[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 151 (2005), Part 17]
[House]
[Page 23611]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                PASSPORTS ARE A NATIONAL SECURITY ISSUE

  (Mr. POE asked and was given permission to address the House for 1 
minute.)
  Mr. POE. Mr. Speaker, every day thousands of packages travel 
throughout the world. United Parcel Service ships and tracks packages 
from places far and wide, and these packages are kept up with a simple 
bar code. These packages are scanned at every stop they make when they 
enter or leave a building, or, when they are loaded on to trucks, ships 
or planes, they are scanned.
  From when a package leaves its destination, let us say in 
Tegucigalpa, Honduras, until its ends up here in its final destination 
in Washington, DC, it is scanned at least 10 times and tracked with 
almost up-to-the-minute data on where it has been and where it is 
going.
  Mr. Speaker, millions of people cross our borders every day. We do 
not even record who enters our Nation. A border agent at a port of 
entry in south Texas just looks into the vehicle and may or may not 
examine papers, and waves the passengers in. We must require the 
machine-readable bar code passports to enter the United States. It will 
add no measurable amount of time.
  We take the time to record letters and packages; now we must start 
recording foreign citizens who enter the United States. It is an issue 
of our national security.

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