Immigration Reform

Floor Speech

Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, we obviously are talking about immigration this week and last week and next week. I am one of those who, after many years working on this subject, hopes we are successful in passing what I believe is good, credible immigration reform.

I have come to the conclusion, like many Americans, that the status quo is simply unacceptable. I have talked a little bit about some of the bodies in unmarked graves that I witnessed myself in Brooks County, TX, where under the current broken system people come across the border from faraway lands only to die trying to get into this country and are buried in unmarked graves in places like Brooks County.

I met with a young woman who was prostituted after having been brought into the United States from Central America, and she worked in a Houston nightclub, where she was basically held as an indentured servant or slave because she knew she was vulnerable to deportation. So the person who brought here there and put her in that situation knew they had the power to keep her quiet and not disclose what was happening, while she was living a horrific existence.

Those are just a couple of examples why I believe our system is broken and neither serves our economic interests nor represents our American values. So I want a good solution. But it is not just what happens here in the Senate. That is not the end game. The end game is what happens when this bill goes to the House and once the House and the Senate get together in a conference committee and reconcile the differences between those two bills to see if we can actually get a bill which reflects our values and which represents our economic interests, things such as recruiting the best and the brightest minds from around the world to stay here in America and to create jobs here.

Those are some of the positives in the underlying bill that we need to preserve, but there are other issues we need to fix. That is what I want to talk about right now.

Last night the Congressional Budget Office released its long-awaited report on the underlying bill, the so-called Gang of 8 immigration bill people have heard so much about. The report, as usual, is a blizzard of numbers and estimates and projections, but here are two I want to talk about in particular, which you see reflected on this chart.

I think this is going to be a shocking revelation to most people who thought this bill would actually fix our broken immigration system.

If you will look behind me, it says: The number of new unauthorized immigrations in the United States by 2033 with the passage of the underlying bill, 7.5 million; without it, 10 million.

So what we see reflected in the Congressional Budget Office, which is the ``coin of the realm,'' the ``gold standard''--whatever you want to call it--around here, love it or hate it, and we all find ourselves on different sides depending on the issue, but the gold standard, the Congressional Budget Office, says this bill will not fix the underlying problem.

In other words, despite all of the promises and perhaps I might say the hopes and the dreams and the good intentions of the authors of this underlying bill, this bill will have only a minimal impact on illegal immigration. Does that sound like the kind of solution we owe to the American people to solve this broken system? Does that sound like a solution to solve our long-term problem in this area?

I want to take a moment to discuss another portion of the bill that has gone largely unnoticed by most of the country, but first let me respond to some remarks made by my friend from Arizona Senator McCain yesterday. I am going to agree, not disagree, with Senator McCain. Standing right here on the Senate floor, as he so often does, Senator McCain said he was absolutely confident--absolutely confident--that U.S. authorities can obtain 100 percent situational awareness and full operational control of the southern border. He cited the head of the Border Patrol as his authority.

I was glad to hear him say that because I agree with him exactly. He is exactly right. But I was a little confused at the same time. He repeated a comment that the majority leader had made about my amendment, which will be pending soon before the Senate and which we will vote on later today or tomorrow. He called my amendment a poison pill, suggesting that it would somehow kill the underlying bill. Well, if the standards in my amendment are exactly the same as those in the underlying bill of 100 percent situational awareness and 90 percent operational control, defined as 90 percent capture of people crossing the border illegally--Senator McCain thinks it is attainable, the Border Patrol Chief thinks it is attainable, and I think it is attainable. So how could that possibly be a poison pill? I do not understand it.

As I have said numerous times over the last week, my amendment uses the same standards and many of the same metrics as the Gang of 8 bill. Here is the difference: My amendment establishes a real border security trigger before immigrants can transition from probationary status--something called registered provisional immigrant status--before they can transition from that probationary status to legalization. Under the Gang of 8 bill, that would occur after 10 years of probationary status. But the problem is, contrary to initial advertisements back in January where Senator Durbin, among others--the distinguished majority whip--said back in January that the pathway to citizenship is contingent upon border security, only to say just a few days ago, quoted in the National Journal--he said: Now we have delinked the pathway to citizenship from border security. Indeed, they have in the underlying bill, and that is what my amendment is designed to fix.

Here is the real tragedy. In 1986 Ronald Reagan signed an amnesty for 3 million people. That is not the tragedy. The tragedy is, in return the American people said we are going to fix our broken immigration system. We are going to enforce the law. Well, we all know what happened.

The amnesty was granted and the enforcement never came.

Here is the tragedy. The underlying bill, without an amendment such as mine that provides a real border security trigger that realigns the incentives for the right, the left, Republicans, Independents, Democrats, everybody to be focused like a laser on how do we actually implement that operational control of the border--which Senator McCain believes is attainable, I believe is attainable, the Border Patrol Chief believes is attainable--without realigning everybody's incentives to focus like a laser on obtaining that objective, this is like 1986 all over again.

All we have to do is look at the polling to tell us--and I don't think we even need any polls to tell us--that there is enormous skepticism across the country about Washington. This bill says: Trust us. Trust us.

There is a trust deficit in Washington, DC, and on immigration. When so many promises have been made in the past that have not been kept, I think it is unreasonable to ask the American people to just trust us. We need an enforcement mechanism such as my amendment, which will guarantee that everybody is aligned and it is highly incentived to make sure that those Border Patrol measures are upheld. Then we will not have what is reflected on the chart behind me, as reported by the Congressional Budget Office yesterday.

The year 1986 was when Congress passed amnesty for illegal immigrants without guaranteeing results on border security. Ever since then Members of this Chamber have said we will never make that mistake again. Yet the underlying bill would effectively be 1986 on steroids and the CBO report confirms it. That is why those of us who actually would like to see a good, credible immigration bill pass--not only in the Senate but also in the House--believe, as I do, that this legislation is dead on arrival in the House of Representatives without a real border security trigger.

It is going to be a challenge even if we put that in, but we have a much better chance of success if we deal with the problem that the Congressional Budget Office has identified, and if we deal with the experience we have had from 1986 and other times when we made extravagant promises to the American people how we are going to fix the system, only to find that those promises have not been kept. That will be the real poison pill to this bill, and it will also be an unnecessary and lamentable tragedy if somehow we can't, working together, find a solution to our broken immigration system.

I yield the floor.

Source