Speech #1040203048

First of all. let us understand something very clearly. The discussion about separating the bills. the legal and illegal bills. boils down to one simple political fact. Those who do not want any changes in the laws relating to legal immigration in this country. who do not want to change the numbers. who want to continue to see the number of legal immigrants in this country continue to rise. as the charts that were shown earlier indicatethose people who do not want to see any constraints on legal immigration also do not want to see the issues of legal and illegal immigration combined into one bill because they understand that there is a very strong political desire to deal with the problem of illegal immigration. This body will not refrain from dealing with the problem of illegal immigration. Therefore. if we are talking about the same subjects in the same billthere is going to be a bill and there could be a change in the law relative to legal immigrationso they do not want to see that. They would rather see the legislation regarding illegal immigration pass and then do nothing with respect to legal immigration. The Jordan Commission made some very substantial recommendations about both legal and Illegal immigration. Specifically. it determined that our law should be changed to put some caps on the numbers of people legally immigrating to the United States. The basis for the recommendation was what has occurred in the last 10 years. both with respect to illegal immigration and the increases in legal immigration. Ten years ago or so when the law was changed. the assumption was that we would stop illegal immigration. How naive. I guess. everyone was.