Speech #1040203584

Third. this bill will be an administrative and bureaucratic nightmare for Federal. State. local and private service providers. They will be burdened with determining which immigrants have sponsors. what the sponsors income is. what the immigrants income is. and who is entitled to benefits. These providers will have to do this for every needsbased program from school lunches to Medicaid. That makes no sense. Let me give you an example or two. On school lunches. teachers and school officials have their hands full as they work for the education of children but under this bill. when school starts next September. every school in America must documentlisten to thisevery school in America must document whether their pupils are American citizens or immigrants. Teachers must figure out whether the immigrant has a sponsor. The income of the sponsor must be determined before legal immigrant children can get school lunches. but illegal immigrant children do not have sponsors so they get the school lunches on the same basis as American citizen children. Under medical care. suppose an immigrant child has a chronic medical condition. The parents are legal and working but have been unable to get insurance. Their sponsors income is just high enough that it disqualifies the child for Medicaid under the bill so the child goes without care until her condition becomes an emergency. She runs up an expensive medical bill under the emergency Medicaid for a condition that could have been treated at a low cost earlier. and this result does not make any sense. Child care. Like many American families. some immigrant families struggle to make ends meet. They rely on child care in order to stay on their jobs. These children receiving child care are American citizens. But by deeming child care programs as this bill does. it removes American citizen children from child care programs and jeopardizes the employment of their immigrant parents. That is true with regard to Head Start as well. Finally. the United States must continue to provide the safe haven for refugees fleeing persecution. yet socalled expedited exclusion procedures in th. legislation will cause us to turn away many true refugees. Under this procedure. persons arriving in the United States with false documents but who request political asylum would be turned away at our airports with little consideration of their claims. no access to counsel. and no right to an interpreter. It is often Impossible for them to obtain valid passports or travel documents before they flee their homelands.