[Congressional Record Volume 155, Number 35 (Friday, February 27, 2009)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2581-S2582]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                                E-VERIFY

  Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, we have had a number of discussions in 
recent days about the E-Verify system that allows employers to do a 
quick computer check of an individual's Social Security number to 
validate whether it is a legitimate number before hiring them, an 
action that would help them avoid hiring people in the country 
illegally.
  The discussion has been whether to extend that program which is 
currently set to expire in March. I offered an amendment to do that, an 
amendment similar to the one that passed in the House last year, 407 to 
2, that would extend the E-Verify program for 4 years. There are 
100,000 American businesses using it every day, and 1,000 to 2,000 new 
businesses a week are signing up voluntarily--just voluntarily because 
it protects them.
  They want to follow the law, as most of our businesses do. When they 
go through this process, if someone were to say: You deliberately hired 
someone illegally in the country, they could say: Well, we checked it 
out on the system and they showed up to be legitimate and we felt 
legitimate in hiring them. So it protects them and helps them follow 
the law.
  But for some reason there has been a resistance here. It passed the 
House. It was in the House stimulus bill, that $800 billion stimulus 
bill. It also provided, in the House legislation which was accepted and 
the majority of the House Members all voted for it on final passage, 
that everybody who gets a contract from the U.S. Government as part of 
this stimulus package must use E-Verify. In other words, it was 
designed to create and protect jobs for lawful Americans. The 
amendment, which was unanimously accepted in committee, said that 
beneficiaries of stimulus money must use the E-Verify system, and that 
E-Verify system would help ensure that only legal people would be 
hired. They could be green card holders; they could be legal workers; 
they did not have to be citizens. But they at least ought to be in the 
country legally. And this Senate systematically refused to allow us to 
have a vote on that amendment, so it was not in the Senate bill.
  I asked three or four times to be able to have a vote on that 
amendment and was rejected. When they went to conference, sure enough, 
as I suspected, as I stated on the floor, the Senate version won. Our 
bill, which did not have this language in it, prevailed. They took the 
House language out at conference without any deliberation. This was a 
common sense amendment, and I think it would have passed overwhelmingly 
in this Senate had we been allowed to have a vote.
  So this has caused me great concern. A lot of us have believed 
President Bush and his administration failed to aggressively enforce 
the law to ensure that jobs are going to American workers and not those 
in the country illegally. And I criticized him for that.
  But it does appear this administration and this new Congress may be 
even more determined to not enforce the law. In fact, it appears they 
may be indeed taking steps to undermine some of the programs that 
President Bush and the ICE Agency and the Homeland Security Department 
have been taking that were at least making progress toward creating a 
system of lawful immigration that we can be proud of.
  We are a nation of immigrants. Nobody wants to end immigration in 
America. Over 1 million people can enter our country lawfully each year 
and become citizens and contribute to our country in many positive 
ways. But since so many people would like to come to our country, and 
we recognize we have to have a certain limit on the number who come, we 
have a legal system that requires them to make application, and by 
various standards they are approved or disapproved in their 
application. Those who are approved get to come to America, and those 
who do not have to wait until maybe later or maybe they, for one reason 
or another, are permanently unable to come. Maybe they have a criminal 
record or have other problems that would make them unacceptable for 
admission. No one has a constitutional right to come to America. We 
cannot have and do not have and should not have an open borders policy 
so that everybody who would like to come and work, can come and work.
  So this is the situation we are in. In light of that, I was 
particularly troubled, I have to say, and all Americans should be 
troubled by a recent headline article in the Washington Times this 
week. It was about certain activist immigration rights groups 
criticizing the Obama administration because some of the agents in the 
Immigration Enforcement Division had raided an engine machine shop in 
Washington State and actually went so far as to detain certain illegal 
immigrants. They are not happy they actually went into a business and 
detained some individuals who

[[Page S2582]]

were in the country illegally, and they complained about that. So, 
apparently, according to the article, the Obama administration itself 
seemed ``taken aback by the raid by the United States Immigration and 
Customs Enforcement Agency.'' The new Secretary, Janet Napolitano, was 
``vowing to Congress that she would get to the bottom of it.''
  The article goes on to say that an official with the agency said, 
``The Secretary is not happy about it.''
  Well, that is troubling to me. In 2008, under the Bush 
administration, which was not, I think, particularly aggressive--as a 
matter of fact, not aggressive enough, ICE made 5,173 administrative 
arrests at work sites. Additionally, ICE made 1,101 criminal arrests in 
connection with worksite investigations. Those arrest represented 
criminal activity, gangs or drugs or other kinds of criminal activity. 
They were doing that, and periodic enforcement actions were taken 
because a company does not have a right to have hundreds and hundreds 
of illegal workers who perhaps certainly are working for less money 
than Americans would work for.
  That is not good and creates unfair competition and undermines our 
lawful immigration system. But this worried me even more. According to 
the Washington Times article, immigrant rights groups said they had 
discussed this with the administration some time during the last 
election. They did not discuss it publicly, but they apparently had 
discussions with the campaign, and they said this:

       This was a fixture of our conversations and demands with 
     him during the campaign. It has always been one that there 
     would be a hold on the raids or a stop to the raids.

  The National Council of La Raza has urged supporters to call the 
White House and demand that Mr. Obama lay out his immigration policy. 
In criticizing this, they said:

       What are Latino and immigrant voters to think? They turn 
     out in massive numbers and vote for change and yet the change 
     we can believe in turns out to be business as usual.

  Well, I think maybe the American people need to make some demands on 
this administration. Maybe that is the way you get things done; you 
make demands on the administration that they actually enforce the law 
and that they do not conduct investigations of the law enforcement 
personnel who were doing what the law required and who were, by all 
accounts, legitimately identifying illegal workers in America.
  So now, according to this article, the Secretary of Homeland Security 
is investigating our law enforcement officers for simply doing their 
duty in response to some secret demand and agreement they made back in 
the campaign to undermine law enforcement in America. I do not think it 
is good.
  This is why people are upset with Washington and upset with Congress. 
I believe in lawful immigration. I think we need to stop all of this. 
But what do we do? Nothing. Whenever something starts happening and has 
some possibility of being successful, well, politicians intervene and 
stop the law enforcement officers from doing their duty.
  I am really concerned about it. The Immigration and Customs 
Enforcement Agency says in their statement about the operation that 
they were investigating criminal activity, and they apparently 
discovered in the course of that the hiring records revealed a 
significant number of people were using bogus Social Security numbers 
and counterfeit identity documents. That is why they did their jobs. 
They went and checked it out and found 28 people at this company who 
were not here lawfully.
  So now the Secretary of Homeland Security has promised to get to the 
bottom of it--not to the bottom of why this company was hiring 28 
illegal workers, not asking whether this company ever used the E-Verify 
system, they are going to get to the bottom of why the law enforcement 
officers of the U.S. Government, paid for by the taxpayers, had the 
temerity to actually go out and investigate criminal activity and 
detain people in the country illegally.
  So I have to tell you, this is not going to fly. We are not going to 
go quietly about this issue. We need a vote in the Senate, and we need 
one soon to extend E-Verify. It is unthinkable that this highly 
successful, proven system that over 100,000 businesses voluntarily are 
using would be allowed to expire.
  The only reason it would be allowed to expire would be we do not want 
the laws enforced. And, by the way, E-Verify does not raid any 
businesses. E-Verify does not call for a single investigator, not a 
single detention facility. All it says is the business owner could 
check and not hire someone if they did not have good documents. That is 
all. They do not arrest them. They do not call the police. Nothing 
happens. You just eliminate the jobs magnet, as the Border Patrol 
people tell us, that is causing people to come to our country illegally 
to get jobs, and that magnet is a factor. E-Verify would diminish that.
  I wished to share those thoughts. I believe this is a troubling 
event. We need to consider it and not go down this path. It signals a 
further erosion of the efforts to bring a lawful system to this 
unlawful system we have today.
  The Secretary does deserve credit for one statement she made, that 
businesses do need to be held accountable for exploiting the illegal 
labor market. I thought that was a good statement. She went on to state 
that there is an impact of illegal workers in the country and ``that 
has impacts on American workers, and it has impacts on wage levels, 
often has undue impacts on illegal workers themselves.''
  This is also true. There are costs to the American worker in terms of 
wages, the ability to get a job, when we allow huge numbers of illegal 
workers into the country.
  I hope our colleagues will consider this issue. The American people 
have a different view than some about the need to enforce our laws. The 
American people would like to see that, before we start talking about 
amnesty and a lot of other things. If we are not going to enforce the 
law, why should we go forward with some of these expansive programs 
that have been proposed to allow persons who only recently broke into 
the country to be placed on legal status? The American people are not 
naive about this. They want something done, and they have a right to 
expect it. We in Congress have to figure out a way to be responsive to 
their demands and not focus only on the demands of special interests, 
certain big businesses, and certain activist groups, but to focus on 
legitimate demands of the public for good public policy. Good public 
policy requires the end of the illegality in immigration and the 
establishment of a lawful system of immigration that honors our great 
heritage of immigration of which we have always been proud.
  I yield the floor.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Delaware.

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