Speech #990274906

Once it is known that an individual is incapable of asserting his rights. there will always be those who are all too ready to exploit their advantage over that individual. In short. we are talking about madetoorder victims. and until these individuals are either removed from the United States or legalized. this utterly unacceptable situation will continue to exist. The options. then. are deportation or legalization. The first option. deportation. is really no option at all. First. any effort designed to even attempt to locate. provide hearings to. and then physically deport millions of individuals would cost billions of dollars. To understand just how extraordinarily expensive such an effort would be one must realize that in a typical year INS now is able to deport only about 20.000 individuals at a cost of several million dollars. Second. and more important. any effort to implement such a massive deportation program would necessarily involve sending out thousands upon thousands of INS investigators to scour the country in search of undocumented aliens. Hundreds of thousands of business premises would be raided. Any individual on the street who "looks or sounds foreign" would be stopped and interrogated. It is inconceivable to me that an investigative effort of this magnitude could be conducted without violating the rights not only of undocumented aliens. but also legal aliens and U.S. citizens as well. The third reason why deportation is not an option is that. in the case of longtime residents. deportation is unfair. and would be perceived as such by the public. The Legalization Program contained in the bill before us covers only undocumented aliens who have resided continuously in the United States since before 1982 or before. Many of these individuals have U.S. citizen children. Many work with U.S. citizens. Many have U.S. citizen friends who. as we often see in the context of private immigration bills. would be appalled to learn that their hardworking friend or neighbor is slated for expulsion from the United States. I therefore do not think it surprising that in a poll conducted by CBS News earlier this year fewer than onethird of the respondents said that the lawabiding. undocumented persons who have lived here several years should be deported from the United States. It is no secret that the great obstacle to the enactment of immigration reform. in recent years. has been the foreign agricultural worker issue. As I have said many times before. in my judgment this issue has no relevance to the problem confronting usthe problem of undocumented persons coming to and remaining in the United States. I am strenuously and irrevocably opposed to any massive guestworker program. Aware of my feelings on this issue the gentleman from New York