Speech #1040267203

Mr. Speaker. Congress knew a decade ago and more when we first established penalties for employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants that it would be difficult to enforce the law. impossible actually. if we did not have some kind of system requiring employers to verify the authenticity of documents that employees use to show work authorization. Moreover. because more than 50 percent of illegal immigrants come here legally and then overstay their visas. we cannot stop these types of immigrants simply by tightening border control. The only real way we can stop them is by forcing employers to check their -work authorization status with the government. But despite knowing full well that the lack of an enforceable verification system is the largest obstacle to enforcing employer sanctions and thus the biggest hole in our efforts to stop illegal immigration. this legislation fails to cure that major principal problem. For employment verification. the bill provides only for pilot programs in States that have the highest numbers of undocumented workers. Because these pilot programs will be voluntary. employers will be able to avoid checking the status of their employees. Thus. businesses that hire illegal immigrants. and there are plenty of them. Mr. Speaker. who do. will continue to be able to get away with it the same way they do now. by claiming that they did not know that employees work authorization documents were fraudulent. And that will continue until the Congress revisits the issue and passes legislation making verification mandatory. To make matters worse. the bill fails to provide for an adequate number of investigators within either the Immigration and Naturalization Service or the Labor Department to identify employers who are hiring illegal immigrants. The other glaring failure of this piece of legislation is its failure to reduce the huge number of legal immigrants who are settling in the United States each year. Many people have been focusing on the problem of illegal immigration. which is understandable. Undocumented immigrants and employers who hire them are breaking our laws and should be dealt with accordingly. But if a fundamental immigration problem we are concerned with. and I believe it is. it certainly is amongst the people I represent back home. is the impact of too many people arriving too quickly into this country. the sheer numbers dictate that we cannot ignore the role that legal immigration plays. About threequarters of the estimated 1.1 million foreigners who settle permanently in the United States each year do so legally. It is the 800.000. more or less. legal immigrants. more so than the estimated 300.000 illegal ones. who determine how fierce the competition for jobs is. how overcrowded our schools are. and how large and densely populated our urban areas are becoming. More importantly. the number of foreigners we allow to settle in the United States now will determine how crowded this country will become during the next century. The population of the United States has just about doubled since the end of World War II.