[Congressional Record Volume 153, Number 10 (Thursday, January 18, 2007)]
[Senate]
[Pages S754-S756]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

      By Mr. ISAKSON:
  S. 330. A bill to authorize secure borders and comprehensive 
immigration reform, and for other purposes; to the Committee on the 
Judiciary.
  Mr. ISAKSON. Mr. President, I am pleased to rise today before the 
Senate. This is an issue this Senate visited 9 months ago in the month 
of May. Nine months ago, the Senate tackled what I submit is the most 
important domestic issue in the United States of America and in every 
State. That is the issue of legal immigration and illegal immigration.
  In that debate of what became known as a comprehensive immigration 
reform bill, I submitted an amendment that ended up being amendment No. 
1. The amendment simply said that before any provision of this act that 
grants legal status to someone who is in America illegally takes 
effect, the Secretary of Homeland Security will certify to the Congress 
that all of the provisions of border security contained in the bill 
were funded, in place, and operational. It become known as a trigger--
and it was a trigger--because the immigration issue is not like when 
you can never figure what is the chicken, what is the egg, and what 
came first. There is no way to reform illegal immigration unless you 
first stop the porous borders we have and the flow of illegal 
immigrants. But to do only one without the other is a terrible mistake.
  The result of last year's debate was the Senate passed a bill without 
the trigger that granted new legal statuses. Although it provided for 
the authorization of border security, it did not provide for the 
guarantee of border security. The House reaction was, we want border 
security only, and the debate to this day between the House and the 
Senate has been the Senate is for comprehensive reform and the House is 
for border security only and never the twain will meet. The twain must 
meet. It is the No. 1 domestic issue.
  I come to the Senate today to introduce a major immigration reform 
bill that is the bridge from where we are to where we must go. For a 
moment, I will discuss the provisions of that proposal.
  First of all, it contains the trigger. It predicates any reform of 
immigration that grants legal status to someone here illegally to be 
noneffective until we have first closed the doors to the south and to 
the north. It provides for all the security measures the Senate passed 
last year--and they are 2,500 new port-of-entry inspectors, 14,000 
border inspectors, trained and ready to deploy, $454 million for 
unmanned aerial vehicles to give us the 24/7 eyes in the sky essential 
to enforcement on our border, authorization and ultimate appropriation 
for those barriers and those fences and those roads that are necessary 
for our agents to patrol, 20,000 beds for detention, to end the 
practice of cash and release.
  When I came to the Senate 2 years ago as a Georgian and one who loves 
the outdoors, I thought ``catch and release'' was a fishing term. I 
found out it became a border term, where we would catch people, tell 
them to go home, release them and they would wait for us to leave and 
come back again.
  We must remember the reason we have this problem is we have the 
greatest Nation on the face of this Earth. We do not find anyone trying 
to break out of the United States of America. They are all trying to 
break in and for a very special reason: The promise of hope, 
opportunity, and jobs. But we must make the right way to come to 
America be the legal way to come to America, not the ease of crossing 
our border in the dark of night under some other cover.
  Lastly, an integral part of border security is a verifiable program, 
where

[[Page S755]]

America's employers can be given a verifiable ID by someone who is here 
legally that verifies they are who they say they are. The biggest 
growth industry in the United States of America on our southwestern 
border is forged documents. We have a proliferation today of forged 
documents, where illegal aliens have legal-looking documents and we 
have a customs and immigration system that cannot tell an American 
farmer or an American employer that, in fact, the document they were 
shown is, in fact, right or wrong. That has to be fixed.
  Once those provisions are in, we have a secure border. Interestingly 
enough, it takes about the same amount of time to put in the barriers, 
get unmanned aerial vehicles in the air, train the border security and 
port-of-entry people as it takes to get the verifiable identification 
system in place. We know both will take about 24 months.
  When we have the trigger, it does not protract reform, but it 
precedes the implementation of what is going to take 24 months to do 
anyway. And all of a sudden we have a new paradigm in America. Those 
who want to come here realize the way to come is the legal way, not the 
illegal way. They learn there are consequences to coming illegally and 
employers know when they get an ID they can either swipe it on a 
computer or they can go up on the Internet and code to customs and 
immigration and find out that person is legal. The paradigm changes, 
and then the hope and opportunity of reforming legal immigration in 
this country can become a reality.
  I am not an obstructionist to doing it. In fact, if anything needs to 
be done, we need to reform the legal system because we almost promote, 
through the rigidity and difficulty of legal immigration, coming here 
illegally because we are looking the other way on the border. We have a 
historical precedent.
  In 1986, we reformed immigration with the Simpson Act. We granted 3 
million people amnesty, said we were going to secure the border and 
didn't. Today, we have 12 million because we did not secure that 
border. That can never happen again.
  Second, if the border is secure and we give people who are here 
illegally but are lawfully obeying the laws a chance to come forward, 
we can identify who is here who is not a problem.
  And you, also, leave open, for those who do not come forward whom you 
must concentrate on, to see to it they are not here for the wrong 
reasons and they go home. But you can never enforce the system 
internally before you first close the external opportunity to come 
through illegal immigration.
  Mr. President, in May 1903, Anders Isakson came through Ellis Island 
because of the potato famine in Scandinavia. In 1916, my father was 
born to him and his wife, Josephine. My father became a citizen of this 
country because he was born on our soil. In 1926, my grandfather became 
a naturalized citizen of the United States of America.
  In my home today, framed and hanging on the wall, are his 
naturalization certificates from 1926, when he raised his right arm and 
pledged his allegiance to the United States of America. There is no one 
who has greater respect and greater joy in the promise of this country 
and the opportunity of immigration. But we must begin restoring the 
respect for legal immigration and shutting the door on illegal 
immigration, or else those lines become blurred, and the stress we have 
on our social service system, civil justice system, public health 
system, and public education system that is stretched to the limit 
because of illegal aliens today will increase.
  We owe it to the history of our country and the greatness which makes 
us great to secure our borders, to honor legal immigration, and to move 
forward with a reform of illegal immigration that matches the economic 
needs of the United States of America.
  I stand on the Senate floor today committed to work with any Member 
of this Senate for comprehensive reform, as long as its cornerstone in 
its foundation is that we fix the problem on our borders, have it 
certified, and have that fix be the foundation for the modernization 
and reform of our immigration laws.
  Mr. President, I thank you for the time and yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Tennessee.
  Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I congratulate the Senator from 
Georgia. He has described something that for the last several months I 
have been calling the Isakson principle. I believe the Isakson 
principle is the basis for a comprehensive immigration bill that could 
attract 85 to 90 votes in the Senate and could, in a fairly short 
period of time, be reconciled with legislation passed by the House of 
Representatives.
  It would be a single piece of legislation that would work in two 
stages. It would first secure our border; and then, as the Senator from 
Georgia says, the trigger would come in, and we would get the rest of 
the job done. And the rest of the job includes defining who can work 
and who can study in the United States if they come from overseas. The 
rest of the job also includes helping prospective citizens, of which 
there are about a million a year today--people who are here legally--to 
help them learn English, to learn our history, and to learn our 
democratic traditions so we can be one country.
  There is a lot of talk this week about the borders of Iraq. I believe 
there are some more important borders in this world, at least to us 
Americans, and they are the borders around our own country. It is more 
important that we secure our borders at home than it is to secure the 
borders in Iraq.
  Last year, both the Senate and the House of Representatives passed an 
immigration bill. I voted no on the Senate immigration bill. I opposed 
the bill because I did not believe it did enough to secure our borders. 
It had some good proposals for border security, and it had a number of 
other excellent proposals, but it did not guarantee they would be 
funded. We all know that border security on paper means nothing. It 
requires boots on the ground. It requires jeeps on the roads and 
unmanned aerial vehicles in the air. It requires an employer 
verification system. And it requires adequate funding.
  So I voted no. But I said at the time I was ready to vote for, and 
wanted to vote for, a comprehensive bill, one that fixed the whole 
problem. And I suggested then, as did a number of others, that the 
basis for such a bill was the Isakson principle.
  Well, instead of getting a bill passed into law, it was a political 
year, and some Members of the House of Representatives, including some 
members of my own party, thought the wiser course was basically to run 
against the Senate bill that I voted against. Well, we now know how 
successful that turned out to be. That was not successful because the 
American people expect us to act like grownups, deal with big issues, 
and come to a conclusion.
  There is no issue upon which we in the Congress have more need to 
come to a conclusion on than the issue of immigration. It is our 
responsibility. We cannot kick it to the Governors. We cannot blame the 
mayor of Nashville. We cannot blame anybody in Iraq. It is our job in 
the Senate and the House of Representatives.
  We should begin to do our job. We should take it up within the next 
few weeks. We should base our bill on the Isakson principle. And we 
should not stop our work on the immigration bill until we are finished.
  The Isakson principle is the basis for success with immigration 
because of the so-called trigger. As the Senator from Georgia said, 
once we put into effect all of the things we need to do to secure the 
border, the trigger operates, and then we get to all the rest of the 
issues, some of which are hard to solve. But they are made much easier 
to solve once we and the American people are assured the border will be 
secured.
  It is outrageous for us in the Senate to preach about the rule of law 
to the rest of the world and ignore it here at home. The rule of law is 
one of the most important principles of our country. We should make no 
apology, not be embarrassed 1 minute for insisting upon it. Every new 
citizen knows that. They do not come to this country to become an 
American based upon their color or their ethnic background. They come 
because to be an American, you believe in a few principles which you 
must learn if you are going to become a citizen. Foremost among those 
is the rule of law.
  So we start with that. But that is not the only principle new 
citizens learn. There is the principle of laissez-faire--

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in other words, a strong economy. And immigrants help a strong economy, 
whether they are going to be Nobel Prize winners or whether they are 
going to be picking fruit in California.
  There is the principle of equal opportunity. There is the principle 
of e pluribus unum, engraved right up there above the Presiding 
Officer: How do we become one country? We learn our tradition. We learn 
a common language. We adhere to common principles, instead of color and 
background. And there is the tradition of the country that we are a 
nation of immigrants. By our failure to act, we are showing a lack of 
respect for the rule of law and a lack of respect for our tradition as 
a nation of immigrants.
  It is especially outrageous for us not to act when there is no one to 
blame but us. We cannot blame Syria for this one. We cannot blame the 
Iraqi Government. We cannot blame Iran. We cannot blame al-Qaida. It is 
us. It is our job. So, Mr. President, I am here today to commend the 
Senator from Georgia. Since last fall, he has had before us the basis 
for sound, comprehensive immigration legislation--all in one bill; two 
parts: secure our borders; and once that is done, then all the rest of 
it. I believe that would attract 85 or 90 votes. And I would suggest, 
respectfully, to my friend, the Democratic leader, and my friend, the 
Republican leader, that if we are looking for things to do that are 
important, that the American people expect us to act on, that we have 
already demonstrated we can work on together, that within a few weeks 
we take up the matter of immigration, we base it on the Isakson 
principle, and we do not stop until we finish the job.
                                 ______