of that for the temporary workers who come without a merit-based system.

So there is a step taken in the bill to reduce chain migration, and it reduces it, it appeared, immediately and even back I think 2 years. But it says that if you were an applicant to come into our country for a permanent residence, as part of a chain migration application, you are considered to be a backlogged applicant. As a backlogged applicant, this bill says we are going to give you the opportunity to come and to get permanent residence in America, even though people who applied after a certain date would not get to have that provision applied to them. This will free up some numbers that will not be coming in on chain migration, but the theory was the green card numbers would be shifted to a skill-based, point-based system like Canada's. That is how you get there, and this bill does attempt to do that. Unfortunately, it takes a lot of time to get there.

Under this bill, they will take 8 years of those saved green card numbers and apply them to the backlog. There are about 3 million backlogged chain migration petitions, and each one amounts to about 2.2 persons because they could bring a wife or a child with them, sometimes 3 or 4 children. If you are in the backlog as a brother of a citizen and you have been in the backlog for several years, then you get to come with your family--not just yourself as

a brother, but you get to bring your family--in the next 8 years. So we think it will total up to 6 to 8 million people who are in the backlog. We are not moving to a merit-based system any time soon. Actually, it is going to be 8 years out before it really kicks in. I don't know what will happen in 8 years. I have grown, in my 10 years in this Senate, to be somewhat worried about what we are likely to do when that happens.

I salute my colleagues for making a decision that appears to shift us to a more healthy view of immigration that will be more likely to serve our national interest. But I am disappointed that it is not going to really take effect for 8 years. That is so long, I am not sure I can buy that as a legitimate compromise.

My colleagues say: We did the best we can do. Jeff, there are things in the bill I don't like. I would like to have it take place right now.

Why don't we make it happen right now? Why wait 8 years? We don't have a right to offer amendments and fix that? We need to think about it.

Another thing is, in Canada they have, as I said, 60 percent based on skills. We think the numbers in the United States--from 20 to 22 percent based on skills--will not exceed 40 percent. In fact, Senator Kennedy, who really opposed this part of the provision, estimates it would only be 30 percent. That is not enough. We need to look at these numbers. If we don't have a proposal which would carry us 50 percent or above, I don't think we have made the kind of real progress in that area that we could.

Also, the system is going to skew, again, to the temporary workers. If you are here as a temporary worker, you get 6 to 8 points for adult sons and daughters who might apply under the point system, 4 points for brothers and sisters of citizens and permanent residents, and 2 extra points if you apply for a chain migration category between May 1, 2005, and now. So a significant number of points are given based on family, I am concerned about that.

Points are going to be given not just for higher skills but for high- demand occupations. That is what the temporary program is for, the high-demand occupations. I think the permanent track to citizenship should clearly shift to a more skill-based system. But we are going to give a lot of this skill-based system personnel--they will get 16 points on the point scale if they are in a high-demand occupation. These could be fairly low-skilled jobs. You could be in the service industry or things of that nature, low-skill personnel and things of that nature, or food processing. That is an undermining of the principle of moving to a merit-based, skill-based system. That worries me, that we are not getting there sufficiently on the point system. It is just frustrating to see that.

Why is that point-based system important in the long run? Just because Canada has gone through this process and has reached that conclusion? No.

Mr. Robert Rector is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a premier think tank, a conservative think tank but one of the most respected in America. Mr. Rector has for well over 20 years, I suppose, been recognized as one of the most knowledgeable persons in America on welfare and social policy. He is widely recognized as the architect of the highly successful major welfare reform that was done a number of years ago. Eventually, after 2 vetoes, President Clinton signed it, and it became a very popular program that reduced child poverty and created a system where lots of people went out and found work. The welfare office became an employment office where people can be counseled on how to get work, and people are now out being very proud to be breadwinners, bringing home money--more than they ever thought possible sometimes--just because they got out of the welfare trap and into workplace. That is what Mr. Rector was part of.

At a press conference yesterday, he was very strong in his view that we have a big problem with low-skilled immigrants. He talked about some things you don't like to talk about so much, but it is just a fact, and all these other countries have had to deal with it. When you are low skilled, have low education, you tend to collect more from the government than you put in. That is a big problem. What he concluded was that the necessary fiscal deficit for a house which is headed by a person without a high school degree is $19,000 a year. He put his pencil on it. He calculated it out. I don't know whether that figure is correct, I didn't calculate the numbers myself but that is what he said yesterday. This is Mr. Rector. He noted that $19,000 per year in benefits could buy each one of those families a new automobile every year.

He calculated that, over a lifetime, the numbers are worse, that we should calculate the numbers not in the first 10 years where they would be artificially low but calculate them over a lifetime. He calculated that if we pass this bill, the immigrant households headed by non-high school graduates would take out of the U.S. Treasury $2.3 trillion more than they pay in over their lifetime. That is the group which would be in the 12 million who would be legalized.

There are reasons for that. People with education, with language skills, who have skills and talents America needs, who apply in a point-based merit system, who have any college at all when they come, tend to do very well in America. In fact, the numbers show that if you just had 2 years of college, you tend to do very well and pay much more in taxes than you would ever take out in taxes. We have to be careful that our business friends understand that somebody is picking up the tab if they have low-skilled, low-wage workers. It may not be the employer, but somebody is paying. It is the Social Security system, it is the Medicare system, it is the American taxpayers who pay.

I see my good friend from Florida.

I am pleased to yield such time as the Senator wishes.

I say to Senator Martinez that I thank him for that,

but he was one of the people who stood firm on this issue of a more merit-based, competitive system of immigration, like Canada. Without his leadership, I know it would not have happened. In fact, his personnel leadership was pivotal in a number of areas in this legislation that made it better than it would otherwise have been. I appreciate that.

My concern on the bill is that by saying the backlog gets approved, we delay about 8 years moving to the full implementation of a merit system. I know, when you are in a meeting and you have to negotiate with people--I know Senator Kennedy didn't want to do this at all.

You had to reach a compromise. But the compromise of waiting 8 years is troubling to me. I like the move. I thank the Senator for his leadership, and that is the point I have tried to make this morning.

I thank Senator Martinez. The Senator himself is an immigrant from Cuba and has risen to serve as a member of the Cabinet of the President of the United States and now an outstanding Member of this Senate. I am proud to know him. I am also proud his wife is from my hometown of Mobile, AL. She is wonderful also.

As I understand the chain migration matter, in fact, it does end chain migration mostly, but it does allow 40,000 parents to come each year. There are some restrictions on it, but 40,000 parents. So those 40,000 more elderly parents--by the way, Canada gives points for youth. They believe Canada benefits from a younger rather than an older immigrant.

But those parents who come--we have to be honest with ourselves are not going to be net gain like a young skilled person. But that was the compromise they pounded away at. Some said family reunification, we have to have family reunification. So instead of eliminating aging parents, they agreed to cap them at about half the number we currently have of parents who get to come each year.

But what I want to ask you to think about is, here is a young man in Honduras who went to high school, graduated, maybe was valedictorian of his class, taken English, utilizes television and radio to improve his English, has 2 years of college. He applies to get in the United States.

He wants to come here very badly. Maybe he has a distant cousin here or maybe he has read about America. Maybe he wants to come here and work and go to college and earn a degree and be a doctor. I don't know what is in that young man's mind. It is a zero-sum game.

If you let the parent in, you deny someone such as that the ability to come in on a more meritorious basis. That is why this is not an easy call and why we need to be clear about this. Every time we allow a chain migrant or an aging parent to take an immigration slot, we are denying someone who deeply wants to come, who could be selected on merit from the large number out there who want to come to America, that would be more successful and flourish here. That is all I am saying.

We hear stories about familial reunification. I know that is nice to talk about. That could be important to an immigrant who becomes a citizen and wants to also bring their extended family. It might be important to them personally. But the real question is, what we have to ask is: Is this important to the national interest? What is in the best national interest? The best national interest, I believe, and other nations of the developed world have concluded, requires a movement where you can bring your wife and children, but you don't get to bring extended family in.

Mr. President, how much time is remaining?

All right. I will use that and then reserve the remainder of the time.

Another principle of the PowerPoint presentation was the question of giving legal status to persons currently illegally in the country through a new visa. But it was stated as one of the principles that there would be no special path to citizenship. That was a direct quote. ``No special path to citizenship.''

However, the bill clearly creates a system whereby current people here illegally are treated differently, better, than those who tried to come to the country lawfully.

That is a principle I think we have all said we don't want to breach. In fact, the PowerPoint principle about any new immigration bill stated that would be one of the principles. This bill is not jackpot amnesty, as some would say; but I think it is a form of amnesty, however you want to define it.

I have not tried to use that word too much because I am not sure what it means to anybody. If I use the word amnesty, it tends to mean that you allowed somebody who came here illegally to stay permanently. That is a form of amnesty. I mean, normally they would be apprehended and removed. That is what the law would require.

But whatever amnesty is, I have concluded that the principle we should adhere to is, that if someone did come to our country illegally, and we have now not enforced the law as we would expect the law to be enforced but are going to allow them to stay here in our country, come out of the shadows to have a legal status, that we can do that, but we should not provide to that illegal entrant every single benefit we provide the persons who wait in line and come lawfully.

I see no reason to do that. That is what we did in 1986. The speeches were crystal clear: Never again. This is the last amnesty. Because those people in 1986 understood that if amnesty became the rule, we would totally undermine respect for our legal system. So here we are, 20 years later, granting another amnesty. I think we need to maintain some clarity so there is a difference in status of those who come illegally.

Now, Senator McConnell, the Republican leader, gave a definition. He made a statement that is valuable. ``One thing is for sure, if this bill gives them any preferential treatment towards citizenship over people who came into the country in the proper way, that is a non- starter.''

I would go further. I think we can give some kind of legal status and certain benefits to people who come illegally, but I believe they should not be given benefits that lead to citizenship--that powerful, wonderful thing, citizenship in the United States--based on an illegal act. I do not think we should. I think we should say forever--in 1986, we said the truth then--you come illegally, you are not going to benefit. We are not going to do this again. We should do that.

Now, if they have children born here, the children can become citizens. But there will be detriments to having come illegally that would be permanent, that are not going to be wiped out. That is my personal view. We will see how it goes.

I would say, with regard to the question of moving to citizenship, there are at least five preferential treatments toward citizenship given to the illegal alien population by this bill. Preferential treatment.

First, illegal aliens who rushed across the border between January 7, 2004--the date contained in last year's bill--and January 1, 2007, this January, will be eligible for amnesty. This includes illegal aliens who have been here for a mere 5 months. They would be eligible for the amnesty, be eligible to be put on track for citizenship, even if they came into our country last December 31. Remember, we called out the National Guard, the President did, after the American people put the heat on, called out the National Guard. We are building fences now, not enough, but we are building barriers. We are increasing agents and we are saying: The border is closed. But we turn around and have a bill that says that somebody who got past the National Guard, got past the Border Patrol, got around the fence, is now going to be put on a path, guaranteed path to citizenship.

Now, I don't think that is good public policy. That does not breed respect for the law. I was a Federal prosecutor for nearly 15 years. I am telling you, if you don't enforce a law, it is undermined and undermines respect for the Government in general, frankly.

I will not go any further. I think our time is about finished. I would thank my colleagues for their attention to this bill. I hope they will be reading it. I hope the research we do might be helpful to some of you as you work on

it and try to decide how you should handle this very important piece of legislation. We need to do something. We need to do something that is good. We need to pass a bill. I guess no bill will be perfect, but we do not need to pass bills with serious flaws in them, those that undermine the principles that any effective immigration system should be founded on.

I will have extra time. We will talk about that later and talk about some other things I have.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I was sharing with my colleagues before the leadership break a number of issues about the immigration bill. Perhaps it will cause some to think unless it is improved, it should not be passed. Some will be encouraged, hopefully, to support amendments that could make it better. To some, I am sure it will make no difference. They intend to vote for it, maybe, or against it, as it is today. But I am glad we will now have all week. The Democratic leader has changed his previously stated view that we would vote this week. We brought the bill up only last night. If it was written in formal bill language, it would be one of the longest pieces of legislation ever considered in the Senate, maybe the longest piece of legislation since I have been here, other than perhaps an omnibus bill, but not a legislative bill.

We need to be thinking about the basic principles that are important to immigration reform. That is what I wish to continue discussing. The Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, said:

One thing's for sure, if this bill gives them any

preferential treatment towards citizenship over people who

came into the country in the proper way, that's a nonstarter.

I have made a number of points about some of the things that actually are in the bill that provide for a person who came into our country preferential treatment toward the process of being a citizen that are not given to somebody dutifully waiting outside the country to be called up when their time comes. I want to point that out in a number of ways.

For example, only illegal persons would be eligible for these Z visas, visas that would allow them to live and work here forever, as long as they are renewed every 4 years. That visa would not be available to anyone currently living in the United States who came here to work legally or someone who did not overstay their visa but went home when they were supposed to. So if you came here for a work visa and your work visa is 1 year, and you are complying with the law, and you don't want to go home at the end of your year, you still have to go home. But if a person broke into the country illegally and they don't want to go home, they are given the Z visa, they get to stay, and they get to apply for a green card that leads to citizenship. Even if they entered the country last December 31, getting past our National Guard, the new fences and the Border Patrol, and got into the country as late as last December, a single person with no skills, that person is eligible for the Z visa and could be here forever.

A Z visa plan is a better plan than the plan we had last year, I have to say, but it still has some real problems with it. Namely, it still leads to citizenship.

My colleagues say: Well, nothing is perfect. Yes, there are things in it I don't like, but we have to do something.

Well, why don't we fix things such as that? If it is not right, why should it be in the bill? We don't have to let the Z visa be a pathway to citizenship, it could just be renewable forever.

Well, they say, we can't touch anything that affects the core of the bill. All of us--the senators in the secret room--have agreed.

Who agreed? This group that met for several months with one another and outside groups, and they wrote up this bill and plopped it down on the floor last night. Until last night, we were still on last year's fatally flawed bill that should never, ever have become law. Although it passed this Senate, it never had a dog's chance of passing in the House. That is where we are, and I am concerned about that.

A third example of preferential treatment is Z visa holders get legal status 24 hours after they apply, even if their background checks aren't complete. The bill says ``No probationary benefits shall be issued to an alien until the alien has passed all appropriate background checks or the end of the next business day, whichever is sooner.'' Nobody else gets immigration status benefits if their background check is not complete. Fourth, visa holders are exempted from a long list of inadmissibility grounds, including fraud or misrepresentation to obtain an immigration benefit and false claims for U.S. citizenship, and their prior deportation or removal orders can be waived, even if they never left, if they can show extreme hardship to their illegal alien family members.

An illegal alien who applies to be a Z visa holder is exempted. That includes anyone that got here before January 1 of this year. They can walk in and they get a Z visa. They don't have to pass a background check to get the visa immediately--at the end of the next business day. Presumably, they will check pretty quickly. But what if we had hundreds and thousands of people showing up with convictions for crimes and that kind of thing that makes them ineligible, how are we going to find them? They will have the probationary z visa.

If they have participated in a scheme to obtain immigration benefits or have

falsely claimed with official documents to the U.S. Government that they are a citizen, this is a crime under Title 18, section 911, that does not bar them either. What would happen if an American citizen made a false claim to the Government? Title 18, section 1001, false claims to the Government is a Federal felony that can put you in jail for 2 years, 5 years. But if you made a false claim to be a citizen or some other benefit under immigration law and you are one of the people who came here illegally and not through a system, you get immunity from those cases, whereas a citizen does not. We have to be careful about what we do in legislation such as this. This is why amnesty deals are important. We should not be put in the position of ever having to do this. We said we would not do it again. After 1986, we said we were not going to ever do another amnesty again because it was so painful. It worked so poorly. All it did was encourage additional immigration, as those who opposed it in 1986 predicted.

It is very interesting. I looked back at the debates. You could see who was right and who was wrong. The people said: This is going to be a one-time thing. Don't worry about it. This will end the backlog and bring people out of the shadows, and we don't have to enforce the law on these people. Let them stay, and we will give them for one time amnesty. We won't do it again.

Others said: Wait a minute. This is a principle of importance. How can we say in the future we won't give amnesty if people come illegally, when we did this time? Doesn't this put us on the road to repeat amnesty in the future? Aren't we afraid it won't work?

What happened? After the 1986 bill, 3 million people claimed the benefits of amnesty. Twenty years later, we now have maybe 12 to 20 million that will be claiming amnesty. There are consequences to making these kinds of choices. That is a preference given to people who have come illegally over someone waiting outside the country to come legally.

Fifth, a Z visa holder will be able to get a green card through their own separate point system and without being subject to the regular annual numerical limits. This is a huge benefit to them. In other words, they will not have to compete with other persons around the world on a merit basis, as we are supposed to be moving to, but, in fact, they will have an inside track. They will not be in a line that has the standard numerical limit, instead they will have their own like, so that at most they will have to wait only 5 years for a green card after they are eligible for one.

That makes clear to me--I think it is clear to anyone--the way the bill is now written there is a preference given in quite a number of areas on the question of citizenship, as well as other questions, frankly, that they get benefits over persons who came here waiting to come legally or came locally.

In fact, another thing they have left out of the bill--and it was in last year's bill--they do not have to pay back taxes. So the illegal alien community that has been working here for half a dozen years--and we hear there are so many of them, and many of them have decent-paying jobs. I think that is true, quite a number do have decent-paying jobs and are supposed to be paying taxes. If they did not pay their taxes, they don't have to pay them as a condition for getting z visa amnesty. American citizens have not been exempted from paying their taxes for those same years. That is just true.

You may say: Well, you are just harping and complaining, Sessions. Well, I pay my taxes. Most Americans pay their taxes. If somebody has come here illegally and makes $50,000, $80,000 a year--some do--and they did not pay taxes, we are just going to wipe that tax debt out? I do not think so. It is not a principle, to me, that I could adhere to, instead it is one I would dispute.

So what about the chain migration question? Are we eliminating that? And what should we do?

Let me say it this way--and this is accurate, and there are other ways to look at it--it is accurate to say that instead of eliminating chain migration, which was one of the principles in the talking points that circulated around as this new bill was drafted, the bill actually escalates chain migration two to three times over the next 8 years. That is an indisputable fact.

Not only are the current chain migration numbers maintained--the 140,000 that was eliminated is now used to adjust backlogged chain migration applications.

They did eliminate chain migration. No new applications will be accepted. Let's go back and be fair about the bill. The bill eliminates chain migration in the future. That is an important thing. Chain migration means collateral relatives; it does not mean your wife or your child. They would get to come with you. If you are a citizen or a permanent resident, your wife and children get to come with you. It is the question of the brothers and sisters, adult children that perhaps are married and have their own families, or aging parents that are part of chain migration.

If a person comes, then you can bring your brother and sister. If your brother is married, the wife comes with your brother. If they have three children, those come. If she moves forward to a green card or citizenship, she can also bring in her relatives. Then the wife can bring in her brothers and sisters. So that is how this system works. It is unrelated to skills and the productivity of the person intending to come. It is unrelated, therefore, to the national interests of the United States. It is unconnected to them. It is their interest they are concerned about and not the national interest, which is to make sure the persons who come are honest, hard-working, decent people with skills and capabilities to be successful in America.

So how did all this work out in reality? Not only are the current chain migration numbers maintained--the 140,000 was eliminated, so to speak, but it will be applied during the 8-year period after the bill to provide more green cards, increase the numbers of green cards for family migration, most of which are for chain migration persons who are waiting to get green cards as a result of their applications over a period of time. So if a brother applies to come to the United States with a wife and child, because they have a brother here who is a citizen, they apply and they are put on a list. This is non-skill-based immigration. It is purely based on kinship. Those numbers have been set aside to allow the people who are backlogged to clear, and it is going to take 8 years, they estimate 8 years. As we look at the numbers, it looks as if it could well be longer than that. It looks as if the backlog will not be eliminated in 8 years but could be much more.

So what we will do then I am not able to say because we have not had a chance to read the bill sufficiently from last night. So I just would say we are concerned about that aspect of it. So the first 8 years we can expect, as we calculate it this way--hold your hat--in the first 8 years, there would be family-based green cards--not skill based--lots of them chain migration-based green cards--issued in numbers over 920,000 each year. That is almost a million each year who would come in under that program, unrelated to skill-based immigration that the bill purports to establish.

I will admit, after that 8 years, if the bill is unchanged--and who knows what would happen in that period--there would be a bigger shift to merit-based immigration and well over a million people will enter the country legally--probably closer to 2 million per year under this plan--whereas the current number of legal immigrants each year into America is about 1 million. So it is going to increase quite a bit the number of people entering the country with green cards, but it is not going to shift us to a merit-based system until at least 8 years go by. That is a serious defect, in my mind.

They say: Well, it is implemented for those who qualify. That is right. Out of a million, a million and a half, 2 million--closer to a million and a half to 2 million--who will be coming legally in the next 8 years, only 150,000 of those will enter based on the Canadian point system, merit-based system. That is not much. It is a disappointment to me that the hopes that were held out for a system like Canada's point- based system were not realized. I am disappointed in that.

I will read an example prepared by the Senate Republican Policy committee, which did a nice study on merit-based permanent immigration. It is a look at Canada's point system.

Remember now, there are a number of categories of issues we will deal with. One is a temporary worker program. We are going to have two votes on that, I understand, this afternoon. I intend to support Senator Bingaman's amendment, although I have not seen it. But based on what I know about it, it would reduce the number of people who would come in under the temporary worker program from 400,000 to 200,000.

Now, this is all, in my view--I do not want to be too cynical--a little bit of a put-up job. I talked to administration officials earlier in the year, and I asked: Well, how many would be expected to enter under the temporary worker program? They said: Well, about 200,000.

So the bill comes out, and it is 400,000 per year, and you stay for 2 years. There is an escalator clause in it that could take the cap to 600,000. So under the bill that was plopped in last night, you would have 400,000 the first year--and it could be fifteen percent more than that with the escalator clause--plus 400,000-plus the second year. Now, at that point, in the second year of the new program, you have about 900,000 temporary workers here competing for jobs in our economy--at one time, almost a million. That is a big number. That is bigger than I think anybody ever intended.

So we are going to have an amendment this afternoon, and it is going to allow the Senators to impact the agreement, and they are going to bring those numbers down, and we are all going to pat ourselves on the back, I guess, and go back to our working people in our communities and union people and say: See, we knocked that business bill down to a rational number that is much better. Now we may be able to vote for the bill. But I have to tell you, that was the number I was told some months ago was the appropriate number by an official in the Bush administration who certainly is not timid about asking for temporary workers in America.

So I am inclined to support the Bingaman amendment. I do, however, have concerns about the Dorgan amendment because it strikes me that a good temporary worker program is good for America; it just needs to work, it just needs to be effective. I can tell you one good example. A portion of my State and a large portion of Louisiana and Mississippi were devastated by Hurricane Katrina. There is tremendous construction work there. A lot of people moved out of the neighborhoods and no longer live or even work there. So immigrant labor in numbers larger than you would normally expect to be needed were needed and were helpful and remain helpful. So a good system of temporary workers would consider those kinds of things because those workers in New Orleans, right now, are not likely to be putting Americans out of work or even pulling their wages down any noticeable degree.

I think a temporary worker program is good. I am not inclined to vote for the Dorgan amendment, as I understand it at this moment. But we do need to work to examine the temporary worker program that is in this bill because it still has defects.

Now, let's take an example of a would-be seeker of permanent residence as they apply to Canada according to the RPC paper. This is a made-up example of how the system works.

Stella, an individual from Cyprus, desires to reside permanently in Canada. She has a master's degree in computer science. For that, she would get 25 points. She has a job offer from Nortel. That would give her 10 points. She has 3 years of paid work experience in her home country. Canada gives her 19 points for that. She is 23 years old, and because she is younger and Canada prefers younger people-- unfortunately, for some of us, she is younger--she gets extra points for being younger, an extra 10 points. She has a moderate to good proficiency in English. She gets 10 points for that. So she has a total of 74 points. She has met the minimum of points required to apply for permanent residency in Canada. But she previously studied in Canada, and that gives her another 7 points. And the fact that her sister resides in Toronto gives her another 5 points--for a total of 86 points. She can apply to be a permanent resident at the Canadian Embassy in Cyprus and would be eligible promptly--immediately. So that is the way the system works in Canada. It is something that I think without doubt should be a part of our immigration reform.

So we are a nation of immigrants. We are at a point in our history in which the influx of immigrants into America is as high as it has ever been. Once, I believe, in our country's history we peaked at this high of an immigration rate, but along came the Depression and World War II and we almost stopped immigration entirely. We went to very low immigration rates. Then we have gone back into a new cycle of very strong immigration.

It looks as if there is not any likelihood that this Nation will stop this current rate and go back to zero. Most of us believe immigration, properly handled, is good for America, but we do have to consider the actual numbers. The numbers cannot be too great, or it takes jobs from Americans and can, in fact, create cultural problems that wouldn't occur if it was a little slower. So we have a situation where we would like to see immigration continue.

Now, if we are going to maintain a very high level of immigration at historic highs for America, it only makes good sense and common sense, it seems to me, that we would look around the world and we would give points like Canada does to the persons who are most likely to be happy and prosperous in our country, who are most likely to not go on welfare, most likely to have good jobs and pay taxes, who will help us balance the budget rather than causing a drain on the budget, and in fact attract people who really desire to be an American and who want to be a part of our society and deeply desire to make a permanent move, and who want to create a new allegiance from their prior country to their new home in the United States. That was the ideal of American immigration, and I certainly think that remains our ideal today. We ought to keep that in mind as we go forward.

Doing the right thing, creating the right number in the right categories with the right skill sets, while at the same time having a legal system that really works, is within our grasp.

Forgive me if I am disappointed that the framework which I thought had so much great potential has not been fleshed out with statutory language that meets the ideals of that framework. My concern is it is so far from the ideals of that framework that it is not a good choice for us at this moment. There will be time for us to fix it on the Senate floor. There will be time for us to pass amendments that could make it better, but it is troubling to me at this point.

I hope our colleagues who are involved in actually writing this bill will not be so hard-headed about their commitment to sticking together on the core principles that they all agreed to and pull out all the stops to make sure they have the votes to not allow any significant amendments. We do need some significant amendments to make this bill appropriate.

Madam President, I yield the floor and note the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, there are more than 3 hours' worth of discussion that needs to go on concerning this bill, that is for certain.

I appreciate Senator Reid's comments, but I express some concerns about what I understood him to say a few moments ago. He is the Democratic leader. He does have the power to call up legislation in the end and to try to set the agenda but not the total power to do so. I think I heard him say he would like to see this bill--he wants to see debate and amendments this week.

I have to say there is no way this bill can be voted on and amended only this week. We have had legislation such as WRDA that we took up for 2 weeks, a re-authorization of the water resources bill. When we worked on the bankruptcy reform bill, which mainly was a reworking of the existing bankruptcy law, with some changes, we debated that for months. So there is no way we can or should produce this bill after 1 week of debate.

If that is so, the American people can know we have had a railroad job for sure. Hopefully, that does not reflect Senator Reid's firm and final opinion on the question of the schedule for this week.

Also, I wish to say I am not pleased, and I oppose the motion to proceed to last year's bill.

When we talked about the comprehensive immigration bill last year, I pointed out 17 loopholes in the bill in a series of speeches, and people began to take to heart a number of points I made, frankly. The negotiators of the new bill have come back with a bill that has some of the intention to or at least purports to deal with some of the concerns I had last year.

I have to say I was pleased to hear that we were considering a point system, such as Canada's, that we were considering a temporary worker program. I was told by the people who met and drafted this legislation, that the guest worker program would be for temporary workers and it could work to serve our economy.

I am afraid, that if you read the legislation, that the needed immigration

reform is not so. That is not what we have in either case and to any significant degree; it is a bit of window-dressing of some movements in those areas and some fairly significant steps, frankly, that we need to hold on to and need to be a part of a fundamental reform of immigration. There are some positive steps, but they are just not effective enough, as I will discuss later.

I reject the idea that a movement to a system such as Canada's or Australia's that is based on merit and skills for immigration is somehow, as I think Senator Reid said, an attack on the family. I am offended by that statement. A person who wants to come to this country, has to ask to be admitted into the United States of America, and say that: I have not been a criminal, I meet the standards for admission, and I want to be a productive citizen. Then after we give that person a green card, that person can become a citizen and have the right to demand that his or her parents be allowed to come here, the aging parents who will be fundamentally supported by the American taxpayers, demand that his or her brothers and sisters and their spouses and children be allowed to come. So how is this an attack on your family if we say: You can come, you can be a citizen, but right up front, you cannot bring your parents, adult children, and siblings, you don't have any special rights to do so, but they can apply if they qualify, just like everybody else, based on their own merit. But why should the fact that we give one person a glorious thing--citizenship in the United States--entitle them to bring maybe tens of other people? It just does not make sense. I reject the argument that moving to a merit based system is an attack on family. Canada does not believe it. Sure, you can bring your nuclear family--spouse and children. I am not talking about stopping nuclear family from being together. I am talking about a reform of the current system that focuses on the extended family.

This chart shows three approaches to immigration by nations similar to the United States. Fifty-eight percent of the people who come to our country are family based--58 percent are family based, and only 22 percent are skill based. We have a policy that gives 16-percent of green cards for humanitarian reasons and those are unconnected to the skills they might bring. And 4-percent of green cards are given through a visa lottery. I may talk about that issue later. This bill wisely eliminates the lottery.

Look at Canada. They had 60 percent merit based immigrants; that is, they asked those people: Are you educated? Do you have language skills? Can you speak in English or French? What kind of skills do you have that Canada needs? What prospects do you have as an immigrant to be successful in Canada, to be a productive citizen who will contribute to Canada, make Canada a stronger and better nation? That is what Canada does. Australia does the same. They have 62 percent skill, merit based immigration. I reject the idea that it is some sort of an attack on the family to do that.

Senator Reid and others have said that this bill which will be introduced--it has not yet been introduced--is a good starting point. That makes me a bit nervous, I have to say, because the bill can be moved through perhaps this week with some real strong-arm tactics, which would be a very sad thing, but perhaps it could be. The House of Representatives does not have the free period of debate that the Senate does. The House leadership, Speaker Pelosi, could bring this bill up and hammer it through in a matter of days even and then it goes to a conference committee. The conference committee will be picked by and will be dominated by and absolutely controlled by the appointees of Senator Reid and Speaker Pelosi. They can alter the bill in any fashion they wish. So it is a good starting point, they say. Well, what might happen in conference?

The American people have a right to be nervous. They have a right to be cynical about how we in Congress have handled immigration. We have consistently protested that we want a lawful system of immigration. People have run for President for the last 25 years or last 50 years saying they believed in a lawful system of immigration, but, in fact, they don't do anything about it. They never take the steps necessary to make the system lawful, to make it principled, and to do what it absolutely must do as a matter of national priority; that is, the bill should serve our national interests. Think about that simple concept. Any legislation we pass should be a product that serves our national interest, not special interests.

One of the things that has worried me about my colleagues who have been having these secret meetings is that there is some talk about them having stakeholders, I believe Senator Kennedy said that. I think Secretary Gutierrez from the White House, Secretary of Commerce, said interest groups. I don't know whom they pretend to be meeting with and deciding these issues, but I will tell you who was not in those meetings, and that was the American people. Not only were we not there, we were excluded from those meetings, and we had not been informed how those decisions were reached or what is in the bill--until perhaps Saturday morning.

This started brewing last week when Majority Leader Reid said he was going to bring up last year's bill. He gave the people who were working on this legislation a limited amount of time. He told them they had to come up with a bill by Wednesday. So they fiddled around and worked hard and compromised and rushed and rushed and rushed and came forward with a bill on Thursday. They announced they had reached a grand compromise and that all Americans could take a deep breath and relax because they had met and fixed the problem of immigration, a comprehensive fix, that we could all just relax and not worry about it anymore because they fixed this problem.

We were told--and I was promised directly--that the bill would be ready Thursday. Senator Kennedy, at the press conference, said it would be ready Thursday, and it wasn't ready Thursday. They said it would be ready Friday. It wasn't ready Friday. It came in early Saturday morning, 2 a.m. Staff had been working all night, bleary-eyed, trying to put this grand compromise together in some sort of fashion. Small print, it is 326 pages, I believe. That is about this thick, all these pages together. That is about what the stack looks like at 326 pages.

One of the few times since I have been in the Senate, perhaps the only time I can recall, we have had a major piece of legislation not written, not reviewed by the committee that is here to review language and write it in bill format. They didn't do it. So all we have seen is a bill written on a computer by somebody who works for the executive branch, as I understand it. It is about 300-something pages. Why didn't they ask the Legislative Research Service to write up a good bill? They can't do it. How can you take 326 pages and put it in proper legislative language overnight when the thing comes in at 2 a.m. Saturday morning? And truly, if it is put in proper bill language--and I hope it will be at some point because the group that works on the language really does a good job of professionally making sure it is written in a proper way, and they find a lot of errors just doing that. If the bill is re-formatted by legislative counsel, it will turn out not to be 326 pages but closer to 1,000 pages of bill language, about two times or more this thickness.

Are we going to pass that bill this week? How many amendments will we be able to take up this week? People need to talk about, first and foremost, the fundamental principles and policies embodied in good immigration reform. We should also talk about what is going to be coming up in the legislation.

As I understand the plan, the majority leader intends to file cloture this afternoon on last year's bill, and then he purports that he--and that uses up a lot of time, see. If we started with a new bill, we would have to wait until it is printed, then bring it up, then move cloture on the motion to proceed, cloture on final passage, and other procedural matters. They have been moving on a bill they said they never intended to bring up anyway, last year's fatally flawed bill that should never ever become law. That is what we are going to do this afternoon. We are going to move to cloture on that bill.

Then we are told this entirely new bill is going to be substituted as an amendment. So the first amendment

will be a substitute to wipe out the old bill, last year's bill, and get an accelerated start without the opportunities for debate on a new bill. Presumably that is how we can ram this bill through in record time. I predicted that is what the plan was last week several times, and it does look as if that is where we are going.

So we have a flawed process, I suggest, in a lot of ways, and it should cause the American people to be troubled and Members of the Senate to be troubled.

I don't deny that the people who attempted to work on the legislation, draft this new bill, are good people, good Senators, but they put themselves in a situation, based on what I see of their results, in which the document does not have the strength, the effectiveness needed to be a solution for our immigration problems today. I wish it was different. I wish I could say it is something we could be excited about and should support.

It is all right that they met. I have affectionately referred to them as ``masters of the universe.'' They would go into these secret meetings, and they would get together and talk to special interest groups and would listen to everybody, I guess, but the American people and put together a bill. But that is what they have done. The bill has some good parts and some troubling parts.

So we are at a point in our history when the time is right for comprehensive immigration reform. The Senate, however, in my view, is not ready for debate today. The plan, as we are moving today, is unwise. It has been produced as a result of undue pressure and artificial timelines, which we have no responsibility or need to meet, on the Members who are meeting in this group involved in the negotiations. So the majority leader says: OK, you guys go off and meet, but you only have so many days or we won't bring up this bill, we will bring up the old bill, and we will do these things. They felt this pressure, and they produced.

When I first heard about the plan on Friday, May 4, I stated that the Democratic leadership in the Senate acts as if this is just another piece of everyday legislation, but it is not. The immigration bill is one of the most important bills to come through the Senate in the decade I have been here.

Staff drafting of the bill was not finished until Saturday morning, and legislative counsel has not yet converted the bill into the proper format. Even today, we have no assurances that the product they produced that had across the top of it ``Draft: For Discussion Purposes Only,'' are the final agreements in the bill and will be the document actually introduced, presumably tonight.

At last week's press conference, two individuals remarked, and with great pride and enthusiasm, they were taught as children that is--what they had been doing--how a bill becomes law. One said:

I have never been more proud to be a member of the Congress

and a member of the Senate. This is what my ninth grade

teacher told me government was all about, and I finally got

to experience it a bit. We have been in rooms together, early

in the morning and late at night.

Hopefully, they weren't smoke-filled rooms. They used to be smoke- filled rooms.

Going line by line trying to figure out what started to be

how to deal with illegal immigration and it wound up being

what it means to be an American.

Well, that is good. Actually, Secretary Chertoff said:

This is pretty much what I was taught in grade school about

the way the process works; not that everybody gets what they

want, but everybody works together to achieve the best

results for the most people.

Well, I want to share a few things about how a bill should become law and what we were taught in grade school about it. Last Tuesday, I agreed to move forward. We have a cloture vote today. We were told we would have a bill by Wednesday or Thursday. We were not given that. So we have moved forward and the bill is being rushed forward at this point. I remain concerned that what I heard Senator Reid say earlier, that he hoped to debate and amend the bill this week, indicates, I am afraid, that he intends to see it passed this week.

How does a bill normally become law? A bill normally becomes law, if it is a bill of importance, when it is filed in the Senate and referred to the proper committee. To a degree, that was done last year, although there was a tremendous effort last year to rush that bill through to completion. Many of the tactics utilized this year are very similar to the tactics utilized last year.

Let us talk about what happened last year. The bill was introduced-- McCain-Kennedy--and it went through the Judiciary Committee. It was referred to the Judiciary Committee. Senator Specter, I believe, had his own bill as a working document, but it wasn't long in committee negotiations before the Kennedy-McCain bill was substituted for it. Then the majority leader, Bill Frist, gave them a deadline: You have to finish this bill, as I recall it, by next Monday. If you don't bring up the bill out of the committee next Monday, I am going to offer on the floor of the Senate a tough law enforcement bill that will focus on border security. This was supposed to be an incentive for the committee to act. Apparently, it worked, because a bill passed out of committee, worse by far than the bill Senator Specter had introduced, and here it was on the floor and hardly had been written. Nobody had seen what was in it. Yet they were bringing it up the next morning, Tuesday morning, and we were on the floor in debate.

Senator Reid, then the Democratic leader, pushed to have no amendments and have the bill voted on that week. It became a big brouhaha. Senator Kyl, Senator Cornyn, myself, and others had amendments we wanted to talk about. So we pushed back and complained and complained. Finally, then Majority Leader Frist said, let's pull the bill down. We are not going to bring it up until we have an agreement to have a full debate and an opportunity to offer amendments. And that is what happened. It was brought back up and we spent 2 or more weeks on it.

I point out, however, the legislation which was on the floor was in the Judiciary Committee and, even though rushed out, it passed out of the Judiciary Committee and it had several weeks of debate on the floor. That was that fatally flawed bill from last year, the bill we are now talking about going to but will be substituted by an entirely new piece of legislation which Senators have not had an opportunity to see, except from Saturday morning, if they were here, and most Senators have been at home this weekend.

So that is what is going to be brought up. It has not gone through the committee process, as classically a piece of legislation should, and it is not known to the Members of this body what is in this bill of perhaps a thousand pages, and we are hearing they might want to move to it this week. That is a matter that is breathtaking in its scope. We should not do that.

This is how the Heritage Foundation describes the process on its Web site. The Heritage Foundation is one of our Nation's most August and respected institutions that deals with public policy. They have been engaged in major issues for several decades. They say this on their Web site:

Working behind closed doors for months, a handful of

Democrat and Republican staffers, along with a few Senators

and principals from the administration, have been drafting a

``comprehensive immigration reform package.'' Until Saturday

morning, the legislation was unavailable to any other Senator

or staff, let alone the media, policy analysts, or the

general public. This legislation would be the most

significant reform of immigration policy in 40 years,

affecting not only our national security and homeland defense

but the fiscal, economic, and social future of the United

States for several generations. For the sake of open

deliberation and public education, the Heritage Foundation--

which got a copy of the bill somehow--is making this

legislation in draft form publicly available to encourage

widespread debate and discussion.

Well, thank goodness they did make it public, but who knew they had it on their Web site? I don't know, maybe it was Sunday they did so, but it is not an opportunity for the American people to know what is involved. The Heritage Web site goes on to say:

The document made available here, although marked ``Draft:

For Discussion Purposes Only,'' is being relied upon by

Senators and staff as the final language to be debated

beginning Monday, May 21st, with the expectation of a vote on

final passage without congressional hearings, committee

markup, fiscal analysis--and we will talk about that in a

little bit, that means how much it costs--expert testimony,

or public comment before the end of the week.

As Mr. Hugh Hewitt wrote yesterday, in an on-line article entitled ``Summary of the Fine Print'':

I have spent a lot of my weekend reading the draft bill, as

requested by both John Kyl and Tony Snowe. There are so many

problems with this bill that it should not be introduced in

the Senate absent a period of open hearings on it and the

solicitation of expert opinion from various analysts across

the ideological spectrum. Even if it were somehow to

improbably make its way to the President's desk, if it does

so before these problems are aired and confronted, the

Congress would be inviting a monumental distrust of the

institution.

In other words, a monumental distrust of the Congress and the Senate. He goes on to say:

There is simply too much here to say ``trust us and move

on.'' The jam-down of such a far-reaching measure, drafted in

secret and very difficult for laymen, much less lawyers to

read, is fundamentally inconsistent with how we govern

ourselves.

Not what we were taught in grade school, I assure you, and I couldn't agree more. This is not how the process is supposed to work. We should not be asked to trust our colleagues and vote to put a bill on the floor when we do not know that the bill text is even finalized, that the bill has not been drafted by legislative counsel, the bill has not been introduced or even given a bill number, the committee process was skipped and not followed, a Congressional Budget Office score may not have been requested.

What is that, a Congressional Budget Office score? Before a piece of legislation is passed, you are supposed to have a score, which is how much it costs. How much will the bill cost? How much will it impact our budget and our deficit if we pass the legislation? How basic is that? Congress shouldn't be passing bills if we don't know what they cost. Last week, they haven't even asked for a CBO score, although we had one from last year that said the bill was exceedingly costly in the first 10 years and much more costly in the years outside of that.

I am going to talk a little bit about what Heritage Foundation says about a score, and it will take your breath away when we discuss that. It is almost something you hate to discuss, but it is something we have to discuss because this is supposed to be a serious institution.

One reason, of course, they haven't requested a score last week is you have to send the bill language to the Congressional Budget Office. Well, they don't even have the language, I guess, yet. It is still being called draft language, and it will be over 800 pages in the proper format. How would you score how much a bill like that will cost? How long do you think it would take? So there is some sort of problem here.

The majority leader is saying we are to spend 1 week on this bill, and we don't have a score, we don't have an idea of how much it is going to cost from the official institution, the Congressional Budget Office, that is charged with doing those things? Not good policy, in my view.

In 1914, former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wrote:

Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants, electric

light the most efficient policeman.

So I want to trust my colleagues. I do trust them. But I have to verify, because this bill is very complicated. It should be introduced in the proper way, as a new bill. It is very different from last year's bill in a number of areas. It should have been introduced as a new piece of legislation. It should have been referred to the Committee on the Judiciary, the primary committee of responsibility, and we should have had hearings and debate on it. We should have called policy experts from Harvard and the University of Chicago, as we did a little bit last time, at my insistence, to find out what it means to our economy, to the working people of America. Are they going to have their wages crushed down because of a flood of low-wage workers, which is what those experts told us last year would occur? That is what they told us.

That is what should have happened. We are not there. Maybe these Members of the Senate who have been meeting think they got it right and the bill is ready to come to the floor, but there are 85 other Senators here who have no idea what is in it. There is no way they could. For many, today is the first day they are back in DC after the new bill text has been made available for them to read. This bill needs some time to be disinfected by the light of day before it is ready for this floor and before we should be voting on it. That is fundamental, because it is so important.

We have small bills, and bills that come before us that we have dealt with that are legitimate to bring up on fairly close notice. But a bill of this importance, one of the longest piece of legislation, possibly the greatest number of pages of any legislative bill since I have been in the Senate, is not something that ought to be popped through here, plopped down as an amendment to the bill, substituting out an entire bill and then going forward to final passage. I don't like that and I don't think we should do it. It is not the right thing to do, and it is not fair to the American public.

The American public cares about this issue. They know more about this issue, oftentimes, than the politicians themselves. The American people, for the last 40 years, have had the right instincts. They want a lawful and fair immigration system. They do not want to end all immigration. They know we are a nation of immigrants. They believe in immigration. But they want a system that works, that does not pull down the wages of working Americans, that furthers our economy, does not enhance the welfare state and is lawful--is consistent with our principle of law. They want the law enforced.

It is the politicians who have failed them consistently. The politicians, similar to last year, seem to be on the move. Their move is we don't want this bill on our floor long. The longer it stays here the more the people will get upset, the more they are going to find out about it, the angrier they will get with us. So we do not want them to know what is in it. We will bring this new bill up, we will plop it down, we will vote it out this week, and get it off our plate. Maybe they would not know. Maybe they would not care.

But it is too important for that. We are beyond that. The American people do care. They are engaged. We might as well have a public and open debate about it and discuss these hard choices--and there are some tough choices to be made. We know that.

It would have been better if this group had conducted their meetings in public, had open meetings and everybody discussed it for several months. They might have made the American people feel better about the system.

When I first heard the White House PowerPoint presentation, this was a presentation made by Secretaries Chertoff and Gutierrez, members of the President's Cabinet. They had a PowerPoint presentation. It leaked to the press at some point. They presented it to certain Senators. I was invited to participate. I believed we had made some big strides from last year. It did, in fact, indicate a movement to a Canadian-type point system. They did assert they had created a temporary worker program that was actually temporary. Last year's temporary worker program was exactly the opposite of what they said it was. It was not temporary at all. The big print in the bill last year was ``temporary guest worker.'' Do you know what those workers were and how it would actually be carried out? A person could come to the United States as a temporary guest worker and, when you got to the fine print, they could come with their family, they could stay for 3 years, they could reup for another 3 years, another 3 years and another 3 years and they could apply for citizenship--or apply for a green card, permanent resident status in the United States the first year they were here.

That was not a temporary guest worker program. It was a joke, a sham, an attempt to mislead the American people. Forgive me if I am a little bit cautious this time about reading the fine print.

We were told we would have a better temporary worker program this year. Let me discuss some of the concerns I have about this legislation, as we understand it today, and how it actually meets with the public presentation of the principles and outlines and framework, as stated in the White House PowerPoint.

It has been my hope that negotiations would produce a bill that followed the principles laid out in the 23 White House PowerPoint presentation. That was released in March. Those were much closer, those principles, to

the framework of a bill that I said last year should be in any legislation. I stated I thought the framework from the PowerPoint could produce a bipartisan piece of legislation that could become law and could even become law this year. But I stated clearly I intend on reading the fine print.

I have not had time to read all the fine print, but I have had time enough to know I will have to oppose the bill in its current form. The question Members should ask themselves is this: If we invoke cloture today on last year's fatally flawed bill, this old bill, will the new bill the leader will file as a substitute amendment fulfill the promises laid out in the White House plan? Let's look at the four principles and see.

Principle No. 1 is an enforcement trigger. Among the first principles, the PowerPoint was to ``secure the U.S. borders'' and ``not repeat the 1986 failure.'' Before any new immigration programs or green card adjustment could begin, the White House PowerPoint stated ``enforcement triggers'' would have to be met.

Several items were listed under the trigger: 18,300 Border Patrol agents; so many miles of fencing; the end of catch and release; and the initial implementation of a workplace verification system. That is the system at the workplace that ends the job magnet so the businesspeople will stop hiring people illegally because they will have to produce a work card, an identification card, that is very difficult to forge. That is something I think could be very effective.

But I didn't think this list was going to be exhaustive, the things they had on their agenda as a trigger would be the only things in the trigger, that they would be the only things needed to ensure that we ``secure U.S. borders'' and make sure we did ``not repeat the 1986 failure.''

Does the new bill fulfill the principle No. 1? Will the enforcement trigger guarantee we are not repeating past mistakes? No, it falls short. It will not ensure that the same promises of enforcement made in 1986 do not meet the same fate.

First, the trigger only applies to the guest worker program. All other amnesty programs will begin immediately--the Z visa probationary status begins 24 hours after the Department of Homeland Security begins accepting applications. If the trigger is not met, it is unclear that status will ever expire.

Second, the trigger only requires enforcement benchmarks we are already planning on meeting. It requires nothing new, and it leaves out many very important enforcement items. Let me tell you about the debate on the trigger. It was a very important debate. Senator Isakson offered it. It was something I had offered in committee. He worked on it. I offered it on the floor of the Senate. The trigger basically said nobody gets amnesty until we fix this system.

The reason that was important was because, in 1986, when that big amnesty occurred, people said: OK, we are giving you amnesty. American people, we will not have amnesty again. We are going to fix the border. We are going to have a law enforced at the border. But of course it never happened. Three million people were given amnesty in 1986, they were given that on the promise we would have enforcement in the future, and today we have 12 million people here illegally and that enforcement never occurred. So the American people are cynical on this point. I am cynical on this point. I know how this institution works. The concept in the trigger was we would insist on the critical components of the enforcement mechanism being in place before any kind of legalization or amnesty occur.

That is that. That is why it was important. It was a very important part. We have been told: Don't worry, we have a trigger in the bill.

Let me tell you some of the things that are not in it. The US-VISIT exit system is not included as a requirement of the trigger. In 1996, 11 years ago, Congress required the administration--it was the Clinton administration then--to set up a system that recorded the exit and entry of persons across the border. I mean, people go to work, they put their cards in the machine. You go to the bank, you take out money by sticking a card in the machine. It is not difficult to have an exit/ entry system at the border if you make up your mind to do so.

We later gave ourselves more time to finish the exit portion because the exit portion was not completed. We moved the date of the exit portion from US-VISIT to the end of 2005. The exit portion of US-VISIT is essential to ensure that future guest workers or new-parent visa recipients or new-family visa recipients do not overstay.

It is one thing to be recorded when you come in. But if you come in for a 30-day visa or you come in for a 1-year work permit, how do we know you left? This is fundamental, to know when the person leaves. Anybody who suggests this is beyond the capability of the United States of America technologically to accomplish, I think is blowing smoke. Of course, we have the capability of doing this if we desire to do so.

It is not a part of the trigger, so I am not sure how valuable it is to have an entry check as part of the US-VISIT but not have the exit check. It is important, I would say, if you intend, when we pass this bill, to actually see it enforced and actually have people go home when the bill says they are supposed to go home. But if you do not put it in, then we have a problem.

A separate section of the bill, section 130, only requires the Department of Homeland Security to submit to Congress a schedule for developing and deploying the exit component. There is no requirement that it be finished as part of the trigger. But I would say the trigger has been very much weakened. They promised a trigger. They knew what the debate was all about and why it was important. The masters of the universe, I affectionately call them, who wrote this thing, said they put a trigger in. But it is not an effective trigger.

Operational control of the border is not required by the trigger. Current law requires that by April 26, 2008, 18 months after the Secure Fence Act was passed and was signed into law, that:

The Secretary of Homeland Security shall take all actions

the Secretary determines necessary and appropriate to achieve

and maintain operational control over the entire

international land and maritime borders of the United States.

Eighty Senators voted on that last year right before the elections, that this should be the standard that we would have, operational control over the border.

Only 18,000 Border Patrol agents have to be deployed by the Department of Homeland Security under this deal. This is 300 agents less than the PowerPoint listed. The Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 requires 2,000 new Border Patrol agents to be hired each year through 2010, so we are already on track now to have that many people in the next 2 or 3 years. We have already funded the hiring of over 14,000 Border Patrol agents, and DHS is already planning on hiring the 18,000 with upcoming appropriations.

This trigger didn't require anything new, nothing other than what we had done.

The 370 miles of fencing, which was part of the bill offered last year, and 200 miles of vehicle barriers, are yet to be built. So they are being built. But that was a key part of the trigger.

The trigger said we must end the catch and release, and some progress has been made to end this situation that happened when individuals coming across the boarder are apprehended. If they are from Mexico, it would be pretty easy to transport them back to Mexico, or Canada if it were on the Canadian border, but what about somebody caught on the border who is from Brazil? What about someone caught on the border who is from China? Or Indonesia? Or India? Or Africa? What about that? What happens to them?

What we were doing was apprehending people such as that, taking them before some administrative officer, releasing them on bail and asking them to come back for a hearing to be deported. Of course, 95 percent, the numbers show, were not showing up.

We have ended some of that already. Secretary Chertoff has made some progress in ending that situation, where those other than Mexicans are actually moved out rather quickly, except in a few instances.

The catch-and-release provision of the bill directly conflicts with the bill sponsors' claim that the catch-and-release will be eliminated forever as part

of the trigger. That section, found on page 10, lines 3 through 23, allows persons ``other than Mexicans'' caught at the border to be released on $5,000 bond. Being released on a bond is being released. The practice of catch-and-release of the persons ``other than Mexicans'' isn't ended by this bill; it just now calls for bond. People pay $5,000 to have some coyote bring them across, and they bring another $5,000 bond and they can post the bond and be released immediately into the country.

Another question that came up as part of that debate was to have sufficient prison capacity to detain people while they are being deported instead of releasing them on bail. You cannot end the catch- and-release if there is no place to hold persons apprehended.

The Senate has appropriated money for 9,000 new beds already, bringing us to a total of 27,500 beds. This is the money already appropriated. It is the current level of funding. So nothing new is added by this trigger that would strengthen our capacity.

Later in the bill, a separate section, 137, requires Homeland Security to conduct or acquire 20,000 additional beds. That should be in the trigger. How do we know it will ever be done? Well, we want to authorize or require 20,000 more beds to be built because we have decided we need those. But let me tell you, American people, just because we authorize something like this does not mean in any sense that somewhere down the line a future Congress will put up the money to pay for it. You cannot build bed spaces without money. What is not appropriated will not be built.

Additionally, 27,500 beds is far less than the 43,000 detention beds required under current law to be in use by the end of 2007, as required by the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act. So we are below where we need to be. That should be in part of the trigger if we are to guarantee we are moving in that direction.

Finally, there is no guarantee that the additional enforcement items in title I, Border Enforcement, and title II, Interior Enforcement, will ever be funded. There is no guarantee that the additional enforcement items will be funded. The phrase ``subject to the availability of appropriations'' is used 18 times in the first two titles. The phrase ``authorized to be appropriated'' is used 20 times in Titles I and II of the bill.

We all know this does not require any money to be available or any money to be appropriated. So that should make us nervous, ladies and gentlemen, that the language in the bill says we will do this and we will do that, build the items in title I and title II of the bill, but it will be done ``subject to the availability of appropriations.''

Then they go on to repeat many times, ``moneys that are authorized to be appropriated.'' In other words, this bill is an authorization bill. It would authorize border enforcement. It would authorize bed spaces. But it does not fund it. It does not require it to be done.

Two other trigger elements--workplace enforcement tools and processing of applications of aliens--are fine, but they do nothing to make sure the border is secured before the new guest worker amnesty program begins.

So I am disappointed that the promise of an effective trigger is not what we see in the reality of the bill language.

Principle 2: a future flow temporary worker program, the so-called Y visa. The principle is outlined in a new program for temporary foreign workers. That is what was in the framework in the PowerPoint. The PowerPoint proposed a new program where workers would be admitted for 2 years and could have their visas renewed two times, for a total of 6 years. Each period of admission would be separated by 6 months at home.

Get that. This is what is in this new bill, as we understand it and read it. So this is going to be a temporary worker program. Workers would be admitted for 2 years. That could be renewed two times, for a total of 6 years, but each period would be separated by 6 months at home.

I stated I was very concerned about this time frame. I argued last year that a genuine temporary worker program should be a 1-year program and that workers would come without their families and work on the max to be about 10 months, was my suggestion, then they would return home to be with their families, and that this could be renewed year after year as long as they were satisfactorily employed and the employers desired to hire them again and they had work to do.

But I like the fact that the PowerPoint stated--this is what they promoted a few weeks ago or a month or so ago in the PowerPoint--that workers would not be allowed to bring spouses or children but could return home for visits with their spouses and children. The PowerPoint did not say spouses and children would be coming to the United States to visit the worker.

Though no numerical cap was specified in the plan, the plan envisioned an annual cap set by the Secretary of Homeland Security, in consultation with the Secretaries of Labor and Commerce to set this cap, how many would come.

Secretary Gutierrez told me he thought it might be around 200,000-- 200,000. If workers wanted to apply for green cards, the PowerPoint stated they would be able to apply for permanent residence--a green card--but they would have to follow the normal merit-based channels and compete for the green card. Just because you are allowed to come into the program and work temporarily in a low-skilled job did not give you a leg up on somebody who was applying because they had a master's degree in mathematics. Also, they would have to leave the country when their work period expired, even if their green card status had not been granted but was pending. That is essential to the success of the project.

Well, does the new bill fulfill the principles in principle No. 2 that were stated to us? Will a truly temporary worker program be created that is comparatively simple and efficient as promised? I have to say the answer is no. There are at least three flaws that will make this program unworkable.

First, the periods are too long. The bill sets up a program where workers come for 2 years at a time. I strongly believe 1 year is a better time period. I think 2 years is just too long.

The periods, curiously, are limited. The bill only permits workers to come for two or three 2-year periods. Why do you limit that? It makes no sense to me to prohibit a worker who has come here for 2 years, gone home, 2 years, gone home, is a fine, skilled worker, the employer wants them, why they cannot keep coming, although I prefer 10 months at a time every year. After 6 years, the bill would cut off the worker from their employer unless they apply for a green card.

So this is a plan, I suggest, that is not supportive of circularity, where a person comes and circulates back to their home country, maintains their base in their home country, but encourages persons--in fact, puts pressure on them, if they want to continue to work--to do everything they can to become a citizen when they may have no desire to be a citizen.

We were in Colombia last year with Senator Specter. I met with President Uribe, and he talked about their temporary worker program. He was concerned. He thought the United States was being hostile to immigration. He expressed concern about that. He said: Why don't you do like Canada. We have people who fly up to Canada, they work and come back, and nobody ever has any problem. Well, I said: Mr. President, that is exactly what we should do. We would love to see that. But our system is so convoluted and so lawless, it is not working at all. We are not against immigration. We are not against the workers. But we want to make sure the number of workers is a legitimate number and that the system works. Our system is not working. I would love to have your system.

Now, the numbers are way too high, I have to tell you. The bill sets the initial number of guest workers at 400,000 per year, not 200,000, then it adds an escalator clause based on ``market demand.'' So the real cap is 600,000 a year after a few years. Due to the fact that the bill's market escalator--15 percent--is available in the first year of the program, the new program can result in just under 1 million workers being present in the United States in the second and third years of the program. About one million guest workers will be present in any given year under that program after the second year.

Now, that will have an impact on wages in America. It will be about 920,000 in year 2 here, the 2-year program, and 989,000 in year 3. These numbers do not include the 20 percent of workers who will be allowed to bring their families with them for their 2-year stay. So instead of complying with the promises that we would have a temporary worker program without families, we ended up with 20 percent of the temporary workers being able to bring their families with them for the full 2 years.

So that is what makes this new temporary worker program unworkable. Families can come with a worker. The new temporary worker program allows workers to bring their families--spouses and children--with them in one of their 2-year stays and for 30 days at a time on parent- visitor visas. So there is going to be a parent-visitor visa, which means you can bring children and spouses for 30 days at a time.

There is no reason for a temporary worker program that should allow workers to bring their families with them. Workers can easily go home for a week or two at a time. The cost of travel for one person to travel would be cheaper than for a family to travel for a visit.

Allowing workers to bring their families for either the 2-year period or the 30-day period will cause many practical, complicated ripple effects. Now we have got to be serious about this. We do not have enough Federal people to go out and search for everybody who is overstaying in our country and not complying with our laws. We need to create a good framework that reduces the number of people who are here illegally so they do not have to be run down and apprehended.

So these are some of the things which will happen with children coming for 2 years: Local school costs will escalate as the children of these guest workers attend schools; the language barrier will create additional problems for No Child Left Behind requirements; difficult problems for teachers and principals who have to have language skills they did not have to have before; local emergency room and health care costs will likely escalate.

So we are creating a magnet for dual citizenship. What worker would not want to bring their spouse in during her eighth month in pregnancy on a 30-day visa? This would guarantee that the spouse would receive great medical care during her delivery and would give the child dual citizenship.

Down the road, Members of Congress now purporting to be enforcement hawks, when they have to talk about removing a family, leaving a child here who is a citizen of the United States, what will they do then? I submit they will crumble. You have to create a situation in which that is not likely to occur, not create a bill that encourages or incentivizes this kind of thing to happen. It is going to be too hard to require families who overstay go home. They have kids who are going to be in school; some will be U.S. citizens. That is not going to work.

The temporary guest worker program in this legislation is set up to fail.

Principle 3 in the PowerPoint presentation was that green card allocations would be adjusted to focus more on merit and chain migration, and the visa lottery program would be ended. This is a good deal. That was a good principle, a historic move in the right direction, following Canada and Australia. It was something that was never even discussed last year, except by me. Senator Mike Enzi on the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee agreed to have a hearing at my request to discuss that. We could never get a hearing in the Judiciary Committee where the immigration bill came forward. We learned a lot about it. Everybody who learned about the merit-based system liked it. So the White House PowerPoint stated the bill would change the way we distribute green cards to focus more on merit. It described how the current green card system is ``out of balance'' and ``favors those lucky enough to have a relative over those with talent and education.''

It noted how the United States currently dedicates 58 percent of the 1.1 million green cards issued each year to relatives and only 22 percent to people selected for their disabilities.

This is the chart we had. It reflects that this is what the United States does; 58 percent of the immigration was based on relative ability, not merit. The PowerPoint noted how in other developed countries, Canada specifically, 60 percent of the green cards go to employment-based immigrants selected for their abilities. The PowerPoint described that in the initial years ``all diversity visas and some parent-preference visas would be used for merit based selection--creating 100,000 openings in year one.''

Finally, the PowerPoint stated we would ``launch a visa system that sorts applicants according to national needs and merit.'' The system was described as a way to ``boost U.S. competitiveness, emphasize education,'' and ``make it easier for the best foreign students earning STEM (science, technology, engineering, or math) degrees at U.S. colleges to stay and work.''

Negotiators describing the merit system described the implementation of a point system which selects legal permanent resident applicants based on their skills, education, language abilities, and age. That is good, isn't it? You would evaluate people who apply based on their skills, education, language, and age.

To give you an insight into how significant this is, we have a lottery. Anybody in the world from any country can apply to be a resident of the United States. They can submit their name and it goes into a pot. They draw 50,000 names from that pot. If your name is drawn out, you get in regardless of whether you have any skills, merit, or anything else, other than perhaps you couldn't get in if you had a bad criminal record. To give some perspective on the situation the United States now finds itself in, 1 million people in the year 2000 applied for those 50,000 slots. Correction. My fabulous staffer Cindy Hayden has corrected me. Hold your hat. I was wrong. Not 1 million people applied for the 50,000 lottery slots; 11 million people applied for the 50,000 lottery slots. What does this mean if we are trying to establish an immigration policy that serves our national interest? What does that mean? It means we have far more people who have applied to come to our country than we can ever accept. Professor Borjas at the Kennedy School at Harvard, himself a Cuban refugee, has said in his book ``Heaven's Door'' that for a poor person anywhere in the globe, coming to the United States is a tremendous benefit to them. All of them will benefit; almost universally they will benefit by coming here. It is not a question of whether the individual will benefit if they come here; it is a question of who can come here since we can't allow and have no capacity to come close to allowing everybody to come to America who would like to come here.

What have Canada and Australia done? They said: We are going to set an immigration policy that serves our national interest. How commonsensical is that? Our national interest. We had a committee hearing on it. I asked Secretary Chertoff at one of the hearings: Do you believe that policies should serve our national interest? I was proud of him. He said, just like that: Yes, sir, it should serve our national interest.

I believe it was the columnist Charles Krauthammer, in one of his columns about this subject, who mused as to whether we shouldn't be like the NFL football draft and look out all over the world and pick the best and brightest who would flourish in America and strengthen our Nation and make us a better, stronger, more vigorous, and talented country. There is much to be said there. That was the promise we were made, that this new bill was going to make a move toward the Canadian system. There are some steps in that direction but, unfortunately, not enough.

I expressed concern at the time that the White House plan appeared to increase the number of green cards available each year. Page 21 of the bill indicated 1.4 million would be available each year, now at 1.1. I also stated it would be critical to examine how the point system was actually written, that the actual test had to ensure that low-skilled workers would not receive preference for green cards over high-skilled workers. Even though some business may think that is great, to have a bunch of low-skilled workers, that may not be the best thing for the national interest. Nor does the bill fulfill that principle we were told should be included in an immigration bill.

Will green card allocations be adjusted to focus more on merit? Will chain migration be ended? The new bill will only do a fraction of the good it could have done. That is what is so frustrating to me. It came close. It made some progress, but it could have been so much better. We could have made a cleaner move to this kind of enlightened approach to immigration.

They say we are going to end chain migration. Chain migration would be the ability to bring brothers and sisters into the country if you have been made a citizen. Also I thought it meant you would end the ability to bring in aging parents, but typical of the cutting the baby in half, the political compromise basically cut the number of parents in half who could come. So a number of aging parents will still be able to chain migrate in if their children have obtained citizenship. That is in the future, however. But between now and 2015, chain migration does not end but is actually accelerated. I kid you not. Instead of actually ending chain migration, the new bill only stops accepting new chain migration applications. The bill's sponsors take the numbers they eliminate from chain migration categories, about 200,000 per year, and then allocate those to adjusting the backlogged chain migration applications. In other words, people who have applied for chain migration get to come in.

If this were not enough, the bill's sponsors then take the green card numbers freed up through elimination of the visa lottery program-- 50,000--and also dedicate those numbers to processing not high-skilled people but the chain migration backlog applications. Even after 8 years, when the chain migration backlog is supposed to be eliminated, points for family members will be issued through the merit system. So we are creating a so-called merit system, but it is skewed also, not to merit but to family. Six points are given for adult sons and daughters of permanent residents; four points for siblings of citizens and permanent residents; and two extra points if you have applied for a chain migration category between May 1, 2005 and now. So we are giving substantial points, tipping value points to lower skilled workers because they happen to be involved in the chain migration process. I don't think that is a good principle. It undermines the move we have been promised occurs through a merit-based system.

Let me make this point. The merit system as proposed in the legislation will not receive ``100,000 openings in year one'' alone, as the PowerPoint presentation we were given promised. For the first 5 years, current employment-based visa levels are kept the same-- 140,000--until 2015. Only after 8 years will the number of employment- based, skill-based, green cards be increased to 380,000. So in reality, chain migration numbers between now and 2015 will skyrocket. Chain migration is going to increase until 2015. The portion of family-based migration versus merit-based migration will be worse than it is today, perhaps much worse. Think about that. The PowerPoint we have been sold is that this is going to move to merit. Yes, it says that. Yes, it does. But when you look at the real numbers through the next 8 years, the numbers are going to be more chain migration, and it will be worse in terms of merit-based migration than exists today.

Additionally, several characteristics of the merit-based system will work to undermine its stated purpose, which is ``to boost U.S. competitiveness,'' to ``emphasize education,'' and ``make it easier for the best foreign students earning STEM degrees at U.S. colleges to stay here and work.''

The merit-based system will set aside 10,000 green cards a year for temporary workers, new Y visa holders. These workers will not have to compete on a level playing field with all other merit system applicants. Instead, they will only be competing among themselves for the 10,000 annual slots. Additionally, the merit-based system includes points for characteristics that low-skilled workers in the United States are sure to have. In other words, you create a temporary worker program that can bring in almost a million people in a 2-year period to do low-skilled work. Then you create a permanent system of immigration for those low-skilled workers when it is supposed to focus on merit. But the system then turns around and provides extra points for low-skilled workers to help them get into this system. Sixteen points, for example, are given for employment in a ``high demand occupation.'' This list, to be produced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is sure to conclude jobs in the service industry, the construction industry, food processing industry, et cetera.

Two points per year--up to 10--are given for the years of work the applicant has done for a U.S. firm. It is easy to see how a temporary worker, who is allowed to work in the United States for 6 years, will get 10 points here. That undermines the merit system in many ways, so there are a lot of subtleties here.

Now, when Senator Kennedy and the others had their press conference to announce the grand compromise, Senator Kennedy or his staff, about that time, indicated only 30 percent of the people would come into our country based on merit and that, not to worry, we were still going to be, as one of his staffers said, a family-based system, a chain migration system, not a merit-based system. As we look at the numbers, I am afraid Senator Kennedy is more correct than I wish were so.

There is another principle: the illegal alien population program, the Z visas. These are the people who are here illegally.

The White House PowerPoint described how the proposal would give legal status to illegal aliens currently in the United States through new Z visas, but would provide them with ``no special path to citizenship.'' The Z visa sounded better to me than the plan last year, which was very bad and should never have become law.

Specifically, the PowerPoint told us the Z visa holder would be able to apply for green cards, but ``only through regular programs,'' through ``point-based merit selection.'' According to the PowerPoint, Z visa holders would be ``ineligible for `adjustment of status' from the U.S. . . . Heads of household would need to return to their home country and follow the normal channel'' to be admitted into the country on a permanent basis.

Well, does the new bill we have been presented with Saturday morning at 2 a.m. fulfill principle No. 4? Will the current illegal alien population be treated compassionately but not given a special path to citizenship, as they promised? The answer, I am afraid, and I am sad to say, is no. The new bill clearly creates a system whereby current illegal aliens are treated differently than those who try to come to the United States lawfully. It may not be ``jackpot'' amnesty, but it is some form of amnesty.

My definition has been: Those who broke the law to come here should not receive every benefit this Nation has to offer, like those who come lawfully; namely, citizenship and certain economic benefits. If you come unlawfully, you should never get those things. That is an important principle.

Mr. President, 1986 should have told us that. We need to establish and say from 1986 onward we are never going to let you be a citizen if you come unlawfully. We may say you can stay here with your family and your children--you are working, you have been here many years--maybe we can accept those kinds of compassionate realities. But to give them every benefit of citizenship as a result of breaking in line ahead of other persons is not the right thing.

I was very glad our Republican leader in the Senate, Senator McConnell, when interviewed yesterday by George Stephanopoulos on ``This Week,'' drew a line in the sand for the Republican position on this issue. He stated:

One thing is for sure: If this bill gives them any

preferential treatment toward citizenship over people who

came into the country in the proper way, that's a non-

starter.

Well, I agree. The one thing we can all agree we should not do is treat the illegal alien preferentially. So I am sad to say that after reading the bill I think there are several ways in which the language gives preferential treatment toward citizenship to the illegal alien population over people who have waited in line to come the proper way.

First, illegal aliens who rushed across the border between January 7, 2004--the date contained in last year's Senate bill--and July 1, 2007, will be eligible for amnesty. That is on page 260, line 25 of the legislation. This includes

illegal aliens who have been here a mere 5 months.

I want to repeat that. Last year, the bill that was so fatally flawed--I thought was not principled--said if you wanted to be part of the amnesty it contained, you would at least have to have been in the country before January 1, 2004. This bill says you get amnesty if you were in the country up to January 1, 2007--just a few months ago, 4 or 5 months ago.

We put National Guard on the border. We have enhanced our Border Patrol. We put up fencing and all of this. But if somebody beat the system last October, last November, last December 31, and got into our country, they are going to be given amnesty under this bill. That is not sensible. It indicates we are thinking politically and not as a matter of principle.

Advocates for this bill claim this bill is necessary because illegal aliens have deep roots in the United States and are, therefore, impossible to remove. This is simply not true in all cases. It is not true in all cases. For some cases, they are tough situations, I admit. But illegal aliens who have rushed across the border in the last few years, without their family--and including those who came 5 months ago--will be given all the same amnesty benefits as those who have been living here for 10 or more years in the United States, and raised children in the United States, and have never been arrested or done anything wrong.

The American people may want us to treat the illegal alien population compassionately--and they do--but there is no reason to lump all illegal aliens into the same amnesty program regardless of when they got here or how deep their roots are into the United States.

The bill also contains a provision that makes anyone who filed an application to come lawfully after May 1, 2005, have to start the process over by applying for a green card through the merit system. So if you applied lawfully after May 1, 2005, you have to start your process all over again--a burden to the lawful applicant. It is fundamentally unfair those who would come here 5 months ago should be put on this guaranteed path.

Second, under this bill, only illegal aliens will be eligible for Z visas--visas that allow them to live and work here forever, as long as they are renewed every 4 years, and they have a special point system that allows the Z visa holder to adjust status to permanent status without regard to numerical limits. These visas are not available to anyone living in the United States who came here to work legally and who will have to go home once their visa expires.

Third, under the bill, unlike any alien who wants to come the proper way, those illegally here will get legal status 24 hours after they apply, even if their background checks are not completed.

Fourth, under the bill, unlike any alien who wants to come the proper way, illegal aliens may be exempted from a long list of inadmissibility grounds, including fraud or misrepresentation to obtain immigration benefits, and false claims of U.S. citizenship; and their prior deportation or removal orders can be waived, even if they never left. In other words, if they have been apprehended in some fashion, have been ordered deported and given a removal order, they can still be exempted from that, even if they refused to leave the country, as they were ordered to do so, if they can show hardship to their families.

Fifth, it is important to remember that under the bill, unlike an alien who wants to come the proper way, a Z visa holder will be able to get a green card through their own separate point system, and without being subjected to the regular annual numerical limits, which is a real advantage, I would submit, to them.

I see my colleague Senator Bunning is in the Chamber. I understood he wants to speak, and I will be pleased to yield to him at this time.

But we do have a responsibility to fix this immigration system we have today. It is comprehensively broken. It is a lawless system. We arrest at the borders of the United States every year--hold your hat-- 1.1 million people. That is because the word is out all over that we do not enforce our laws and you can come into this country unlawfully and get away with it.

Now, we have to make a decision as a nation: Will we create a system that is lawful, that is principled, and that will work? Will we do that, or will we not?

I have said in the last couple years when someone comes up with an idea that will actually work to enforce our law and end the lawlessness, that is what gets objected to. If you come up with an idea that will not work, will only have an incremental benefit, people are glad to pass it and say they did something about immigration. But that is not the way we have been doing it.

In my mind, it is no good--this is the analogy I use--if someone attempts to jump across a 10-foot ravine and he jumps fully 9 feet but does not get across and falls to the bottom, how good is that? That is what we have been doing in immigration law. We have been passing bills. They have had loophole after loophole, gimmick after gimmick, impossibility after impossibility, and they have never worked. I think it is because in our base, in the Congress--we and the Presidents--they have not wanted it to work.

It is time for us to listen to the American people. Their heart is right on this subject. They believe in immigration. They believe in a lawful system of immigration that can serve our national interest.

Mr. President, it is a pleasure to yield the floor to my colleague from Kentucky. He understands this issue with great clarity. He is a man of principle and courage. He also is a man you do not want to be battling against with two outs and two people on base, our Hall of Fame baseball pitcher, Jim Bunning.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Kentucky. I hope people heard what he said and saw the import of the charts he produced. The numbers are so large it almost goes beyond our ability to comprehend. But according to the senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, Robert Rector, one of the most acknowledged experts on social welfare in America and the architect of the historic welfare reform that worked far better than critics ever said it would work, at a press conference that Senator Bunning hosted this morning to give those figures, he said in his opinion--correct me if I am wrong--and he studied this and added up the numbers for days, weeks, and months, and he came up with the

figure of $2.3 trillion as a net loss to the U.S. Treasury over the lifetime of those persons who would be given amnesty out of the 12 million; is that correct?

Based on the fact that half of those were high school graduates, that was a key factor. He was passionate; would you not agree?

Regarding the damage this would do to the financial well-being of our country.

Yes.

I thank the Senator. I agree. We are at the point of needing historic reform. I believe we could do that, but we ought to consider what Canada, Australia, and New Zealand have done to avoid the financial catastrophe we are headed for if we don't watch out.

I yield such time as he might use to Senator Vitter from Louisiana, who is a lawyer and a Tulane graduate.

Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Louisiana and value his insight into these matters and so many other matters in the Senate. He has an incisive mind and is committed to the principles that have made America great.

I wish to follow up on a few points that indicate to me the unhealthiness of where we are. Here is an Associated Press article from Saturday. Once again, we are hearing statements from the people who met to write this bill, as we did last year, that any amendments threaten the whole bill and it may not pass. It might fall apart if somebody in the Senate were to disagree and offer an amendment that was different than something the self-appointed negotiators agreed upon; and not just they agreed upon, but maybe some outside influences and special interests who have been working behind the scenes to see this legislation become reality from the beginning.

I remember last year in the debate having an exchange with one of my colleagues who objected to amendments and said that we couldn't do this amendment, that the compromise that these groups had worked on together might collapse if a trigger amendment, I believe it was, that Senator Isakson was offering passed.

I remember asking: Who was in this room where you all met? Were you elected to be in this room? Did outside groups submit information and approve or disapprove various provisions contained in the legislation? Are those the people who are going to be unhappy if some Member of the Senate, duly elected by the people of their State, disagrees and votes it down? Who gets to decide what is in a piece of legislation? The whole Senate or not? I just see some of that same little tendency out there today.

I have an article by the Associated Press. This article goes on to note:

Any one of the changes has the potential to sink the whole

measure, which was unveiled with fanfare Thursday but still

was being drafted late Friday.

That is what Julia Hirschfield Davis said. She goes on to quote Commerce Secretary Gutierrez, who helped negotiate the compromise who ``cautioned against revisions that could upset the framework.''

I would like to have seen the bill follow the framework that Secretary Gutierrez and Secretary Chertoff provided when they said we were going to have a new bill. That framework sounded pretty good to me, but the details of it are not holding up to the principles of that framework.

Secretary Gutierrez said:

You take something out and you're creating a problem

throughout the system--you may think that you're only

tweaking one part. . . . We've got to be very careful as to

what is proposed to change.

In other words, don't be messing with what we worked on.

Interest groups also seem to be well informed:

"We're going to fight like mad to fix the parts we don't

like,'' said Tom Snyder, the national political director of

Unite Here!, a service workers union comprised largely of

immigrants.

Not a normal union, a service worker union, comprised of immigrants.

Then liberal activists who call the measure a good start but object to parts, but they say they have `` `a couple of bites at the apple' to change it as it makes its way to President Bush's desk, said Frank Sharry, the executive director of the National Immigration Forum.''

And another:

``We're not sure that our support will continue if the bill

that approaches the finish line has these kind of problems in

it,'' says Cecilia Munoz of the National Council of La Raza.

So they make their points. All I am saying to my colleagues is that it is our responsibility as Members of this body to take extremely seriously the responsibility we have been given to craft an immigration policy that will serve--surely we can all agree--the national interest of the United States and the people who live here--a just, legitimate national interest. That has to be the pole star of what we are doing, a guiding star of how we are going to do our work. If we don't commit to that, then we are going to have real problems. We are going to try to adjust immigration policy based on special interest groups, what they think is important to them in the short run.

If you are a business and hire people and don't have to have health care for them and they get sick, you don't have to take care of them, but they can go down to the local emergency room and have it paid for by the city and the county in which that person lives and you have gained an economic advantage.

Why would you want to hire a lawful American citizen if you have to have more benefits or pay more wages? This is a real factor. We have to talk about it. You can bring in enough workers and, in fact, we are already doing it, to the degree it will drive down the wages of decent, honest, hard-working American citizens and prohibit them in this time of economic growth and prosperity of seeing their wages rise as those corporate leaders are seeing their wages rise in this time of prosperity with profits up.

In fact, Professor Borjas of Harvard, who has written the book ``Heaven's Door,'' himself a Cuban refugee, is very concerned about the large flow of low-skilled immigration workers into America. Professor Borjas says, in his estimate it has reduced the wages of lower skilled American workers by 8 percent. That is real money. Not only that, it has prohibited people from having a chance to progress and rise in the ranks and be promoted and get an even larger paycheck than just the lower scale at which they may have started.

On the Mall--not even on the Mall, at the foot of this Capitol--last year during this debate, I was taking a Saturday morning walk. An individual, an African American from Montgomery, AL, spoke with me. I went over and talked with him. He was going to visit relatives in New Jersey, and he stopped by with the family to see the Capitol.

I asked him what he did. He said he was in the drywall business in Montgomery. I asked him how he was doing. We first talked about how good the economy in Alabama was doing. We had good economic growth and a lot of building had been going on. I asked him how things were going with him. He said: Yes, the county and the city are doing wonderful, but we're not doing so well.

I said: What do you mean?

He said: My father started this business as a young man, and we have been carrying it on. Really these are as bad a times as we have ever had.

Why? Montgomery is growing, houses are popping up everywhere. There is economic growth in the commercial area in addition. I said: Why? Do you think it has anything to do with immigration?

He said: I don't have anything against immigrants. I like them. But, yes, it really has. We have lost a lot of work.

So I am saying to my colleagues, it is not always true that nobody will do this work. Sometimes it is a question of whether they will or can do it at a salary and an income level we want them to have, at a salary and income level that will allow them to take care of their family, that will provide a retirement benefit or health care for their family if someone gets sick. There are thousands, tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of individuals similar to this man I just described who are seeing their piece of the economic pie being eroded.

People disagree about that. They say it is not so. But I submit it is basic economics.

We grow cotton and corn in Alabama. If someone were to bring into this country huge amounts of cotton, causing the price of cotton to fall, we would hear from our farmers, and people would oppose that, saying that is not proper. If they brought in huge amounts of corn and depressed the price of corn, wouldn't we be concerned about that? Is anybody concerned about the low-skilled worker, where we are seeing unprecedented numbers of people doing low-skilled work and adversely impacting the wages of workers in America today? It is happening.

Do we need immigration? Do we have jobs that can't be filled by American workers? I think so. I have talked to business people in my State. I have had them tell me what is happening and share their ideas, and I am convinced we do. That is why I proposed last year that we create a legitimate temporary worker program, one that would actually work.

The proposal in last year's bill was breathtaking in its lack of wisdom. The bill last year had a provision called temporary guest worker. But when you read it, what it said was that a temporary guest worker could come to America for 3 years as a temporary worker and they could bring their families with them; after 3 years, they could reup again for another 3 years and another 3 years and another 3 years. After the first 3 years here, they could apply to be a green card holder or a permanent resident and then be put on the road to citizenship. That is not a temporary worker program. Those people were supposed to go home after a certain period of time. But the way that proposal was set, they would not go home. Their children would be born here, their families would be settled here, and their roots would be deep in American soil and in the American community. Their kids would now be in junior high school, and somebody is going to walk in and say: Sorry, it is time for you to go back home to Mexico or Honduras or China or wherever they may have come from? That is not a practical solution. That makes no sense.

We know we are not going to want to confront that kind of situation, so we objected to that and urged the idea that they have a legitimate temporary worker program and a legitimate program that is a temporary worker program, which would mean the worker came here without their family for a limited period of time and, with circularity, would go back home after their period of work had occurred.

That is being done throughout the world today. A group from Colombia applies, and they go to Canada and they work for a season and then return home to Colombia. They never have any problem with that. They do not bring their families. They do not settle in for 3 years and then the Government of Canada expects them to go home. They have created a system that actually works because it is based on common sense and human nature.

What I suggest is that we create a genuine temporary worker program where people can come to our country to meet those needs certified by the Department of Labor and that are in crisis. For example, my colleague, Senator Vitter from New Orleans, and I have talked about Hurricane Katrina. That is a national crisis. There are not enough workers to do the roofing and other things that need to be done. That would provide a basis for the Department of Labor to allow temporary workers--maybe more than normal--to come to the United States to help us through this crisis program. You could do that and still not pull down the wages of American workers, yet fill a critical need.

I believe that if we are to avoid the problem of permanence, avoid the problem of a system that will not work because it invites people to sink their roots into the United States, it must be a system that does not allow families to come with the temporary workers. I believe strongly and I urge my colleagues to let us have a temporary guest worker program that allows people to come for 10 months and no more and spend at least 10 months at home. With a good ID, they could go back and forth throughout the year if they chose to. That would work.

Some say: Well, some companies aren't seasonal. Some companies need people all year. Well, you could stagger the number, for heaven's sake. The return-home periods could be staggered. Maybe you would need for a given business 12 workers instead of 10, but you could cover the whole period. The system would be clear that the person would come just for temporary work and would go home. Frankly, I am not aware of why we would want to say that type of program should end. As long as a person wanted to come and as long as a business wanted them there to work, I don't see why they should be required to end after 6 years or 8 years or however many.

Now, under this bill, what we find is this: Under the temporary worker program that is supposed to be without family, we find that 20 percent of them do bring their families. Not only that, they do not come for 1 year or less; they would come for 2 years, have to go home for 6 months, come back for 2 years, go home for 6 months, come back for 2 years, go home, and never return, which is sort of weird, to me. So I am just not sure that this has been thought out carefully.

I believe we could create a better, more practical immigration system--one which we could be proud of and which would actually work-- and provide the amount of labor we really need in our economy without having an amount that depresses the wages of American workers. We have to be careful about that. We really do.

Mr. President, I see Senator Corker from Tennessee is here, my neighbor, super mayor of Chattanooga, just across the Alabama line. If you can't be from Alabama, Chattanooga is a good place to be. I yield such time as the Senator would consume.

Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Tennessee, and I believe he is telling us correctly that the way we were taught in school is that Senators ought to have an opportunity to understand what is before them before they vote. We are dealing with an extremely complex piece of legislation, and the more you get into it, the more I have been involved in it as a member of the Judiciary Committee and in the floor debate last year, the more I see you have to be realistic and practical and thoughtful and principled if you want to make this system work, and we are a long way from that.

I think what Senator Bunning said earlier about the cost of this bill is important for us to consider. I understand some work is being done on a CBO score. I don't know if that is true, but I have heard that the Congressional Budget Office is attempting to score this, but it is difficult, I assume. They can't give a real score because we don't even have the bill in final form yet. It is still referred to as a draft and hasn't even been introduced. So until something is actually introduced, there is no way we can get a score. But I can tell you a little bit about the way this thing was handled last year.

Those of us who were concerned about it last year asked for a score on the bill from the Congressional Budget Office to find out how much it would actually cost. We got a troubling number, and we used that number a day before we had a final vote, and then a month or so later, we got a more complete score from the Congressional Budget Office. I think that bill was probably less complicated than the one we are dealing with today, and they scored the bill, over 10 years, to be $127 billion in cost. Now, they excluded from that the money we spent on enforcement. I didn't count that. This was based on lost tax revenue, it was based on the welfare and other direct benefits to people who would be legalized under that bill and how much more they would draw from the Treasury than they would pay into the Treasury, and they came up with a cost of $127 billion over 10 years. Similar to last year's bill, this bill puts things off for 10 years. That is what the Budget Office scores normally on, a 10-year cycle. They score it on that basis, and that is how they came up with $127 billion.

When we asked them--I believe at a public hearing--what about the next 10 years, they said: Well, it would definitely escalate. It will definitely be higher. Okay. Why? Well, because the lineup and the movement of people to green cards and citizenship was delayed by the bill. They were legalized in our country and they could stay, but they didn't get a permanent resident status, which gives you many welfare benefits and other benefits and citizenship, until the second 10 years. Do you understand that? That is when the big money is out there. That is what Robert Rector told us today at this press conference. That is what his study at the Heritage Foundation points out. He convinced us all last year. One thing you don't hear as much as you used to--oh, we need this immigration flow, these hard-working, low-skilled immigrants; they do a good job for us, and that is going to help us with Social Security and Medicare because we are an aging population, and we need those people coming into the country. They are going to help us with Social Security and Medicare.

Mr. Rector demolished that argument. It is completely bogus. It is off the table. I hope nobody will suggest that anymore. Those were the people I called the masters of the universe up on Wall Street somewhere thinking they know: ``Oh, well, we don't want to be like Europe, we will just bring in this immigration and that will solve our debt problems for the future.''

Isn't that wonderful. But it doesn't work that way. Mr. Rector explained it last year and today with tremendous passion at a press conference. Half of the 12 million people here--at least half, maybe more, maybe 60 percent, there are different estimates--do not have a high school degree. Some of them are illiterate even in their own language. Mr. Rector studied the numbers on that. He used a framework of the National Academy of Sciences study in 1990. That study tried to analyze the economic impact of immigration. He took this disproportionate number of low-skilled and uneducated workers and he demonstrated, as Senator Bunning told us, that it is not this year and not next year the crisis will hit us, but in the outyears. Do you know what Mr. Rector said? He said they will begin to draw the biggest amount of money about the time the baby boomers are drawing the biggest amount of money out of the Treasury, and Medicare and Social Security will be damaged tremendously by this program.

It is hard to talk about that. It is painful to talk about it in those terms, I have to tell you. We hate to do that. But a nation like Canada has had to deal with it. They wrestled with it and they decided it makes sense for them, since they cannot accept everybody who wishes to come to Canada--it would overflow the country, and more people want to come than they can accept--that they would accept people who have the job skills, the education, and the language skills that will be successful in Canada and therefore they will pay more in taxes than they will take out in benefits.

Mr. Rector calculated what happens when you take the workers, the low-skilled workers who will be provided permanent legal status--call it amnesty or not--in this country, who will all be able to stay. He factored out a mortality rate. He was very complex and detailed in the analysis, following the principles of the National Academy of Sciences. He concludes it would cost the U.S. Treasury, over the lifetime of the people who will be provided amnesty, $2.3 trillion.

A trillion is 1,000 billion. I got into an argument down here about attorneys' fees and I talked about attorneys getting $50 million and $100 million. One attorney in Mississippi got a $100 million check and no bank in Mississippi could cash the check. I was winning the argument. Then we started finding out they got billion dollar fees. The Baltimore Orioles guy got $2 billion in legal fees. We started talking about billions and I lost everybody. Nobody understood what we were talking about. It was too big; nobody could comprehend it and the steam went out of the debate.

But I am telling you, $2.3 trillion is a lot of money; $2,300 billion is what that is. Pretty soon you are talking about real money. We have to think about this. I hope we will--very much.

I will raise it as a moral issue. Remember, we have a certain zero sum game. We will put an ultimate level on the number of people who can enter our country. The question is, who will enter our country? We know, as I noted earlier, in the year 2000, 11 million applied for the 50,000 lottery slots. Think about that, 11 million want to come to America and they applied for those lottery slots. Only 50,000 names were drawn out of that 11 million. We can't accept everybody, and we should focus on what we can do for the people who will most likely flourish here, will pay more in taxes than they will take out in revenues, and who have proven themselves acceptable. Since we can't take everybody, let's raise this question.

Under the current law, here is the choice for the immigration official. You have a person who dropped out of high school, has not done very well, has no English skills, but has a brother in the United States who is a citizen. Compare that to another young man in Honduras, say, who finished at the top of his class, and was the valedictorian. He took English classes because he wanted to take English. People all over the world learn English today. It is an international language. Millions of people know English all over the world. So he knows English. He took the technical and college courses he could get there. He had a couple of years in college. They both apply to be citizens. Who gets in? The answer is crystal clear: The brother with no education, no skills, is going to get in, and the other one will have zero chance to get in.

We need family reunification. Everybody who becomes a citizen needs to be able to bring their parents. Why?

Church groups are asking that. I ask, Why? If somebody leaves their family, goes to the United States of America, decides to be an American citizen and now feels they have a constitutional right to bring their aging parents in to be taken care of by the American health care system, why is that? If that parent is brought in, it denies that young person in Honduras, who has worked hard, studied hard, learned English, and dreams of being an American and dreams of the opportunity of coming to this country--because we have a limit to how many people can come. See? If we can't accept everybody, what basis do we use to decide who gets to come?

I think that is an important concept. I urged and was very pleased when the White House and members of this group who are negotiating this bill said they were going to move to the Canadian point system, a merit-based system. That is the right thing for us to do. It only makes common sense. It is what Australia, New Zealand, as well as Canada, are doing. I understand the Brits are moving in that direction. I think they are moving towards it in The Netherlands and other advanced countries.

We ought to be moving in that direction. I am disappointed the move was so small, and such an incremental step. I am not even sure that is going to be acceptable because prominent Democratic Senators have said--and Senator Reid earlier today used this phrase, which made me nervous,--``this is a good start.''

What does a ``good start'' mean? It means, well, it may change on the floor of the Senate. Then it could go to Nancy Pelosi and the House of Representatives, and they may take out the merit-based point system. Or it could go to conference where the conference committee will be formed to work out differences between the House bill and the Senate bill, and who will dominate the conference? Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi. She will appoint a majority of the House Members and Harry Reid will appoint a majority of the Senate Members, and the bill then comes right out. What they say is going to be in it. Senator Reid a while ago indicated his concern about a move away from family migration.

I don't know; I am nervous about this legislation. Here we go, are we going to get together and hit the bait? They throw out a point system, a merit-based system like Canada, and this is going to be a big deal and we all bite it and it is not there. We get hooked.

What we do know is it is a very small step. It may be an important step, but a small step. According to Senator Kennedy in his press conference and his statements through his staff, they calculate this will move the merit-based system in the United States from the 22 percent we have today to 30 percent. About 8 or 10 percent is all it is going to increase merit-based immigration into America. That is what he said.

He said it to the leftist groups that have all been hollering about this and objecting. He says, Don't worry, there is nothing to it, it is not a point system at all. His staff, I believe his press secretary, said flat out, ``This is a family-based immigration system.''

You tell me what it is. Canada got to 60 percent, Australia 62 percent, on merit based. They are very happy with that. I have met with the director of the Canadian system. I met with an individual from Australia who is involved with it. I asked him how it was working, are they happy? Yes, they are.

They considered things such as if you are willing to go to a more rural province that needs workers, you get more points. Because that serves the Canadian or Australian interest. A lot of things such as that can be made part of a thoughtful bill, which we do not have here, I am afraid.

Why is it important we go to the merit-based system? There are 2.3 trillion reasons why.

Look at immigration. Rector explained it to us last year. He is a senior fellow at Heritage. You get sort of a skewed picture. If you take the smaller number who come to America with any college, he said-- 2 years of college or above--they tend to do fabulously well. They tend to be very successful. They and their children almost never go on welfare. They pay their medical bills. They do well and they prosper. Many of them are providing scientific expertise that may be the cure for cancer and other diseases and have other capabilities, so that has tremendous benefits to us.

When you add it all up and average them out, it makes the fundamental system look better than it is. But if you take the lower skilled workers, their productivity is not as great.

I do not believe we ought to create a system that denies people, those who come in initially on a lower skilled workforce basis, the right to apply and compete on a merit basis. So if you choose to come as a low-skilled worker, you work as a bricklayer or something of the kind, you take advantage of junior college courses and you learn English and you get a few hours or some years of credit in college, and then you apply. They should be very competitive. They will know English probably by that time. We are not creating an underclass that gives them no chance to apply. But the system should apply, I suggest, in such a way that temporary workers can apply for permanent resident status and compete against anybody else. I believe that will work.

We have very little increase in the bill as we see it in the high- skilled workers. We have not made a lot of progress toward dealing with those, many of the highly educated people who graduate from our best universities. They come here, advance to the top of their class at a university, and we often send them straight home.

I think we have a strong feeling that we should fix that. But, so far, our evaluation of the bill indicates that it is not fixed very well at all.

Congress needs to seize the moment. We need to pass legislation that will improve our immigration policy, a policy that serves our national interests, our legitimate, just national interests, and that will secure our border and create a lawful system.

These goals will not be accomplished by last year's bill. That is what we will be voting on in a few minutes, cloture on last year's bill, which I have a great deal of concern with and could delineate a host of reasons it is a total disaster. And they won't be accomplished with a new bill that we are forcing through today.

So that is a concern for us. I do believe the principles set forth in the PowerPoint presentation attracted my attention, got my interest up because I thought it would move from a framework that last year's bill had, which was a failed framework, to a framework that could actually be effective to accomplish what we want.

I am disappointed, almost heartbroken, because we made some progress toward getting to this new framework, but the political wheeling and dealing and compromising and splitting the baby has resulted in a circumstance that--we just did not get far enough. I wish we could do better. We have got to do better. This is a historic opportunity.

If we do not grab the bull by the horns now, we are going to be sorry. I would suggest that my colleagues say now is the time to pass a bill. I agree. But what I would say in addition is, let's pass a good bill.

Mr. President, I see my colleague from Nebraska, Senator Nelson. I believe he wanted to share some remarks. I would be glad to yield to him in a moment and just say that I appreciate his service to the country on the Armed Services Committee. I was a member of his delegation. We got back a few weeks ago from Iraq.

Senator Nelson, thank you for your leadership of that delegation. It was a meaningful visit to Fallujah and other places. Thank you for your principled and effective leadership on immigration. I yield to you at this time.

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

Madam President, I had time set aside. Has that time expired? How much time is left?

Madam President, well, I see my colleagues here. I thank Senator Nelson for his work on immigration last year and this year. I see others here prepared to speak. I yield back the remainder of my time.

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

Mr. President, I wish to express some thoughts about the earlier statement of the Democratic leader, Senator Reid, that he was not going to attempt to bring this bill up for a vote this week. I think that is the only right choice that could have been made. He has been talking about bringing it up this week and actually getting a vote on Friday on a bill that we only got the paperwork on Saturday morning at 2 a.m. It hasn't been substituted yet, to my knowledge.

This is a piece of legislation of enormous complexity which has not gone through the proper committee--the Judiciary Committee. It was written by a group of people who claim they have reached an agreement. The agreement is that on both sides, they are saying nobody can offer an amendment that goes to what they consider the core of it because they will all band together and vote against it. So I guess that means if anybody has a different view about how immigration should be handled, the people I really love and respect, whom I affectionately call ``masters of the universe,'' are just going to all get together and vote no. So I am not sure what the purpose of having votes is. But presumably, the rest of us, now that we have had a chance to read it, will be able to at least nibble around the edges and offer a few amendments that might make it a little better, and I look forward to that opportunity.

I think it is very important that this bill was not rammed through this week and no attempt was made to do that. I think it would have poisoned the atmosphere. It would have been a very bad scene had that occurred. So now we are talking about 2 weeks of debate. There is no doubt in my mind that this Senate could spend a month easily on this bill--maybe more. It is a critically important piece of legislation. It has much impact on our whole economy, our culture, and our rule of law. We could do better with it if we spend time on it. So I hope we are not in a situation where the leadership--the conferee group which has been meeting--is going to lock together and just vote down anything that displeases them or one side or the other says this is important and shouldn't be amended. So I am worried about that. We will see how it goes.

I hope the American people will take the opportunity to study the legislation. It does have some good things in it. It does have provisions in it that are quite superior to the bill I referred to as fatally flawed last year. But the cloture vote we just took was to move to last year's bill, and unless I am mistaken, we have not seen the new bill that is supposed to be substituted. We haven't seen anything other than a draft of the former bill. It has not been put in legislative language, even in the smaller print in the draft version that has been floated since Saturday. It is 326 pages, but in normal bill language, it will turn out to be probably 800, maybe 1,000 pages with each one of the clauses and phrases. Based on our history of dealing with immigration, it has to be read carefully because experts seem to have the ability--some of these lawyers, particularly--to slip in phrases that can have significance far beyond what might appear to be the case when you first read it. So it needs to be studied carefully.

A lot of people wanted to ram this through before the Memorial Day recess.

I am glad Senator Reid has abandoned that and will allow the American people the opportunity to have an extra week to look at it.

I thank my colleagues who have worked on the bill. They are good people. They have it in their heads that they want to fix immigration, and it is time for a comprehensive fix of immigration. There are tough decisions to be made. But I get a little bit worried when time after time I hear people say: Well, there is a lot in it I don't like,

but you know, you just have to live with it. I am not sure we ought to live with anything that doesn't make sense. I am not sure we ought to live with anything that is bad policy. Why do we have to do that? Because this group has met and they said no serious amendments can be changed--adopted that would alter the core of the bill, the basic philosophy of it, I worry about that. We are troubled that a number of things don't quite reach the promised principles that have been floated as part of this discussion.

The trigger is in the bill, but I think it is far too weak. The temporary guest worker program is preferable to last year's, but it is very unsettling to me. I have an odd feeling that this temporary worker program that is in the bill is not going to work. We should not pass anything that won't work. It needs to be done in a better way.

The hoped-for move to a more merit-based system, a point system like Canada does, is troubling because no significant move in that direction appears to be on the horizon for 8 years. It is 8 years before the point system will really take effect. So I am worried about that.

These are fundamental. Will the workplace system be effective? We need to study that language because if it is not done right, it won't work. I will have an opportunity to talk more about this.

I thank my staff and a lot of other staff who have worked their hearts out Saturday, Sunday, and into the night last night and all morning today, trying to read and digest this bill to see what it really means so we can do a better job of serving our constituents.

Finally, the guiding principle, the overarching goal of an immigration bill, must be to serve the national interest. It is not to serve special interests, groups of special interests, businesses, or immigration advocacy groups. It is to serve the national interests, and that means a principled approach that creates a lawful system that serves our economy and our society.

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

Mr. President, I wish to recognize Charles Wofford. Mr. Wofford is retiring from the position of Alabama area director of the Social Security Administration after over 45 years of dedicated service. He has served as the Area Director in Alabama since September 1979.

Mr. Wofford graduated from the University of Alabama in 1961 with a B.S. degree in biology. He began work with Social Security that same year as a claims representative trainee. He held additional increasingly responsible jobs as a claims authorizer, field representative, operations supervisor, branch manager, assistant district manager, district manager, and has been an area director since April 1977 and came to Alabama in 1979 to serve as the Alabama area director at that time.

He is the senior area director in the United States, and has received numerous awards throughout his career for superior performance. He received a service award for spearheading an intense direct deposit campaign and a cash award in recognition of exemplary achievement in the area of DDS and field office relations. He has strived to build a strong management team and has worked to ensure that all employees are fully trained to perform to the best of their ability. He received the Deputy Commissioner's Citation for Outstanding Contributions as a member of the National Training Vision Workgroup.

I congratulate Mr. Wofford on his retirement. He has been a valued employee and wise mentor to many other employees. He enjoys traveling, and we wish him well in the future as he has more time to enjoy this favored pastime.

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

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in morning business.

Mr. President, Members of the Senate--at least a certain limited number--are intensely involved in an attempt to draft an immigration bill that will serve the national interest. I say ``serve the national interest'' because there are quite a number of special interests. There are the interests of poor people all over the world who would like to come here, interests of all kinds. But at one of our hearings, we had several professors and experts on immigration and the economy. They said we ought to ask what is in the national interest and do that. That can also cause us to develop a thought process that could lead to legislation of which we can be proud.

One thing that is not in our national interest is to continue the current policy of immigration. It is not working. It has comprehensively failed us. We all know that. We have been at this for some time. We know this system is not working effectively. It has not made us proud. Congress deserves a lot of blame. Often unmentioned is that very considerable blame should fall on Presidents over the last 20 years because I am not aware of a single time any of them have come to Congress with a comprehensive request for action that would actually fix this broken system. So both Congress and the President deserve criticism.

These discussions are ongoing. I admire the Senators who are participating. I am aware these discussions are going on. People ask me: Senator, does that offend you? I say: No, you need some people to gather to try to hammer something out and sometimes to make a blocked system begin to work. There are some excellent Senators participating in that activity. But I have to tell my colleagues, I have some concerns. My predictions last week seem to be coming true today; that is, a process has been ongoing that could lead to us having an entirely new bill plopped on the floor of the Senate, that nobody has had a chance to read on one of the most important issues facing our country.

Some say: Oh, it is not so important. We have to get the bill off the floor. The public is going to be mad, so the sooner we can just bring this thing up and vote it out and get it away from here, the less blame is going on fall on us.

That kind of thinking is afoot here, I am afraid. But it is not good thinking. I believe the American people know this is an important issue. They believe we should get it right. They want us to get it right. They know there are going to have to be some tough choices. I know there are people talking, calling in on the radio and fussing and saying unkind things sometimes that they shouldn't say. We have people calling in with Pollyanna-ish ideas that are not worth two cents. People sort of judge the debate by maybe what they hear in those circumstances.

We need to work up a bill that can be effective, that would actually work. It cannot be done quickly. Fortunately, the efforts have been abandoned on the bill that we passed last year, amazingly. It was an absolutely fatally flawed piece of legislation that should never have become law. I think Members of the Senate, many of them who voted for it, had they believed it would become law, probably wouldn't have voted for it. They also didn't know what was in it. It was over 800 pages. They knew the House wasn't going to pass it. That is not responsible leadership.

This year, we have a new framework. When you have a new framework, you are not able to analyze portions of last year's bill and see how the new framework is going to work. So we are told that they are coming close to reaching agreement. People who I affectionately called ``the masters of the universe,'' those who are out there plotting all this comprehensive immigration reform and putting it together, they are meeting. What will they produce? I don't know. So we are now going to have a cloture vote on Monday. The Democratic leader insisted on that. He moved it off at least until Monday to give this small group a few more days to discuss it, this small group who are on the inside. As a result, we will have a cloture vote on Monday on the old bill, last year's bill.

Presumably Tuesday or sometime, this new bill will be plopped down. What is going to be in it? We don't know. We were told we may get the language tomorrow or we are going to try to have the language for you tomorrow, Senators, so you can at least begin to read it. We think this year's bill is going to be a thousand pages. That is not a little bitty matter, a thousand pages. As a former Federal prosecutor for 15 years, I know that if you don't get every single aspect of the bill right, it can't be made enforceable. If you make errors in the language and the drafting and the appellate process and the enforcement ideas, the whole thing can be a joke and not effective. It takes time to do write a bill this size correctly.

We are going to have this comprehensive immigration reform bill bouncing back up next week. They are going to want to vote on it by Friday of next week. I submit that Senators will not be given enough time to really analyze it, much less the American people. If we are to avoid cynicism, we ought to make sure the American people are engaged in the process. Those are large concerns of mine.

As I said, they say we may have the language tomorrow. But the best we can ascertain is, it is probably not going to be bill language, language we would actually vote on and amend. This is serious. It is some sort of outline or word statement of what the bill provisions are going to be, not having had it written out so we can examine it carefully before we vote on it.

A group of Senators--I was one of them--has written a letter to the Republican leader and to the majority leader, I believe, to say that with an issue as important and complex as immigration reform, it is critical that the process for floor consideration be open to full and informed debate and amendment. Who could dispute that? It goes on to say:

There are reports that the cloture vote on the motion to

proceed will be held on Monday. We would ask you to seek the

following assurances from Senator Reid.

This would be the letter to Senator McConnell asking him to approach the majority leader, Senator Reid, and ask for these assurances: that a new, compromise proposal should be brought to the floor of the Senate as a separate, clean bill, not as an amendment to S. 1348, last year's bill. Therefore, we can proceed in a clean fashion to amend it and act on it in the appropriate fashion. No. 2, it was asked that full and

final bill text must be available online in a searchable format by midnight tonight. They have been talking about having that available in this fashion, but will we get it? I doubt it. All germane Republican amendments must be allowed to be called up and voted on. That is germane amendments, amendments that go right to the bill, not amendments unrelated to the bill. We need a CBO score, that is the Congressional Budget Office score. We had the CBO finally come through with a score on last year's bill that found that not counting the enforcement expenditures, the cost of that bill, as written, would be $127 billion. I thank my excellent staff member for her assistance. Real money, I submit, it would cost, because the people who would be legalized and given permanent status and put on the road to citizenship in last year's bill would have been available for huge amounts of money from the Government in terms of earned-income tax credit and other welfare programs. So we don't have a score on it.

Before we pass a bill, we should look at the CBO score. The CBO has made clear that the real surge in cost to the U.S. Treasury will be in the next 10 years, not in the first 10 years. In fact, the Heritage Foundation's Mr. Robert Rector, who was one of the architect of welfare reform a number of years ago, has done immense calculations on the cost of the bill. He estimates that a substantial percentage of the people who would be legalized under this legislation will have less than a high school education and that on average would cost the U.S. Treasury $30,000 a year or as much as $1 million over a lifetime per household headed by a person without a high school education. He carefully worked those numbers up. Are they accurate? I don't know. But he spent a lot of time working on that. The point Mr. Rector and the Heritage Foundation have made with crystal clarity is that those wise people in the big suites in Manhattan who think we are going to solve our financial difficulties with Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security by adding large amounts of low-skilled immigration are in a dream world because it is going to cost us, not help us, financially. He called it a fiscal disaster. We haven't even seen the language of the new comprehensive immigration reform bill, so we don't know what the CBO score and the cost to the U.S. taxpayers would be.

Those are some fairly minimal issues that I believe should be dealt with before we rush into legislation.

Let me mention a few quick questions that I have about the new bill. The bill purports to have an enforcement guarantee. That is important. The enforcement provisions contained in Title I and Title II of the new bill will be meaningless unless they are funded, meaning that we actually put the money up for enforcement, and unless the enforcement measures are required to be implemented before other parts of the bill kick in. That was the ``trigger'' debate we had last year.

Senator Isakson from Georgia offered a commonsensical approach that we should not give benefits to individuals until we are sure that the immigration system is not continuing to be broken and not working. It would simply require the borders to be secured before the new immigration programs are implemented. But it was rejected on the floor after debate last year 40 to 55 because the leaders who so-called put together that bill last year agreed they would vote against any amendments that had any significant impact on the legislation. So they all got together and voted against a commonsensical trigger. We need such a trigger in this year's legislation.

Without an enforcement trigger, we are unable to assure the American people that immigration reform in 2007 will be any different from 1986, when the promises of future enforcement, made in exchange for the amnesty given in 1986, never materialized.

That is what happened. In 1986, they said there were about 2 million people here illegally. We set up a system to grant them amnesty. We changed some laws to supposedly make the immigration system more lawful in the future. When amnesty was handed out, turned out to be 3 million people were here illegally. We had a big percentage of those who claimed amnesty, and who got it--got it on fraudulent claims--when they really were not entitled to it. That is the history of immigration reform in 1986--20 years ago. So we need to make sure, this time, when legislation passes, it will actually work. Isn't that what the American people want of us?

Another question we need to ask: How much will this bill increase legal immigration? Last year, the bill would have increased the number of green cards--that is, permanent resident status--the United States would issue over the next 20 years to 53 million. That would be 34 million more than the current 18.9 million scheduled to be issued under current law. That was last year's bill. It was just about three times the current rate of immigration.

Now, I have to tell you, Professor Borjas, at Harvard, has written a book, ``Heaven's Door.'' He is at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, himself a Cuban inmigrant as a young man. Professor Borjas has indicated he thinks that 500,000 per year would be the right number for America, economically and otherwise. That would be 10 million over 20 years, not 53 million over 20 years.

When it came out of committee, it was even worse. It would have increased the immigration levels by elevenfold--up to 217 million over 20 years. It actually could have gone that high under the bill as written. My staff--Cindy Hayden and her team--ran these numbers, and they were later confirmed by the Heritage Foundation. We had amendments that brought it down to 53 million.

So we do not know what the green card increases will be in the bill being talked about now. It is a critical question. So we need time to study that issue and make sure the numbers of people coming into our country are assimilatable, and also do not plummet the wages of American workers, particularly middle-class and lower middle-class workers.

I am telling you, the numbers indicate that low-skilled workers in the industries where there are large amounts of illegal immigration have not shown wage increases. In fact, in many instances, adjusted for inflation, wages have gone down. We had expert testimony on that. From 2000 to 2005, wages in categories of workers, where immigration is heavy, showed a net decrease in income.

So that only makes sense. If you bring in large amounts of low- skilled labor, you can expect the value of low-skilled labor in the United States to go down. I do not think the average American believes and expects that immigration reform will result in a large increase in immigration. I am pretty sure they think we are working on a comprehensive plan to create a legal system that works, and they probably expect immigration will be reduced, not tripled. So we have to look at that question.

Another question would be: Will the temporary program be temporary? Last year's bill contained a ``temporary'' worker program that was, in reality, a low-skilled permanent migration program for 200,000 workers, plus their families, annually. This is the bill that is on the floor today that we will vote cloture on next week. Workers and their families were given 3-year renewable visas. They could bring their families into the United States. They could be sponsored by their employer, the first year they are here, for a green card, to become permanent residents in the United States. They could continue to renew those temporary worker 3-year visas indefinitely, as long as they were working and did not have a felony conviction. So in last year's bill it was not a temporary worker program. It was a plan to bring in workers who were put on a virtual automatic path to permanent residence and citizenship.

What will this new bill contain? We hear different things. One is that it contains a 3-year visa, where workers are allowed to bring in their families--I am not sure we can look our voters in the eye back home and say we are going to sponsor such a program again this year.

Additionally, if we set aside 10,000 green cards a year for these new ``temporary'' workers to apply for--as I am hearing the bill may do--I am sure we cannot claim our intention is to create a temporary plan. So I am worried about that.

All I would say to my colleagues is, let's be sure we have enough time. There is no reason for us to have to

vote a week from this Friday on final passage of a 1,000-page bill that we have never even seen the language of yet. The only bill that is out there is last year's fatally flawed bill. Why can't we have this opportunity to review the new bill?

I have argued we should move dramatically in the way that Canada moved to create a merit-based system for immigration, based on skills and abilities, which countries such as Canada or the United States would deem helpful to their nation.

If we have 100 people who want to come to our country, and we cannot accept 100, we can only accept 50, why wouldn't we set up a system that asks them what skills and attributes they have that might be beneficial to our country--which would allow them to most flourish and benefit from the American experience? Why wouldn't we ask that and give preference to those who would come here?

I say to my colleague, to show the bankruptcy of any idea that we could have open borders, in the year 2000, we had 11 million people apply for 50,000 diversity lottery slots. We have an amazing situation, if you want to come to America, and you do not qualify in any number of ways, you can put your name in a pot, and each year we draw out 50,000 names. We had 11 million people in 1 year apply for those slots. So why wouldn't a merit-based system work?

Today, only 20 percent of the immigrants coming into the United States are admitted based on their skills. Canada went through a long period of discussion about this issue. They had a national discussion over some years, and the Parliament in Canada directed their government to establish a point-based system. Canada wanted that point-based system to ensure that 60 percent of the people who come into Canada come on a merit basis. Canada still takes those for humanitarian relief, Canada still takes other immigrants such as those with family connections, but in Canada that is much more limited than in the United States.

That was their plan. They are very happy with it. I have met with the person who actually runs that program. They are happy with what they did. They think it is something we should consider. They think we would be happy with it. We are hearing discussions that would be a part of this package. What a great step that would be if we would move in that direction. It is critical to me that more immigrants be selected on a point-based system as part of comprehensive immigration reform. It is something for which I have advocated for some time now and think we could actually get there. I am hearing some good feedback about it. But, once again, we need to read the language of the new bill.

I would point out a couple things. One, what I am hearing is the best they would expect to get to would be 40 percent of the immigrants would be coming into our country based on merit, not 60 percent like Canada. Australia also does that, with 60 percent of their immigrants coming into their country on a merit-based, on a point-based system.

I am concerned that we will end up with a system that will not be effective to move us to a more merit-based system, which would serve our long-term national interests and would ensure the people who do come to America come with every prospect and every ability to flourish in our country and to do well, and not only not be a drain on our medical system or our welfare system, but actually be prosperous taxpayers contributing to the health and vitality of our Nation.

I think I saw Senator Boxer in the Chamber a few moments ago. I will wrap up, if she is available, but I do not see her on the floor at this moment. I will share a couple more thoughts I do think are important.

Last year, we did not get a final CBO score until 3 months after the passage of the bill. The August 18th CBO score estimated the bill would cost $126.9 billion for the first 10 years, and that ``beyond 10 years, definitely the costs would escalate.''

That is a major factor in what we are doing, and we have not even, to my knowledge, asked for a score from CBO, and I do not think we can ask for a score. We cannot ask for a score because we do not have bill language to say what is going to happen. We do not even know what is in the bill that will be dropped on us.

Another issue that was quite contentious last year, and I believe is very important: Will illegal aliens who worked here under a fictitious name and fraudulent Social Security number be able to get Social Security benefits?

Last year's bill would have allowed current illegal aliens to get Social Security benefits for the time they worked illegally in the United States.

In addition to the predictable fraud on the Social Security system that would result from this provision--there would be no way you could identify with certainty who paid with what Social Security number if you are using false numbers--this concept is fundamentally unfair to the millions of Americans who rely on Social Security as their main form of retirement income.

Our Social Security system is already in peril--$6.8 trillion will already have to be invested by Congress today to have enough money to pay all of the program's promised benefits between 2017 and 2081. So it is not a program that is financially sound.

To provide millions an opportunity to make a claim to receive Social Security benefits when they were illegally in the country--utilizing a fraudulent Social Security number, illegally taking employment when they were not entitled to it, perhaps taking a job from an American worker--to be rewarded with Social Security benefits, I believe, is not required.

Basic law--having handled a number of cases that dealt with it--is that one cannot benefit or go to court to enforce an unlawful contract. If you are a drug dealer, you cannot sue another drug dealer to enforce a promise to pay for drugs. You should not be able to have a claim against the Government based on your fraudulent conduct and then go to court and file a lawsuit to enforce that claim. That is just a basic principle of law, so any bill that offers a compassionate solution for the illegal alien population should draw the line at allowing those who come to our country illegally, utilizing false Social Security numbers, to receive benefits because it is unjust. And, how could you ever calculate that?

I will mention one more thing and will wrap up. What about the earned-income tax credit? Will that be available to temporary workers or illegal aliens given status under the bill?

The earned-income tax credit is a benefit designed to assist low- income Americans. I do not believe it should be provided to foreign workers who we invite to perform labor in our economy, whose own choice was to come and work here.

The cost estimate released by CBO last August calculated that last year's bill would have increased outlays for refundable tax credits by $24.5 billion in the first 10 years because most of these workers are on wage scale rates that qualify for the earned-income tax credit. It would be the largest direct spending effect in the entire bill.

Now, the earned income tax credit was a plan conjured up by President Nixon a number of years ago and has some legitimate basis. Many people--conservatives--like it, and some don't. But it was designed to help working Americans make extra money so they could take care of their families. It costs us $40 billion a year. It is one of the biggest programs we have.

I see no reason in policy or equity that says if a person comes to America to work at a job at a certain wage rate and they would generally know what that wage rate is before they came, that they ought to be given an earned income tax credit, a credit designed to encourage American citizens to work. What kind of sense does that make? So we had a vote on that last year, and the vote was to continue to give this benefit, even to temporary workers.

These are some of the issues I think are important. We are going to treat compassionately the people who are here illegally, try to work something out that is acceptable to them on any reform; we are going to try to do the things that Americans want to do in terms of generous and fair treatment to everybody. But we don't need to go overboard and put things in the bill for political correctness or other reasons that don't make common sense, that threaten our Treasury, that could drive down the wages of American workers,

that could increase the flow of workers into our country to a degree that is much larger than we have seen in the past, and that would not move us effectively to a more merit-based system like our neighbors in Canada have adopted.

Those are some of my concerns. I value and appreciate the hard work of the people who are working to try to make a bill come together, but I want people to know that it is a scary thing. I think it was the Chinese who said, in defining crisis, it is a crossing of danger and opportunity. Yes, we do have an opportunity to produce a bill that could be far better than last year's bill--a bill we could all support, that could actually work, that we could be proud of. I actually think that is possible. This year's framework for a bill is certainly a lot better. I am excited about that. But I have to tell my colleagues from what we are hearing about the language that is actually going into the bill, we could have big print rubric letters that promise this and promise that, but when you read the fine print, it is not there.

We owe the American people an honest, hard study of any legislation we vote on. If that legislation is not produced until next week, even if we get an outline of some kind tomorrow, that is not enough time for us to study it.

I appreciate the opportunity to share these thoughts. I sincerely hope that a compromise can be reached, and I hope it is one that will serve the United States.

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

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Jenny Lee, who is on detail from ICE with me, for the duration of the immigration reform debate, be granted floor privileges for the remainder of the debate.