Speech #1010216585

Those should be given the priorities. Those should be given the opportunity to come in here first. not the people who come here illegally. In my judgment. when we get all said and done with this. we do not address one of the most critical problems facing this Nation today in immigration. We do not address the problem of what we are going to do with all the criminals that are in our jails that are illegal aliens that are here. We need to have a process to expedite the deportation of those who are illegally here. and that process has not been granted. either through the committee structure. or through the Committee on Rules through an amendment I suggested might be offered on the floor. That is urgently needed. What we see is. over the past 3 years. only about 22.000 have been deported from this Nation altogether. whether criminals or otherwise. out of the potential of 1 to 2 million. We do not know exactly how many are here in that category. but we definitely know we are only deporting about 1 or 2 percent of those available for deportation. and a large bulk of those who should be deported are in our jails. criminals flooding our jails in the States around this country. I think that that is the most important single thing that is missing from this legislation. We need to reform the process for adjudication. We need to speed up the process of getting the criminal element who are here illegally. out of this country. instead of having them fill our jails. We also. at the same time. need to give new resources to the Immigration Service. They do not have enough investigators to go out and handle deportation cases. When we visit local Immigration offices. what we notice more than anything else. they say. "Gosh. the case is made over in one division by some folks who know that there are illegals here that ought to be deported. but we do not have the personnei to follow up. so there are a bunch of people out there that ought to be deported that we are never looking into." The bill takes a wrong thrust. It was a good idea. We need to reform it. definitely need to reform priorities. and we should add a few more in the category system. but we should not go in and screw it all around. changing the third and the fifth preferences. having amnesty and doing lots of other things I think are wrong. so I am opposed to this bill in the present form.