Speech #1090138736

Mr. President. this amendment is one I believe is absolutely essential to the functioning of this comprehensive immigration reform plan which has been shaped over the last 2 weeks on the Senate floor. It is premised upon the concept of information sharing. and in a post9/11 world this is the concept with which we have become familiar because the failure to share information between law enforcement and intelligencegathering authorities and other agencies of the Federal Government was one of the causes of the terrible disaster this country sustained on September 11. This amendment strikes an appropriate balance between confidentiality of the records of the applicant for benefits under this bill and fraud detection. The compromise we have heard and which has been carefully crafted by a bipartisan coalition here will not in any way be unraveled or hurt by this amendment. Finally. I believe an illegal alien will not be deterred from applying because of this amendment. This amendment does not remove confidentiality per se. It applies only after an application is denied and the need for confidentiality passes. The text is modeled after the Violence Against Women Act. And I ask my colleagues. if the limitation on confidentiality is OK in the case of women who are subjected to violence. why isnt it OK for workers who are simply here illegally? This countrys early experienceabout 20 years ago nowwith immigration reform shows that legalization or an amnesty program is a magnet for fraud and can be exploited in a number of ways. We know that this vulnerability can be exploited. not only by common criminals but also by terrorists. Three terrorists convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing obtained green cards through the 1986 amnesty. including New York City cabdriver Mohammed Abouhalima. who obtained a green card through the agricultural worker amnesty program. The New York Times has described the 1986 amnesty as "one of the most extensive immigration frauds ever perpetrated against the United States Government." Within just a few years. it was reported that the Government had already identified almost 400.000 cases of possible fraud. One of the reasons there was so much fraud in the 1986 amnesty was because the law did not allow the Government to share information even after an application was denied. Yet the current bill contains the exact same text and the exact same flaws.