Speech #1090122704

Mr. Speaker. I rise today in strong support of tolerant. effective. comprehensive immigration reform. Half a million people. if not a million people. marched peaceully in Los Angeles to let the Senate know that enforcement and border protectiononly approach will not solve our broken immigration system. 300.000 people in Chicago. 40.000 in Washington. DC. and 20.000 in Milwaukee and Phoenix marched to defend the hopes and dreams of immigrant families. Nearly 40.000 students across Southern California. including students at several schools in my district. marched for the rights of immigrants. I urge my colleagues in this body and in the Senate to listen to the message which reverberated across the country and support a tolerant and effective immigration policy. We need effective legislation that strikes the right balance between national security and reforming our current immigration system. This should include a path to permanency for the millions of lawabiding and taxpaying immigrants who call the United States home. It should reduce the long lines in the family immigration system to promote family unity and include measures to control the future flow of immigrants by providing them with legal avenues to live and work in the United States. Several proposals under consideration by Congress have a different approach. Rather than fixing the broken immigration system. they worsen the myriad of enforcement only measures which have already been tried and which have failed. For example. between 1990 and 2000 the size of the border patrol tripled. yet the number of undocumented immigrants increased. Between 1999 and 2004. the number of border agents in the Tucson. Arizona sector of the border increased by 56 percent. while the number of arrests increased by only 4 percent. This enforcement only approach has done nothing to protect our Nations security. It merely encourages immigrants to cross in remote areas where it is more difficult to be caught and where they are more likely to die. We must secure our borders. We need to know who is crossing our borders and living and working in our country for our national security.