Speech #1040190245

Mr. Speaker. the amendments will address is the bills employment verification system. which was weakened significantly in the full Committee on the Judiciary and which. as I mentioned earlier. this rule. through its selfexecuting provision. will unfortunately weaken further by making it voluntary rather than mandatory. To succeed in reducing illegal immigration. we must do two things. tighten control of our borders and remove to the greatest extent possible the incentives that encourage illegal immigration. The most powerful incentive of all. Mr. Speaker. is the opportunity to work in this country. When Congress enacted employer sanctions as part of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. we did so in recognition of the fact that. because immigrants come here primarily to find jobs. It is necessary to deter employers from hiring those who are not here legally. What we failed to do at that time. however. was to provide a sound and dependable way for employers to determine whether or not a prospective employee is here legally. Without that. it is virtually impossible. as we have discovered. to enforce the employer sanction laws. Our failure to establish a reliable means of enforcing the law has created other problems as well. The law has generated widespread discrimination against U.S. citizens and legal residents who may look or sound foreign and has created a huge mulitmilliondollar underground industry. in counterfeit and fraudulent Social Security cards. green cards. voter registration cards. and the 26 other kinds of documents that can be used to demonstrate ones work eligibility under the current law. H.R. 2202 wisely reduces that number. but it does not go far enough toward making employer sanctions enforceable. Establishing a dependable widescale and mandatory system for checking individuals authorization to work in this country is the only way to solve those problems. In fact. to crack down on the more than 50 percent of illegal immigrants who come here legally and overstay their visas and remain often permanently. improving employer sanctions is essential. because we cannot obviously stop those immigrants from settling here permanently simply by improving border control. There will be three amendments dealing with employment verification that we would like to bring to our colleagues attention. One is the McCollum amendment. which would provide for development of a counterfeitproof Social Security card. Establishing such a card is. I believe. absolutely essential to making the prohibition on hiring illegal immigrants enforceable. and I believe it deserves our strong support. The second is the Gallegly amendment. which would make the bills telephone employment verification system mandatory in the States. where it will be tried on an experimental basis. restoring the provision to the form it was in when it was reported by the House Committee on the Judiciary. That amendment also deserves our strong support. In the same vein. if I may say so. Mr. Speaker. the ChabotConyers amendment to eliminate entirely the verification system should be rejected if we are at all serious about doing something real about this very real problem of illegal immigration. Mr. Speaker. in another major issue. perhaps the most important one to be considered in this debate. will be when to retain the bills reductions in legal immigration. Our decision on that issue will occur whether we consider the ChryslerBermanBrownback amendment to strike the legal immigration sections of the bill. It is essential in the view of many of us that we reject that amendment. The limits on legal immigration in the bill go to the crucial question that up until now has been missing from this debate. which is how big do we want this country to be. how populated do we want the United States to be. The population of this country. currently about 263 million. is growing so quickly that by the end of this decade. less than 4 years from now. our population will reach 275 million. more than double its present size at the end of World War II. Only during the 1950s. at the height of the socalled baby boom. were more people added to the Nations population than are projected to be added during the 1990s.