Speech #1020081596

Mr. President. I am pleased to join Senator HATCH and so many of my colleagues in this new bipartisan effort to repeal the employer sanctions in the immigration laws. Last year. the General Accounting Office found that the sanctions have led to widespread discrimination. In fact. fully 19 percent of the employers surveyed by GAO had engaged in some form of employment discrimination as a result of the new law. There is nothing in the months since to suggest that this problem of discrimination has disappeared. In fact. the number of immigrationrelated discrimination charges filed with the Justice Department has increased by 37 percent over the past year. At the same time. illegal immigration appears once again to be almost as high as it was before employer sanctions were enacted 5 years ago. In the face of this evidence. there is no justification for Congress to retain on the statute books these provisions that lead to unintended discrimination. Mr. President. a sad dimension to the history of our immigration laws and policies has been that whenever the potential for discrimination exists. that discrimination occurs. We witnessed this in the past. when our laws and policies discriminated against those seeking to immigrate from the AsianPacific triangle. Congress acted in 1965 to end that discrimination. And so we must act once again today to change our laws in order to remedy discrimination against working Americans and legal immigrants. We must find new and better ways to achieve the goal of the sanctions. without harming HispanicAmerican citizens. AsianAmerican citizens and other ethnic minorities. We can remove the incentive to hire undocumented workers by doing a better job of enforcing laws which govern wages and working conditions. We should provide more effective support for the mission of the Border Patrol. and make certain it has the modern tools and resources it needs. And we must do more. through our trade policies and development programs. to address dire conditions which encourage and even compel desperate citizens of other lands to leave their homes and seek illegal employment in America. In enacting employer sanctions. Congress made the wrong move. We aimed at illegal aliens--but we hit lawabiding Americans. and it is time to correct our mistake.e