[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 152 (2006), Part 16]
[Senate]
[Pages 21515-21517]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                             BORDER FENCING

  Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I want to make a few comments on the 
vote we had earlier tonight, 80 to 19, on a bill on border fencing 
along our southern border, where 1.1 million people were apprehended 
last year crossing that border. We have had a few comments, pro and con 
today, but there hasn't been a lot of debate. It represents the fourth 
time we voted on this issue. So we know pretty much what the debate is. 
I saw no reason to delay our departure tonight. Other matters are being 
settled as I speak now. I think it is appropriate to take a few moments 
to comment on it.
  No. 1, of course, the fence is not the answer. There is no one answer 
to reestablishing a legal system of immigration in America, but that 
must be our goal. If we aspire to be a great nation, a lawful nation, 
it is absolutely critical that we have a legal system of immigration. 
We should not reward those

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 who come illegally, but we should be generous to those who choose to 
come legally and comply with our rules.
  We are a Nation of immigrants. We will remain a Nation of immigrants. 
We will continue to allow people to come to our country.
  I want to say that no one thinks that building barriers at the border 
is going to solve, by itself, our immigration problem. But it is an 
important step. If we have to take 10 steps to cross the goal line, 
this is probably two of the steps necessary to get there. There is no 
need to delay. We need to get started. It takes some time to accomplish 
it. Fences multiply the ability of our Border Patrol agents to be 
successful. We have seen that on the San Diego border. We have seen 
just how well it has helped bring down crime, how well the property 
values have surged on both sides of the border--an area that was 
lawless, crime ridden, and drug infested is moving forward with 
commercial development in a healthy way. That is just the way it is. 
There is not anything wrong, hateful, or mean-spirited to say that we 
integrated a lawful border system in America. The American people 
understand that.
  Indeed, I say to my colleagues that the American people have 
understood fundamentally and correctly the immigration question for 40 
years. They have asked Congress and they have repeatedly asked 
Presidents to make sure we have a legal system of immigration. But that 
has not been accomplished. We have not responded to those requests.
  Now we have reached an extraordinary point in our history where we 
have over a million people apprehended annually coming in illegally, 
and probably, according to many experts, just as many getting by who 
are not apprehended. So it is time for us to confront and fix this 
problem.
  Another critical step in enforcement--absolutely critical--and it is 
one that we can accomplish with far more ease than a lot of people 
think, is to create a lawful system at the workplace. It is not 
difficult, once we set up the effective rules, to send a message to all 
American businesses that they need a certain kind of identification to 
hire someone who has come into our country. If they don't have this 
legal document, they are not entitled to be hired. This will work. Most 
businesses will comply immediately when they are told precisely what is 
expected of them. But that has not been the case. They have not been 
told what is expected of them. They, in fact, have been told if they 
ask too many questions of job applicants, they can be in violation of 
the applicant's civil rights. So lawyers tell them don't ask too many 
questions.
  Then you complain that they have hired illegals, and they say: They 
gave me this document, and I didn't feel like I could inquire behind 
it.
  So it can work. If we tell our business community what is reasonably 
expected of them, they will comply with it. That will represent a major 
leap forward in enforcement. Then we have to ask ourselves what do we 
do about people who only want to come here to work, and we need their 
labor? I believe we can do as Canada and many other developed nations 
have done--create a genuine temporary worker program, a genuine 
program.
  The Senate bill passed in this body that had a section called 
temporary guestworker. But there was nothing temporary about them. They 
could come for 3 years and bring their families and their minor 
children, bring their wives, stay for 3 years, and then extend for 3 
years, and then do it again. After 6 years or 7 years, I believe, they 
could apply for permanent resident status, apply for a green card. Then 
a few years after that, they become a citizen. How temporary is that?
  What Canada says is you can come and work for 8 months. A television 
show interviewed some people in Canada, and they said: I may stay 4 
months or 6 months. They may come and go in the interim many times 
because they have an identifying card that allows them to come and go 
for a specified period of time. That could allow us to have the surge 
in seasonal labor that we need in agriculture and in some other areas. 
But the agricultural community and other areas that say they need 
temporary labor have to understand that they do not get to unilaterally 
set the Nation's immigration policy just so they can have the 
immigration level, the work level, they need. They don't have that 
right. They are not speaking for the national interest.
  This Senate speaks for the national interest. We must set the policy. 
Yes, we have a large number of people who are here illegally. How many 
of those would want to stay permanently? I don't know. I know a number 
of them would. So I think we will reach the point--hopefully, we can do 
this next year--where we confront as a Congress that dilemma.
  I say to my colleagues as a person who was a Federal prosecutor for 
many years, do not ever think that you can just grant amnesty to 
someone who violated the law and that will not have a corrosive effect 
on respect for law in our country. Granting an amnesty is a very 
serious thing. It is not something you can just do because you just 
feel like it, or you feel that is the right thing to do. We must think 
that through.
  My personal view is that for people who have been here a long time 
and had a good record and have done well but came illegally, we ought 
to be able to figure out a way that they can stay here and live here. 
They should not be given every single benefit that we give American 
citizens, or people who come here legally; otherwise, what is the 
difference whether you came legally or illegally? Do you see the moral 
point here. You simply cannot do that and think it has no consequences 
on the rule of law. So we can reach an agreement on that. It is within 
our grasp, I suggest, to deal with that most difficult problem of how 
to deal with people who come to our country illegally.
  Finally, the Nation's fundamental approach to immigration is fatally 
flawed. It makes no sense. It has been wrong for many years. Today, 
only 20 percent of the people who come into our country come in on any 
merit-based program. Most come in on relationships with someone already 
here. Many have come illegally and they obtained amnesty in the past. 
They look to do that again.
  There are many other ways that people come here. But a very small 
percentage of the people who come to our country today come here as a 
result of having met certain qualifications that relate to education or 
job skills. That is not the right approach.
  I have looked and met with the top Canadian officials. I met with and 
talked with top officials of the Australian Government to talk about 
their program. Both of those programs, and also New Zealand and the 
United Kingdom, to a lesser degree, France, and other countries are 
moving to what they call a point system. This is a system by which 
applicants are evaluated on what they bring to the nation. It is 
founded on a simple concept that those nations have decided is 
important to them.
  The concept is this: Immigration should serve the national interest. 
How simple is that? In my committee of Health, Education, Labor, and 
Pensions, and in my Committee on the Judiciary, we have had a few 
hearings on this at my request in both cases. Very few Senators 
attended, frankly.
  Repeatedly the witnesses would say: The first question you people in 
the United States, you policymakers need to decide is: Is the 
immigration policy you wish to establish one that furthers the national 
interest? If you want to further the national interest, then I can give 
you good advice. If your goal is to help poor people all over the world 
and to take the national welfare approach, then we can tell you how to 
do that. You have to decide what your best goals are. If your goal is 
simply to allow everyone who is a part of a family, even distant 
relatives, to come, if that is your No. 1 goal, we can create a system 
that does that. But fundamentally they tell us, when pressed, that an 
immigration system should serve the national interest.
  Professor Borjas at Harvard wrote a book, probably the most 
authoritative book on immigration that has been written. The name of it 
is ``Heaven's

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Door.'' He testified at our committee hearing. He made reference to the 
fact that we have within our immigration system a lottery. This lottery 
lets 50,000 people apply to come to our country from various countries 
all over the world. We draw 50,000 names out, and they get to come into 
the country, not on merit but just pure random choice.
  It makes sense under the idea when it was originally created, which 
was we needed more diversity, we needed people from different 
countries, and this would give people from different countries a chance 
to apply.
  Professor Borjas at the Kennedy School at Harvard, himself a Cuban 
refugee, came here at age 12, said 5 million people apply to be in that 
lot from which we would choose 50,000--5 million. So if we have 5 
million applicants, I ask my colleagues, and we are attempting to serve 
the national interest, how would we choose from that 5 million if we 
could only select and allow in 50,000? How would we choose if we are 
serving the national interest?
  I submit we would do what Canada does. We would say: Do you already 
speak English? How well? Do you have education? How much? Do you have 
job skills? Are they skills that we need in Canada? How old are you? 
Canada--I think Australia also--believes that the national interest is 
served by having younger people come because they will work longer and 
they will pay more taxes before they go on to the Medicare and health 
care systems in their older age.
  Are those evil concepts? Isn't it true that we would want to have 
people come into our country who have the best chance to succeed? Or do 
we believe the purpose of immigration is simply to allow certain 
businesses that use a lot of low-skilled labor to have all the low-
skilled labor they choose to have? A willing employer and a willing 
worker.
  Professor Borjas says there are millions and millions of people all 
over the world who would be delighted to come here for $7 an hour, 
would love to and would come immediately if they could.
  I was in South America recently. They had a poll in Nicaragua that 
said 60 percent of the people in Nicaragua said they would come to the 
United States if they could. I heard there was one in Peru where 70 
percent of the people said they would come here if they could. What 
about all the other countries, many of them poorer? Many of them would 
have an even greater economic advantage to come to America than those 
people coming from Peru.
  Obviously, more people desire to come than can come.
  They would ask: I am sure you guys have talked about this as you 
dealt with comprehensive immigration reform; what did you all decide?
  My colleagues, we never discuss this issue. We simply expand the 
existing program that this Government has that has failed and only 20 
percent are given preference. We did add a program to give a certain 
number of higher educated people the right to come, but our 
calculations indicate that still only about 20 percent of the people 
who will be coming under the bill we passed will come on under a merit-
based system. Canada has over 60 percent come based on merit. New 
Zealand I think is even higher than that.
  What we want to do, of course, is select people who have a chance to 
be productive, who are going to be successful, who can benefit from the 
American dream. It is so within our grasp. I actually have come to 
believe and am excited about the concept that we actually could do 
comprehensive reform. We can fix our borders. We absolutely can. We 
have already made progress. We are reaching a point where we could 
create a lawful system at our borders.
  In addition to that, we can confront the very tough choices about how 
to deal with people who are here illegally. And finally, we need to 
develop a system for the future flow of immigrants into America.
  I believe the columnist Charles Krauthammer said we should do like 
the National Football League does. We ought to look around the world at 
the millions of people who would like to come to the United States and 
pick the very best draft choices we can pick, pick the ones who will 
help America be a winning team. It will allow people to come into this 
country who are most likely to be successful, who speak our language, 
who want to be a part of this Nation and contribute to it, who have 
proven capabilities that means they can take jobs and be successful at 
them and can assimilate themselves easily into the structure of our 
Government.
  It is exciting to think that possibility is out there. Yes, we have 
been talking about the fence and, yes, the fence can be seen as sort of 
a grim enforcement question, but it is one part of the overall effort 
that we are participating in at this point to create a new system of 
immigration, comprehensively different than we have ever had before, 
one that serves our national interest, one that selects the people who 
want to come here based on their ability to succeed in our country and 
be successful and be harmonious and be able to take advantage of the 
great opportunities this Nation provides.
  It is so exciting to me, but we are going to have to let go of the 
bill that got through this Senate and that the House of Representatives 
would not even look at. The bill was nothing more than a rehash of 
current law, plus amnesty. It was a very, very, very bad piece of 
legislation. A lot of people voted against it, but it passed in this 
body. The House would not talk about it.
  If we would take our blinders off and if we would go back and think 
clearly about how our Nation should do immigration and talk to one 
another, I believe we can make more progress than people realize, and 
the American people could be proud of our system.
  I asked the people in Canada, and I asked the people in Australia: 
How do people feel about this? Are they happy with it? Yes, they are 
proud of it.
  I said: What do you think about us talking about your program?
  They said: We are proud you are looking at our program. We think it 
works. It is a compliment to us that you think there may be some value 
in it.
  I don't know why we never talked about that. We never had a single 
hearing in which the Canadians or Australians were asked to testify. 
These are countries that believe in the rule of law. Both of them say 
they have a high degree of enforcement. Yes, there are people who abuse 
the law, but they have a legal system and it works.
  Canada has workers who come and work for 8 months, and they go back 
home to their families. They can work 6 months; they can work 4 months. 
That is a temporary guest worker program. Then they have an asylum 
program where they take a certain number of people, like we have always 
done, who have been persecuted and oppressed. We will continue to do 
that. That is not a merit-based system. That is a system where we do it 
for humanitarian reasons.
  Fundamentally, the principle of our Nation, as we develop a new 
immigration policy, should be to serve our national interests. I 
believe we have that within our grasp.
  This step of building border barriers is important for two reasons: 
One, it is critical to creating a lawful system. No. 2, it is critical 
to establishing credibility with the American people because they 
rightly doubt our commitment, based on history, to do the right thing 
about immigration. They doubt that we are committed to doing the right 
thing. This is a good step to show them that we are, and then I think 
as we talk about some of these more difficult issues, we can have some 
credibility with our people when we ask them to make some tough 
decisions about how to handle immigration in the future.
  Mr. President, I thank you for the opportunity to share these 
thoughts.

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