Speech #1090172633

All of this issue is really one. It is a combination of understanding the world we live in. and that is a world that is not as safe as we would like it to be. and there are very real enemies out there. But it is also understanding a new world that we live in right here on the North American Continent and one that we have ignored for years. that is. creating secure borders and defining and designing a wellrun immigration program that responds to our needs and our economy and. at the same time. is fair and responsible to those foreign nationals who would like to come to our country to work. I began to work on this issue not just a year ago. not just 2 years ago. but in 1999. I first looked at it through the eyes of American agriculture when they came to me and said: Senator. we have a problem. We have a very big problem. The H2A program that supplies foreign national workers to agriculture doesnt work. It is broken. It is bureaucratic. It is nonfunctional and doesnt meet our seasonal needs. As a result. that Federal H2A guest worker program only supplies about 40.000 to 45.000 workers. But we need and have over 1 million in our workforce who are foreign nationals and. frankly. they are illegal. and we know they are. It ought to be fixed because we dont want to base our economy as American agricultural producers on an illegal process because someday it may do us damage. So I began to work. along with several others. to try to build and propose changes within the immigration laws to create a legal guest worker program. We were doing that in 1999 and 2000. And in 2001. as we all know. Americas roof literally fell in as we were attacked by the terrorist elements of radical Islamic fundamentalism. America became angry and frustrated. We began to find out that our immigration process was broken. I knew about it. I was working on it at the time. What I kept saying to my colleagues in counseling them is. as we secure our borders. lets also redo our immigration laws to identify the illegals who are in our countrytreat them justly and fairly but identify themto see if some of them deserve to stay here and work. while at the same time making sure we have a system that in the future recognizes the need for immigrant labor in our economy and specific to agriculture. We worked on that a long while. This year the Senate passed a comprehensive immigration bill. Parts of it I agreed with and parts I disagreed with. I voted for it to move the process along because I thought it was critically necessary because 1 didnt want to get the cart in front of the horse. I wanted the horse in front of the cart. and the horse in front of the cart is border security as a first line of defense in monitoring and controlling illegals in our country. The second line is a legal process which makes sure that those who are here are legal. and those who want to come to work in our economy are legal. And if you dont do them both in tandem.