He is also the former police
chief of San Diego and is now the current president of the San Diego
Regional Chamber of Commerce. During that hearing, Mayor Sanders said
that an efficient border is a safe border, and he knows something about
safety from his time as a police chief. We also know that 99 percent of
what gets screened at border crossings is safe and that there is no
need to worry about its coming into the country. What we need is to get
more efficient at approving the 99 percent of safe cargo and travelers
and better at stopping the 1 percent that we don't want to come in. One of the big challenges that we faced when I first came to Congress
was in border delays. We saw that delays at the border crossing were
costing us, at that point, $7.2 billion of economic activity in our
county and 35,000 jobs annually--numbers so big that they are almost
unbelievable, but those numbers came from independent assessments. One of the great successes I have had in Congress, in working with my
colleagues within our congressional delegation, is to have worked
together to secure more than $500 million to finish the expansion and
the improvements at the San Ysidro border crossing. We did that in
working with Democrats Juan Vargas and Susan Davis and with Republicans
Duncan Hunter and Darrell Issa because we all understood how important
the United States-Mexico border is to our regional economy. By investing in infrastructure and innovation in San Diego, Tijuana,
and across the border, we are keeping Americans safe and supporting the
export of goods made in America by American workers.
Keywords matched
border crossing