Speech #1040203584

This plan cannot go into effect until Congress approves it by a separate vote in the future. The current confusing system of employment verification is not working. It is too easy for people to come in legally as tourists and students and stay on and work illegally after their visas expire. It is too easy for illegal immigrants who impersonate local or even American citizens by using counterfeit documents. Far too often employers seek to avoid this confusion by turning away job applicants who look or sound foreign. This employment discrimination especially hurts American workers of Hispanic and Asian origin. But it harms many other Americans in the job market as well. Some in the Senate will seek to eliminate the provisions that Senator SIMPSON and I have placed in the bill to authorize the pilot programs to find new and better ways of verifying job status. Our ability to deal with illegal immigration should not be derailed by misinformed and misguided notions that this bill would result in Big Brother abuses. or a national II) card. Nothing could be further from the truth. The pilot programs are the core reforms in this bill. Without them this bill will accomplish very little in controlling illegal immigration. We have to deal with the job magnet. That is the key. Every studythe Hesburgh studies of over 10 years ago. the Barbara Jordan studiesevery comprehensive review of the problems with illegal immigrants. you have to deal with the job magnet. You deal with the job magnet and you are going to have a dramatic impact on illegal immigrants coming to this country. And. if you do not. then you can put up the fence all the way across the southern border and fences around this country. You are still not going to be able to adequately deal with this issue. I support the increase in the Nations border patrols contained in the bill. I support steppedup efforts to combat smugglers and modernday slave traders who risk the lives of desperate illegal Immigrants. and who place them in sweatshop conditions. I support increased penalties against those who use counterfeit documents to enable illegal immigrants to pose as legal workers and take away American jobs by fraud. But without the pilot programs our ability to stem the tide of illegal Immnigration would be hamstrung. The Immigration and Naturalization Service has limited authority to conduct pilot programs under current law. Under the few pilots that can be conducted there will be no assurances that they would have significant impact on business. There would be no privacy protection. In fact. there would be no standards at all other than those the Immigration Service would impose on itself. This debate seems to have forgotten that since 1986 employers are required to check the documents of everyone they hire to make sure they are eligible to work in the United States. That means everyonewhether they are citizens or not.