Speech #CREC-2017-11-28-pt1-PgS7341-6_t1

Those are things that are fixable. There is $2.6 billion of fraud that is in the system. We have asked the question about immigration, and immigration has been an important topic here. We talk about immigration as well and not just of the financial portion of it but of the fumble portion of things that are actually going wrong in immigration currently. A lot of folks--and some folks even in this body--say: If we will just enforce the law as it exists and build a fence, we will be fine. The problem is that 66 percent of the people who are in the country illegally came into the country legally, with a legal visa, but they overstayed the visas. They never left. After 9/11, the 9/11 Commission said that one of the major aspects in dealing with immigration was to do an entry-exit visa system so that we would know who they were when people came in, and we would also know when they left. That was a recommendation from the 9/11 Commission, but it has still not been done a decade and a half later. If we are going to deal with immigration, one of the key things that we have to have is not just a wall or a fence or some sort of barrier. We also have to deal with when people come in and when they leave under legal visa systems. I have heard comments about hiring more Border Patrol folks and more ICE folks. That is OK, fine. I am good with that, actually, but here is the problem. With the current system that is set up, it takes over 450 days to hire one person as a Border Patrol person because the process is so convoluted--450 days. What if you would like to apply for a job and you wouldn't hear back about it for a year and a half--450 days? What about if we are going to add more immigration attorneys? We have a half-million-person backlog in our immigration courts right now. What if we were to hire more judges for that process? Great idea. Guess how long it takes to hire more judges in the immigration court? It takes 742 days right now to be able to hire a judge to add to the immigration courts. Our problems are not just in immigration. There are structural problems in the Federal Government right now in hiring, oversight, and in managing the reports. I mentioned the IRS's not implementing one of the reports they have.