[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
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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.
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