Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act Of 2006

COMPREHENSIVE IMMIGRATION REFORM ACT OF 2006 -- (Senate - May 15, 2006)

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Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, about a month ago when we were debating immigration reform and, unfortunately, because of the inability to get amendments heard and debated and voted on, that process was derailed, and here we are again. I was under the distinct impression that we were actually going to have a chance to offer amendments and then have debates and votes. We will work out whatever the misunderstanding is between the sides. But my hope is that we will have that opportunity because I think the American people are yearning for an honest and complete and comprehensive debate about this issue. It affects all of us. It affects all of the States that each of us as Senators represent, and it represents a clash of our values. We are proudly a nation of immigrants, but we are also a nation of laws. Unfortunately, it is hard to reconcile the second ideal as a nation of laws with the current situation we see in this country with our porous border which last year allowed 1.1 million people to come across the border, and because we only had about 2,000 detention beds, most of those individuals were simply subject to what has now become known as the notorious catch-and-release program. And those who were sent back to Mexico came back again in short order, and we saw roughly 250,000 of those individuals who were detained at the border came from countries other than Mexico, including countries such as Syria, Iran, and other countries of special interest, which cause a lot of people, including me, an awful lot of concern because it is indicative of the fact that our southern border has become a magnet and has become a sieve for illegal immigration, not just from Mexico and Central and South America but literally from countries all around the world.

I support comprehensive immigration reform, as a Senator from Texas. With about a 1,600-mile border, we understand what the border is about. A number of Senators have had the opportunity since this debate began to go to the border. I think that has been very instructive for all of them. But I can tell you that my constituents live and work along the border and have come to know both the tremendous benefits of that region of our country and the culture that transcends international boundaries, the fact that families have relatives on both sides of the border, the fact that for the last 11 years, since NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, was signed by the United States, Canada, and Mexico, we have seen a tremendous growth in legal commerce and traffic across the border that has been enormously beneficial to all of those countries and created an awful lot of new jobs in my State.

None of us want to jeopardize all of the benefits that attend to the fact that we do have a neighbor to our immediate south, Mexico, and the benefits that come from the cultural heritage and interaction, but the fact is that illegal immigration across the southern border of the United States has changed dramatically over the last few years because Mexico has been unable to control its southern border and, in fact, has become a sort of a land bridge into the United States and created a tremendous amount of concern, as it should, in a post-9/11 world. We simply have to know who is coming into our country and why they are here. We can no longer assume their motives are simply benign.

I have no doubt that in most instances--perhaps nearly all instances--people come to this country for the same reason people have always come to America, and that is for a better life. We all understand that on a fundamentally human level. But we also understand that if we don't control our immigration system, if we don't control our borders, not only are we less secure, but literally our way of life may be subjected to a huge tsunami of humanity, people from all over the world who want to come to the United States, but if they don't do so in a controlled way, in a way that complies with our laws and allows us to regulate the flow in the pursuit of our national interest, that we will have lost something very important, and part of that will be the opportunity to provide the sort of prosperity we enjoy today to our children and our grandchildren.

My hope is we will create a legal system of immigration that we will be able to regard with pride and that people who, as they always have, come here from all around the world through a legal system of immigration will become Americans. After all, becoming an American is an idea and an ideal. In other words, it doesn't matter where your country of origin is, where you were born. It doesn't matter how you pronounce your last name. It doesn't matter what race you are or what ethnicity you are. When people come to America and become Americans, they become part of this vast melting pot which we thank God for every day and which has become the envy of the world.

We have benefited enormously from the fact that we are a nation of immigrants, but we are in danger because we are no longer a nation of laws when it comes to our immigration system.

During the course of this debate, I will be offering several amendments. I want to talk about one of them in a moment. Because of the objection, we won't be offering any additional amendments today until we can work out the differences between the majority and minority side.

As the chairman of the Immigration and Border Security and Citizenship Subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee, it has been my great honor to preside over a number of hearings on our broken immigration system. That has both caused me a great deal of concern but also a sense that there is a lot we can do if we focus on answering the practical questions that need to be answered before we can actually fix our broken immigration system.

The Judiciary Committee voted out a bill that I think is fair to say bears the authorship of Senator McCain and Senator Kennedy. That then came to the floor and now has been amended by Senator Hagel and Senator Martinez and is supported by a bipartisan group of Senators.

I am sorry to say at this point that I am not able to support that bill, as amended, but it is my hope that after this debate and during the course of the amendment process that we have votes, and hopefully I will be able to win a few of those votes on amendments that will improve the bill to the point where I feel comfortable supporting the Senate bill. That is my hope.

Regardless, I look forward to working with my Senate colleagues and our colleagues from the House once the Senate passes a bill, assuming we are successful in doing so, in trying to reconcile the differences in the approach the Senate intends to take in comprehensive reform and the House approach, which is primarily a border security bill.

I am proud to say that this bill, when I talk about comprehensive reform, has a number of components. I mentioned the first is border security. I am proud to say that the bill Senator Kyl of Arizona and I filed about a year ago now has been largely incorporated into the bill before us. When it comes to the work we need to perform for security along our border, we need to vastly increase the number of Border Patrol agents.

I understand the President tonight may make some announcement with regard to the use of National Guard on a temporary basis to fill in the gaps and provide additional boots on the ground so we can get to that level of security faster, and I believe we should use all of our national assets to provide border security. But I also had the honor this morning of going out to Fort Belvoir, where the Army Materiel Command provided a demonstration to me with some of the unmanned aerial vehicles and ground sensors, the radars, the thermal imagery, and so forth, that the military has developed for force protection.

It has obvious applications in providing the Department of Homeland Security additional technology which will allow us to secure our border. Here again, the problem is not a shortage of ideas; the problem is the shortage of assets, including human assets and technological assets that will actually allow the Department of Homeland Security to accomplish the goal of border security. We have a long way to go between ideas and concepts and actually building the infrastructure, actually purchasing the technology and training people to operate it.

That is one reason I look forward to further debate on Senator Isakson's amendment currently pending that provides a trigger. In essence it is saying the rest of the provisions of the bill will not be implemented until such time as the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security certifies that the border security provisions have, in fact, been implemented. I think that is a significant proposal.

I commend to my colleagues an article that I read this morning called ``Can Immigration Reform Work?'' This is an article written by Lawrence B. Lindsey, who was the former chief economic adviser for President Bush. Mr. Lindsey writes as an advocate of comprehensive immigration reform, as am I, but he asks some very practical questions which I think have to be answered during the course of this debate.

First of all, advocates of the current bill pending on the floor acknowledge that beneficiaries of the provisions of the bill, the 12 million or so who will benefit from the earned legalization--or some might call it amnesty based on its similarity with the amnesty of 1986--but the argument is that the beneficiaries of this provision of the bill will have to go to the back of the line. Again, I commend the Lindsey article to my colleagues.

The question is: The back of which line? Basically what this bill does is it allows people who are currently here in an unauthorized status; that is, they have come either in violation of the immigration laws or they have come here legally and have overstayed in violation of the immigration laws, it allows them 6 years before they can then receive a green card. A green card confers legal permanent residency. After 5 more years, in other words, a total of 11 years, they can then apply for and receive American citizenship.

The problem with the current bill on the floor is that it essentially guarantees the 12 million a green card and all they have to do is stay where they are. In other words, the line does not start in America; the line starts at the consulate in Hong Kong or in Mexico City or in Bogota, Colombia, or in some other place around the world where people would apply for a green card, not here in the United States. What they are essentially saying is people under this current bill can break in line in front of those who have been waiting patiently outside the country, but break in line for those awaiting citizenship who otherwise would have to wait outside the country. There is something, it seems to me, fundamentally unfair about line-jumping, about breaking in line, and many have expressed concerns, and I am one of those who have the concerns, about rewarding people for line-jumping.

Another aspect of Mr. Lindsey's article, which I again commend to my colleagues because, again, these are practical questions: How are you going to solve this problem? And I stand here as someone who is interested in solving the problem and as a supporter of comprehensive immigration reform. But we have to do better than the bill that is currently on the floor. That is why I strongly urge my colleagues to study it and also to listen to the amendments, and hopefully we can improve it.

The other question that Mr. Lindsey raises is the sheer immensity of the program proposed in the Hagel-Martinez compromise. In 2004, the Immigration and Naturalization Service issued almost 1 million green cards and naturalized 537,000 people. Contrast that with what this bill would do. It would give green cards to about 12 million people in one fell swoop and make them eligible for citizenship 6 years later, which is roughly a twelvefold increase in the workload of the agencies and the people who are actually supposed to make this work.

I hope all of us will pay close attention to whether this thing that we are creating, this comprehensive immigration reform, can actually work. Part of making it work is going to be making sure there are the people and the processes, the databases, the computers, the cards, all of the things that are going to be necessary to actually make it function as intended. If not, we are going to be swamped by a tsunami of newly legalized people seeking documentation without any real ability to actually respond to that.

The third issue he raises is the need for what he calls a certificate of legal residency. We are going to have to--and the bill does provide, and there will be some additional debate about this--a work site verification program, which is absolutely critical to the functioning of comprehensive immigration reform. I think it needs to be beefed up and improved because what we need to provide employers is a way to swipe a card through a card reader and then almost immediately the light turns green and that means that person can work here legally. If it is red, they can't. Right now, employers can be presented some combination of up to 19 different documents to prove eligibility to work in the United States, and what happens is the human smugglers and those who benefit from this phenomenon provide a whole host of counterfeit documents.

In other words, there are millions who generate fake documents such as driver's licenses, Social Security cards, and birth certificates. So we need a secure identification card that can help us as part of this enforcement regime because if we don't, then we will find ourselves 5 years or 10 years from now in the same fix we are in today, except probably worse.

I say that because in 1986 the Congress thought it was fixing this problem once and for all when it granted what everyone acknowledges was an amnesty. It bears a lot of resemblance to the proposal that is on the floor today. Yet some say: Well, it is not really amnesty, it is earned legalization. Well, whatever it is, it looks very similar, if not its identical twin. But everyone I think will agree that the amnesty in 1986 was a complete and total failure, probably for one of two reasons.

Some say: Well, it is because we didn't really have any provision for a legal work force, a temporary worker program as part of that. But I think most people would agree that it was mainly a failure of work site verification and employer sanctions. There have been virtually no employer sanctions prosecuted by the Federal officials responsible for that, and part of the reason has been because it is very hard for employers to know whether the person they are in fact hiring is legally eligible to work in the United States.

We can figure this one out. It is not rocket science. If we can go into a convenience store and buy a bag of chips and a Coca Cola and hand the clerk our card and they swipe it and in a matter of seconds it is authorized, we can figure this one out. We have a variety of identification cards and biometric identifiers to help verify that the person who holds the card is in fact the same person whose name is on the card. So we can figure that out. I will talk more about that later.

I think the proponents of this bill as written need to convince the American people that this time we are serious, that we are not going to pull the rug out from under the American people if they put their confidence in the solution proffered by this bill. I remember what my dad always said: Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. The American people can be enormously forgiving and tolerant. But if they feel as if the Federal Government is simply not serious about this and is going to pan this bill off as strict on enforcement and not fund it and not implement it, and not be serious about it, I think there is going to be a terrible price to be paid. Unfortunately, it will be deserved if we are not serious about doing what we say we are going to do when it comes to enforcement, including work site verification.

I want to talk briefly about an amendment I tried to offer, but there was an objection. Hopefully, we will work this out. This was actually the amendment that was pending by Senator Kyl and myself back about a month ago when this whole debate got derailed because we couldn't get any votes on the amendments and basically we ended up going nowhere. After a month now, we are back here again. Hopefully, we are locked and loaded and ready to proceed in the regular order, which means that in the world's greatest deliberative body we will actually have debates and we will actually have votes and majorities will prevail and people who don't get the majority vote will lose. While none of us likes to lose, that is the process, and that should be the process.

Unfortunately, we are here a month later, but now I hope we have an opportunity to have those debates and to have those votes and to proceed to passage of a good bill.

The amendment I am referring to specifically would exclude from the benefits of the bill on the floor--and what I mean by that is the 12 million people who are here in an unauthorized status, who either came illegally or who overstayed their legal authorization; they are here in violation of our immigration laws. It would exclude from amnesty or earned legalization or whatever you want to call it the benefits for convicted felons. In other words, convicted felons would not get amnesty under this bill if this amendment passes. People who have committed at least three misdemeanors would not get amnesty under this bill if this amendment is agreed to and passes. Finally, it would exclude the benefits of the bill to those it applies to, those who have actually had their day in court and lost and simply melted into this huge American landscape.

What I mean by that is they are absconders. In other words, they are people who have been caught in violation of the law, people who have had their day in court, who have exhausted their remedies, and then refused to show up when it came time to go back home. These are known as absconders.

What this amendment would do is say, if you are an absconder, then you don't get the benefit of the amnesty because you have already had your one bite at the apple, and we are not going to give you two bites at the apple. I don't think any Americans really believe that it is just OK to ignore a lawful court order. How many Americans, for example, after receiving a subpoena to show up in court or maybe a jury summons, simply ignore it and skip the date?

Today in the United States, there are 544,000--544,000--aliens who have been ordered deported but then have gone underground. That is more than a half million people who simply chose to ignore a lawful court order. Under current law, it is a felony offense punishable by up to 4 years in jail to not comply with a deportation order. So let's be clear. We are not talking about civil violations. We are talking about criminals, people who not only have overstayed their legal authorization or who have come in illegally and been caught; we are talking about people who have had their day in court and simply ignored the judgment of the court and gone underground.

I believe this amendment is indicative of whether we will continue to tolerate and reward those who violate our immigration laws.

The current bill increases penalties and would impose a mandatory minimum criminal sentence of 6 months on any alien who fails to leave the country after being ordered deported.

The current bill requires the Department of Homeland Security to list absconders in the NCIC, the national database, criminal database, so that State and local police officers can arrest them when they are encountered during regular traffic stops.

These are both steps in the right direction, I believe. But then, oddly in the same bill, the same proposal on the floor, it would allow those same individuals to apply for legalization and would prohibit the Department of Homeland Security from apprehending or detaining these same aliens. In other words, this bill simultaneously increases criminal penalties for failing to follow a court order but then rewards the same criminal act with an easier path to a green card. I do not think there is a better example of Congress sending mixed signals on immigration reform. If we are going to avoid the mistakes of 1986 and avoid the massive buildup of people who are in our country out of status, we have to create a system that encourages self-compliance by illegal aliens.

Each year, there are 300,000 deportation hearings. What is the point of conducting those hearings if those who are ultimately ordered deported after they have had their day in court simply go underground and ignore a lawful court order? If the absconder rate is about 85 percent today, what will it be in the future if we reward those who fail to comply with amnesty? The aliens who comply and who leave the country would not be eligible for amnesty. So the message, at least so far as the bill on the floor is concerned, is you are better off violating the law, hunkering down, melting into the landscape, and then you are going to get amnesty. But if you actually comply with a lawful court order and leave, then you are not entitled to the benefits under the bill--exactly the opposite of the message we ought to be sending. We need to decide whether we are more interested in granting amnesty than we are in reforming the immigration laws and restoring confidence in the immigration system.

Without this amendment, the current bill would grant amnesty to aliens who committed felony offenses, thereby encouraging further violations of immigration and undermining the integrity of our immigration court system.

Some may argue that the majority of aliens deported never receive notice that they are in proceedings. That is simply not true. Deportation proceedings are initiated when written notice is provided to the alien, which is almost always done when that individual is apprehended. The notice, informally called a notice to appear, advises the recipient of three things: No. 1, the conduct alleged to be in violation of the law; No. 2, the alien's obligation to provide the Government with a written record of an address; and No. 3, the consequences of failure to provide or update the address on record with the Government.

The Government is also required by statute to provide notice to the alien of any change or postponement of the proceedings. Just as in any other civil or criminal proceeding, the alien has an obligation to provide a current address. If that were not the case, how would the immigration courts administer the 300,000-plus cases they hear each year?

So what happens if the alien fails to appear at the hearing? The court may order the alien removed in absentia only if the Government establishes by clear, unequivocal, and convincing evidence that the written notice was provided to the alien and that the alien is, in fact, deportable. The court may rescind the order if, within 6 months of the order, the alien establishes that he did not receive notice of the hearing or if exceptional circumstances prevented the alien from appearing. This amendment we are offering--will offer when permitted--includes the same waiver standard, so any alien who establishes that he or she did not receive notice as required or was unable to appear at a hearing because of a medical emergency or other exceptional circumstance remains eligible to apply.

The text of the amendment is unambiguous. It would not apply to any alien who entered without inspection, overstayed a visa, or violated their visa status unless the alien has had his or her day in court and been ordered deported. To avoid any confusion, this amendment uses the exact language as in the current Immigration and Nationality Act.

In conclusion, let me say that national security demands that we know who is living within our borders, especially since 9/11. We must reform our immigration laws in order to bring millions of those who are living outside of the law out of the shadows and in compliance with that law. But success of immigration reform cannot be measured solely on how many aliens obtain legal status. The 1986 amnesty bill brought millions of illegal aliens out of shadows. Yet Congress never lived up to its commitment to enforce the law at the border and at the worksite. Today, 20 years since the 1986 amnesty, the continued failure to enforce the law has resulted in a new class of illegal aliens that is estimated to be approximately 12 million. That is four times larger than 20 years ago.

I share the goal of comprehensive reform and of bringing those 12 million illegal aliens out of the shadows and into compliance with the law. In fact, I believe we ought to give them a second chance to reenter the country in a legal status. But I also believe that we should not repeat the failures of 1986 and restore credibility and law and order to the immigration system. The current bill, without any amendment, rewards criminal behavior and will undermine the Government's ability to enforce the immigration laws. My amendment, which only excludes criminals from obtaining legal status, will reveal whether we are really serious about reforming our immigration laws or if we are strictly interested in granting legal status to as many illegal aliens as possible, irrespective of whether they are criminals or whether rewarding them would repeat the failures of 1986.

Mr. President, I yield the floor.

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