Speech #1100055795

According to a letter of support I have asked to be printed in the RECORD that I received from the Service Employees International Union. they say the following: Employers will be less likely to invest in worker training or other benefits and wages to retain workers. .. . The 21212 is a recipe for wage depression. job turnover and increased illegal workers. The structure of the new guest worker program will also result in a substantial number of these workers overstaying their visas so they dont have to leave the country for an extended period of time. The Government has not done a great job in the past of ensuring that individuals leave the country at the expiration of their visas. and I have no reason to believeI dont think any of us have any reason to believethat the Department of Homeland Security will be able to do a substantially better job in the near future. In December of last year. after the Government Accountability Office issued a report regarding the USVISIT Program. which is a mechanism by which Government is supposed to be able to track the entry and the exit of foreign visitors. the Department of Homeland Security scrapped its plans to implement the exit portion of that program for U.S. land ports of entry. In essence. the GAO report found it could take up to 10 years to develop the technology required to fully implement the program and that the cost of doing so could be in the tens of billions of dollars. There is nothing in the immigration bill that indicates that this capability is within our reach. In section 130 of the bill. the Federal Government is required to come up with a schedule for deploying the exit component of the USVISIT system. However. we have already been told by the GAO that this will not be a reality for a very long period of time. In crafting this immigration bill. there has been a lot of attention given to trying to bring together individuals with a wide variety of political views. In my opinion. we have not focused enough on the practical aspects of how this bill is going to be implemented. Compromises need to be made as part of any legislative package. but we cannot lose sight of the need to craft legislation that makes sense from a policy standpoint and that actually can be implemented and can work. It is my belief the new guest worker program is currently structured in a manner that has more to do with the politics of getting a compromise among those who drafted the legislation than it does with sound policy. As 1 have discussed. the requirement that these guest workers leave every 2 years before renewing their visas is bad for employers. it is haimful to American workers. it is difficult to enforce. and it will likely result in a larger population of undocumented workers in this country in the future. For those reasons. I urge my colleagues to support my amendment and to help make this bill more workable and better public policy.