Speech #1030082701

In certain professionsfor example. engineeringwe have a surplus of labor in this country. However. the Labor Department allows American companies to bring in foreign engineers. In 1990. we took in about three times as much legal immigrationnot talking about illegallegal immigration as Australia. Canada. France. and Great Britain combined. All polls show Americans want lower levels of immigration and want the borders secured. This includes a majority of Latinos. 65 percent of whom believe there are too many immigrants. The American people. Mr. President. are upset. and I think they have a right to be upset. But they are upset for a reason. Our immigration policies. regulating all aspects of entry to the United States. have simply ceased to function in the national interest. "Immigration policy" and "national interest" are terms that are rarely heard in the context of immigration. We seem to have lost sight of the fact that it is a public policy and. like all public policies. our immigration policies should serve the public interest. But they do not. Let us talk about legal immigration. We now admit the equivalent of a major city each year. without having the vaguest idea of how we will educate all the new children. care for the sick. provide housing. jobs. build infrastructure. or attend to any of the human needs of the newcomers or those already here. Mr. President. each year. we admitI repeatthe equivalent of a major city. We admit more people each year than make up some of our States. We admit a new State with legal immigrants every year. At a time of huge budget deficits and severe financial constraints. we have no idea of how these huge costs will be borne. We Just do it. We admit the equivalent of a major city without any assessment of whether these newcomers are likely to be contributing members of our society. Only a tiny fraction of those admitted each year enter because they have skills and abilities that will benefit our country. The rest come merely because they happen to be relatives of other recent immigrants. The result of this socalled policy is that there Is now a backlog of almost 3 million peoplethe population of a city the size of Los Angeles--who have a claim to immigrate to the United States for no other reason than they are somebodys relative. Is this really a way to run immigration policy? Earlier this year. Congress engaged in a bitter and protracted debate about the Presidents job stimulus program. something this Senator supported. While there was a great deal of controversy about how best to put millions of unemployed Americans back to work. no one on either sido of the aisle disputed the need to create more jobs in this country. I did not say "put people back to work" because some of the programs we are working on are designed to give people a job for the first time. Yet. not once during the course of that debate during 1992and I listened to most of itdid we ever stop to consider that our Government was granting more work authorizations to foreign workers than the net number of new jobs created by our economy and certainly the job stimulus program would not have kept up with the new immigrants. Can anyone fathom a logic behind this policy? I have thought about it a lot and I cannot determine the logic. Because a relativebased immigrant system is inherently unfair. Congress has been forced to adopt even more absurd measures to deal with the demands of people who do not have relatives here. Can it be any wonder that the American people think our immigration policies are a joke when we select 40.000 new immigrants a year by lottery? Can anyone honestly tell me it is sound and rational to make public policy based on the roll of a die or the flip of a coin? Heads we admit you. tails you stay home. But the absurdity does not stop with our legal immigration policy. When it comes to enforcing laws against illegal immigration. we have a system that will make you recoil in disbelief. We now have a permanent illegal alien population of 4 million peoplewe think. We think that is all it is. That is more than 2 times larger than the State I represent. the State of Nevada4 million people. The illegal alien population is growing by more than a quarter of a million people a year. we think. with the best statistics we have. Yet we are doing almost nothing to encourage these people to go home or even to deter them from coming here in the first place. In many parts of the country we actually make it easy to be an illegal alien. Listen to this. New York City. always on the brink of financial insolvency. guarantees--that is right. guaranteesthat every illegal alien who lives within the five boroughs can have the same access to every public service and benefit that an American citizen has access to. California. also teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. will spend $1 billion this year to provide health care to illegal aliens. We already talked about the schools necessary to be constructed. Not just emergency health care does Califronia provide.