Speech #1040267269

Speaker. I want to join my other colleagues in indicating how sorely I will miss my friend from Texas. who is really a great Member of Congress. and I am sorry he will be leaving this body. The people of my congressional district and of southern California. and probably the entire country. desperately want us to do something effective to stop illegal immigration. It is wrong to conclude that the people who voted for Proposition 187 are racist or xenophobes. They are people who are looking at what has happened: The employer sanctions did not work. the other strategies did not work. the refusal or earlier administrations to fund the Border Patrol and the Congress to appropriate the money left the border essentially unprotected. They want something done. The problem with this bill is it cons the American people into thinking major new steps are going to be done. This President is the first President to put the money where the mouth is. He has proposed. and the Committee on Appropriations. to its credit. has funded massive increases in Border Patrol. He has initiated through Executive order an expedited procedure for asylum. which has reduced those frivolous asylum applications by 58 percent. We are depositing more criminal aliens and more illegal immigrants than we ever did before. and all the trend lines are up. What the Jordan commission and every single independent academic study of this issue says. without a verification system we will never make employer sanctions meaningful. Nothing else. Nothing else is serious if we do not do that and make a commitment to do that. Second. we know there are industries that systematically recruit and hire illegal immigrants. and for reasons that I do not know. the gentleman from Texas has a theory which sounds plausible to me. this conference committee struck inspectors and investigators to cover those industries. We should not be conned. Let me turn to what it does with legal immigrants. For the first time in American history. even when we had the moratoriums on immigration. a U.S. citizen. and. remember. this bill puts an income requirement on petitioning for spouses. An individual has to make 140 percent. Fiftythree percent of the unmarried American people do not make 53 percent. do not make 140 percent of the poverty standard.