Speech #1000080270

I thank the gentleman. Mr. Chairman. as I was saying. here we go again. before we barely even started. before the ink is dry on the immigration bill. I fear the message that we are sending to the rest of the world is that we really were not serious about our immigration policy. The plain and simple fact is. no matter how you couch it. no matter how you color it. the more we carve up the immigration bill. the less credible our efforts will prove to be. Following the signature of the President on the immigration bill. we saw a remarkable dropoff in illegal immigration from all countries to the United States. That seemed to prevail for about 6 or 7 months. Now we are seeing an increase in those numbers once again. Why? If you talk to the people on the border. it is because the word has gotten out that Congress may not be entirely serious about the immigration bill. that we might put off employer sanctions. that in fact these things are not going to be as we said they were going to be. The gentleman from California made the point that what we would be doing here is having a "de facto deportation." Why? Because he indicates employer sanctions would work. and if they work that means people will go back to their home countries. Now. he may disagree with employer sanctions as the method that we use to try to get our laws under control. but Mr. Chairman. that is precisely what we asked of ourselves when we passed the immigration bill. It was precisely because we thought that employer sanctions would work that we adopted them. Now to come to the floor and suggest that because they are working we need to undo their impact seems to me to be somewhat questionable. If the message of the Refugee Act and the immigration bill was to prospectively apply a legal framework in a consistent fashion. the more confusion we add to the issue the less effective we are going to be. The fact we are asked to grant a special status to a large group of individuals from countries with a long pattern of undocumented immigration which span over several decades rather complicates the situation. The evidence is that it is economics. economics mostly. that has been a major motivation for the northward trek. Now. the gentleman from California who talked about his visit down to El Centro. about a month and a half after he went down to El Centro.