Speech #1090172599

I would like to turn my attention and remarks to the border fencing bill. H.R. 6061. which is before the Senate today. First. let me say that as I look at where we have gotten today with respect to immigration reform in this Congress and here in America. we are now at the point where we are playing political games and gimmicks and tricks with what is a very important national security issue. At the heart of the immigration reform debate. which has consumed so much of our time in this Senate and this country over the last year. we recognized it is in Americas national security interests for us to develop a comprehensive immigration reform package. We recognized. as well. that we are a nation of laws. and as a nation of laws we should be enforcing our immigration laws in the United States of America. And. finally. we recognized there is a reality of 12 million undocumented workers who live somewhere in the shadows of this society and that we ought to move forward and create a realistic program that addresses those 12 million human beings who live in the United States of America today. Yet somehow today we have gotten away from that comprehensive approach to immigration reform. to look at what is a 1percent solution. It is a small part of the solution that we need to deal with for immigration reform. Yet it has been chosen that we move forward to discuss this issue because there are political agendas at stake. It is the House Republican leadership that has refused to go along with the comprehensive approach which President Bush and this Senate have advocated. which has resulted in us coming to the point where we are now talking about a fenceonly bill to deal with this very complex issue of immigration reform which has gone unaddressed by this country and by this Congress decade after decade. President Bush. himself. in his address on August 3. 2006this yearsaid: Im going to talk today about comprehensive immigration reform. This was just a month ago6. probably 8 weeks ago. where he said: I say comprehensive because unless you have all five pieces working together its not going to work at all. That was the President of the United States. Earlier on. the President had said: An immigration reform bill needs to be comprehensive. because all elements of this problem must be addressed together. or none of them will be solved at all. Again. this is President George Bush. former Governor of Texas. who has been working on this immigration issue for a long time. He. as President. reached that conclusion. He said: An immigration reform bill needs to be comprehensive. because all elements of this problem must be addressed together. or none of them will be solved at all. Congress can pass a comprehensive bill for me to sign into law. Unfortunately. we appear to be failing in getting a comprehensive immigration reform package to the President that he can sign. Instead. we have devolved to the point where there is a piece of legislation which the House of Representatives has passed which is a fenceonly bill. This fenceonly bill is only a very small part of the solution we face to this very complex problem. From my point of view. it is a copout and a political gimmick being played on the people of the United States. Let me remind people that it was not so long ago that in this Chamber. by a large bipartisan majority. Democrats and Republicans came together and said we can pass a comprehensive immigration reform package that addresses the issues that the President and the country want to be addressed in immigration reform. It was a lawandorder bill. which we enacted out of this Senate. It was a bill that dealt in a straightforward manner with border security. with enforcement of immigration laws. and also applying penalties and registration to those people who had come forward from the shadows and registered to take them out of the shadows. I want to briefly review the comprehensive nature of that bill and some of the components that caused me to support the bill as the right way for us to address immigration reform. First. we said we would do border security. We are not afraid to do that. We ought to do border security because it is our right as a sovereign nation to do border security. It is our right to make sure that we are protecting America against terrorism coming across our borders. For us. as we worked on that comprehensive bill. border security was very important. In our legislation we added 12.000 new Border Patrol agents. We created additional border fencesin fact. a 370mile fencethrough an amendment authored by my friend from Alabama. We provided new criminal penalties for construction of border tunnels. which we find in places where there are fences today. We added new checkpoints and points of entry throughout the border between Mexico and the U.S. We expanded exitentry security systems at all land borders and airports. So. yes. this legislation was a very tough border security bill. It was part of the comprehensive approach that we took. Secondly. we said that It is not enough to just strengthen our borders. We need to do more in terms of what we do inside our country. We said we would do more with respect to immigration law enforcement. Instead of continuing the patterns and practices of looking the other way in this country. we said we as a nation of laws are going to enforce our immigration laws. We said we would add 5.000 new investigators in our legislation. We said we would establish 20 new detention facilities. We said we would reimburse States for detaining and imprisoning criminal aliens. We would require a faster deportation process. We would increase penalties for gang members. for money laundering. and for human trafficking. We would increase document fraud detection. We would create. very importantly. new fraudproof immigration documents with biometric identifiers. And we would expand authority to remove suspected terrorists from our country. So it was tough in terms of our saying that as a nation of laws we will enforce the laws.