National Public Radio Talk of the Nation - Transcript

National Public Radio (NPR)

SHOW: Talk of the Nation (2:00 PM ET) - NPR

HEADLINE: Border and transportation security recommendations by the 9-11 Commission

ANCHORS: NEAL CONAN

BODY:
CONAN: Philip Zelikow is executive director of the 9-11 Commission. He joined us on the phone from Colorado where, I understand, he's taking some well-earned rest.

We're talking about border security. You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.

And joining us now to talk about how Congress is working to address the recommendations of the 9-11 Commission in this respect, Senator John Cornyn, Republican from Texas, also a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and he joins us by phone from his office here in-or excuse me, his home here in Washington.

Thanks very much for being on the program. Good to talk to you again.

Senator JOHN CORNYN (Republican, Texas): Thanks, Neal. Good to be with you.

CONAN: In a statement you released today, you said, 'We have to understand that border security and immigration reform go hand in hand.' In the report, the 9-11 Commission says, 'The immigration system as a whole was widely viewed as increasingly dysfunctional, badly in need of reform. In national security circles, however, only smuggling of weapons of mass destruction carried weight; not the entry of terrorists who might use such weapons or the presence of associated foreign-born terrorists.' Is that the assumption you're going on there?

Sen. CORNYN: Well, the day of the Judiciary Committee hearing where Asa Hutchinson and Lee Hamilton and another commissioner testified, they said that essentially we are bearing the bitter fruit of long years of neglect or even conscious disregard of our own immigration laws, and unfortunately while the Department of Homeland Security is, I'm convinced, doing everything it can to catch up as fast as it can, there's a lot to do, and it's going to be a period of time, perhaps years before we get to where we need to be.

CONAN: Nine million people in this country illegally, according to the 9-11 Commission report, another half a million or so every year.

Sen. CORNYN: That's right. And the truth is we probably don't know exactly because, of course, these are people who operate in the shadows in an underground economy, a cash economy, and who are afraid of the authorities finding out who they are. But one of the things that I was pleased to hear Vice Chairman Hamilton confirm, as did Secretary Hutchinson, is that we need to be able to make a distinction between people who are coming to the United States for beneficial or even just benign reasons and those who are coming here to try to kill us. And unless we're able to target our resources better, which is going to require immigration reform, and I have a specific proposal with regard to a temporary worker program, we're simply not going to be able to do it for the reasons you mentioned. We have nine to 10 million people already here and we have hundreds of thousands who are drawn here like a magnet to a place where they know that their hopes and dreams can be realized.

CONAN: Let's get another caller on the line. This is Solan(ph). She's with us from Modesto, California.

SOLAN (Caller): Hello.

CONAN: Hi.

SOLAN: Hi. This is my question. I'm an immigration attorney here in Modesto and I have clients who frequently travel to Mexico, and when they come back they simply go through the border checkpoint and they just flash their document. They're not really checked when they cross by car. My question is this-and I've thought about this a lot. If you had someone flying from, let's say, Spain into Mexico, what kind of measures is the Mexican government using to check the terrorist backgrounds of these people? Because it seems to me that they could come into Mexico and then attempt to drive across the border and, you know, appearing Hispanic, I think they could maybe get across.

CONAN: Senator Cornyn?

Sen. CORNYN: Well, she's put her finger on a real vulnerability and one that the United States government and the government of Mexico have been working very hard on in the last three years. It's not just people transiting through other countries and then driving across our borders. It's people who obtain false documentation; for example-well, not even false documentation-authentic documentation which is literally for sale in some countries, for example, as I was told recently in Central America. But it's a tremendous problem. Now that's why we have-are in the process of implementing the US VISIT program which will require a biometric identifier for every person who comes into the country, and it will also record when they leave. The big gap we have right now, though, is that if they don't leave, we simply don't have the resources or the technology in place to find them, and they literally just melt into the landscape and become part of that mass of nine or 10 million people who are here living outside of the law.

CONAN: Solan, thanks very much for the phone call. And, Senator Cornyn, thank you for your time today. We appreciate.

Sen. CORNYN: Thank you, Neal.

CONAN: Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas.