Speech #1100051725

I can tell you that. than we pay to keep people in some of our best universities. I dont think it is a good use of our resources. I think this is one of these feelgood amendments which says we are not being tough enough on immigrants. lets tighten this thing up. let~s be real tough on them. The statistics I haveand these are statistics from the 2006 Source Book of Federal Sentencing Statistics. put out by the United States Sentencing Commission. They have a chart on page 13 where they talk about the distribution of offenders in each primary offense category. It shows that 24.5 percent of the offenders we are incarcerating today are being incarcerated for immigrationrelated offenses. The only other category that is larger is drugs. where 35.5 percent are being incarcerated for drugrelated offenses. So 24.5 percent of our prisoners today are there because of immigrationrelated offenses. That number is going to go up dramatically if we actually adopt and put into law these mandatory minimum sentences that are contained in this amendment. I wish also to point out that the penalties. the sentences these people are being given and the actual period of incarceration. the number of months of incarceration for these immigration offenses. is fairly significant. It ranges from 22.8 months up to over 25 months. So we are talking about putting people in prison for a significant period of time. As I say. they are all for immigrationrelated offenses. I think it is foolhardy for the United States to be passing immigration reform legislation to reduce the financial burden on U.S. taxpayers for all of the illegal immigration coming into the country and at the same time adopt an amendment that loads an enormous additional cost on to the taxpayer so we can keep these people in prison for a long time and thereby demonstrate we are getting tough on crime. I urge my colleagues to oppose the amendment.