Speech #980043350

The same is true with respect to those who will cross the border from the Republic of Mexico into the United States. Mr. President. the pending question is the final passage of S. 529. the Immigration Reform and Control Act. sponsored by Senator SIMPSON and Congressman MAZZOLI. This legislation has attracted deserved attention. It is certainly one of the most important bills the Senate will consider in this session. Illegal immigration is a problem of massive and increasing dimensions. It is enormously complex. It is singularly unpleasant in many of its aspects. That is why the Congress historically has dealt with this subject with understandable and obvious reluctance and with long intervals separating efforts to do so. And that is why his colleagues have turned to the Senator from Wyoming with completely understandable admiration and gratitude for the leadership with which he has attacked this difficult and unpleasant subject. It is the hope of many in this Chamber who voted for his legislation last fall and who will vote for it again this afternoon. that the SimpsonMazzoli legislation will for some years to come dispose of the many thorny and unsettling problems involved in illegal immigration of the tidal dimensions which the United States has been encountering. I devoutly wish that they were right in that hope. But I am convinced that their hope is a fond hope. because this legislation will not dispose of those problems. Instead. they will shortly be back before us. having grown larger and more acute in the interval. I am convinced that this legislation is almost doomed to fail in its express intention of staunching the massive flow of illegal immigrants in the United States. It will fail because the device relied upon to staunch the flow of illegal immigrants into the country is based upon a false assumption and. therefore. will not work. The SimpsonMazzoli Act seeks to stop illegal immigration by denying to illegal immigrants the opportunity for employment in the United States. The bill would do so by imposing criminal penalties and by fining employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants. These penalties. or employer sanctions as they are called. are the linchpin of this legislation. The fundamental premise of the bill is that employers. if threatened with employer sanctions. will not knowingly hire illegal immigrants. and that illegal immigrants. knowing that they will not be hired. will therefore. no longer cross illegally into the United States. The failure in this logic is that it assumes that illegal immigrants will not come illegally without the certain prospect of employment here. That simply is not true. Rather. illegal immigrants will continue to come to the United States in growing numberseven without the prospect of employment herefor the same reason that hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens have legally migrated to the high growth areas of the American Sun Belt even when Sun Belt communities were suffering higher than national unemployment. Econometric studies quite specifically found in the early 1970s that almost 60 percent of those migrating to southern California during the period measured came even though they did not expect to find employment in their new places of residence. They came instead because they expected that life there would be of a higher quality than that in the places they were leaving. even should they find themselves continuing to be jobless in their new location.