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“IMMIGRATION CONTROL AND FINANCIAL RESPONSIBILITY ACT OF 1996” mentioning the U.S. Dept. of Justice was published in the Senate section on pages S3328-S3330 on April 15, 1996.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
IMMIGRATION CONTROL AND FINANCIAL RESPONSIBILITY ACT OF 1996
Mr. ABRAHAM. Mr. President, I rise tonight to make an opening statement with regard to the bill, S. 1664, on illegal immigration.
Let me begin by stating my support for this legislation. It is the product of much work in our Judiciary Committee and before that in the Immigration Subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee. And, in my judgment, although there are parts of the bill that I still hope to see us modify during the deliberations this week, it is an extraordinary piece of legislation which moves in the right direction, and it is in no small measure thanks to the Senator from Wyoming that we have this fine piece of legislation before us. His work both in the context of this legislation and over the past 17 years on immigration-related matters has been exceptional. It is a reflection of a Senator who is deeply committed to accomplishing a job that is difficult, and I commend him for it.
Mr. President, those who refuse to play by the rules who come here illegally become, as a result, a burden on our society, and it should not be tolerated. The illegal immigration is a betrayal of our long tradition of welcoming those who play by the rules. If the Federal Government did its job of keeping out, tracking down, and expelling illegal aliens, we would not have an immigration problem that confronts America today.
By definition, illegal immigrants are lawbreakers, and based on statistics, illegal immigrants are coming here at a very high rate. It is estimated at about 300,000 per year. Our bill to address illegal immigration, S. 1664, deals effectively and aggressively with the real problem of illegal immigration--reforms to our border patrols, our visa policies, criminal alien policies and rules concerning immigrant use of welfare.
First, with respect to border patrols, this bill begins in the obvious place, by fighting the problem of illegal immigration at the border. Our illegal immigration reform bill provides for the addition of 4,700 Border Patrol agents over the next 5 years, a 90 percent increase over the current level. It adds 300 new INS investigators for the next 3 years to investigate the smuggling and employment of illegal aliens, an increase of nearly 100 percent over current levels. These increases will help us address the fundamental, the basic problem of illegal immigration by providing the manpower necessary to address the problem of those who come to this country without proper documentation. That is only a start of how this bill attempts to reform the immigration laws as they pertain to illegal immigrants.
Another category of illegal aliens is those who overstay their visas, aliens who come here legally but then overstay. This bill addresses that problem and forcefully.
First, it establishes the first substantial penalties for visa overstays.
Second, it bars visa overstayers for even applying for a new visa for 5 years if they fail to appear for a deportation hearing. It also charges 300 INS investigators to seek out these aliens and to enforce the bill's rules.
It is important to keep in mind that contrary to some charges made over recent weeks, visa overstayers commonly are not individuals who come here on permanent family visas. Rather, the bulk of visa overstayers come to this country as tourists or students, then stay beyond the expiration of their visas.
Thus, it is wise and fitting that we should address those who break the law, those who overstay the visa, with sharp, stiff penalties rather than attempting to address this problem by changing in some ways the penalties for those who are playing by the rules either by reducing the number of immigrants who may come to this country or dealing with those who are in fact not creating the problem.
A third area which this bill addresses and which I have been very active in working on pertains to criminal aliens. By conservative estimates, almost half a million felons are living in this country illegally. These aliens have been convicted of murder, rape, drug trafficking, potentially such crimes as espionage, sabotage, treason and/or a number of other serious crimes and are therefore, under the current laws of our country, deportable.
Unfortunately, in the vast majority of cases, our officials cannot deport these criminals because of a breakdown in the deportation process. Principally, the problem relates to the interminable amount of appeals which deportable aliens who are criminals have at their disposal. As a consequence, many of these noncitizen lawbreakers end up back on our streets to prey on law-abiding American citizens.
In the original bill of the Senator from Wyoming, a number of needed provisions were contained. That bill originally directed the Attorney General to provide regulations permitting special inquiry officers to enter final orders of deportation stipulated to by the alien. It authorized Federal judges to order deportation as a condition of probation. And it made other similar efforts to address the criminal alien problem.
I am glad, however, that the Judiciary Committee saw fit to go even further and to add to and strengthen these provisions by adopting four amendments on which I worked with a number of other Senators on the committee to see adopted. These amendments would create expedited procedures for deporting criminal aliens. The provisions would first prohibit the Attorney General from releasing such criminal aliens from custody; second, end judicial review for orders of deportation entered against these criminal aliens while maintaining the right to administrative review.
In short, once the criminal alien had exhausted all appeals available under the criminal laws, the criminal alien would still have the full deportation administrative provisions to protect him, that is, a deportation hearing and the ability to appeal any order of deportation to the Board of Immigration Appeals, but that would end the process as opposed to triggering a return to the court system. That will be positive because it will mean the actual deportation of more criminal aliens and the freeing up of the court system from many of these frivolous lawsuits.
In addition, the criminal alien deportation procedures require the Attorney General to deport criminal aliens within 30 days of the conclusion of the alien's prison sentence.
What I believe this will lead to is the initiation of the deportation proceedings well in advance of the end of the sentence so that upon release the criminal aliens will be leaving the country.
Finally, our legislation permits State criminal courts to enter conclusive findings of fact during sentencing that an alien has been convicted of a deportable offense. In addition, the State courts, upon making those findings of fact, will be required to report them to the Attorney General so that criminal aliens who are convicted of deportable offenses in State courts would be known by the authorities, that is, the Department of Justice and the Attorney General, in such a fashion as to allow for the deportation proceedings to begin.
These reforms would not affect any of the aliens' due process protections on the underlying criminal offense. Aliens would still be entitled to the lengthy appellate and habeas corpus review, just like U.S. citizens. But abuses of the appeals process would stop there and not continue on through the deportation provisions themselves.
Mr. President, this makes sense. The fact is, if there are, as is currently estimated, a minimum of one-half million noncitizens who are people who have committed serious crimes in this country, to me it makes sense that the laws which allow those people to be deported ought to be enforced so those slots can be taken by law-abiding citizens who want to come to this country and make a positive contribution rather than come to the country and commit serious criminal violations. These provisions collectively will allow us to dramatically increase the number of criminal aliens who are deported. Most recent estimates suggest that current amount is nowhere higher than 4 to 6 percent of the criminal aliens who are deportable in this country. That means that somewhere over 90 percent of the criminal aliens who could be deported are not, primarily because of a lack of a process to make expeditious deportation feasible.
Our bill would change that. It would mean that criminal aliens would be leaving the country and, therefore, there would be more slots in this country for immigrants who want to make a contribution.
Another area which this bill addresses effectively, I think, are restrictions on welfare benefits available to noncitizens. The problem of immigrant welfare use is often overstated. According to the Urban Institute, nonrefugee, working-age immigrants are no more likely to use welfare than are native-born Americans. But I continue to believe we should concentrate on requiring that all immigrants be responsible for themselves, rather than become dependent on Government programs. To encourage responsibility, we first should concentrate on preventing illegal aliens, who undermine our laws by even being here, from receiving welfare benefits. In addition, we should prevent immigrants from collecting welfare payments until they have worked here and contributed taxes to our welfare system or until they become citizens.
Third, we should hold sponsors of legal immigrants financially liable for up to 10 years for welfare payments those they sponsor improperly receive. As you know, the sponsorship agreements that people sign in order to bring someone to this country are very, very infrequently upheld; very infrequently enforced. I think the legislation we have now will provide us with the tools to enforce such sponsorship agreements. It will attribute the sponsor's income to the immigrant sponsor for 5 years should the immigrant seek welfare payments. That will, on the one hand, dramatically reduce those eligible and, in addition, allow us to collect from the person who makes the original commitment of sponsorship.
Collectively, these provisions address, and address effectively, the illegal immigration problems which we currently confront. They do so without punishing law-abiding people and companies. However, there are certain parts of the legislation before us which I think go too far and place the focus, not on those who are breaking the rules, but rather too much on those who are playing by the rules.
First, in this respect, and most important, are the provisions in the legislation that pertain to what I believe will ultimately become a national ID system. The original bill included a national employee verification system. This mandatory system would have required all employers to verify with the Federal Government the work eligibility of every prospective employee. Because this system would be expensive and intrusive, riddled with mistakes and dangerous to our workers' ability to find work, the committee saw fit to strike that permanent system, which would have to have been in place within 8 years.
I brought a provision before the committee to simply strike all of this verification process. It failed on a 9-to-9 vote. What we are left with now is a provision for a pilot program. While it is a smaller program than that originally envisioned in the legislation, I continue to see problems with this provision because, although the bill does not overtly establish a national verification system that is mandatory, it heads us in that direction. And there are no brakes provided in the bill to keep it from that destination.
In this provision, the INS would be permitted to initiate large local or regional demonstration projects anywhere in the Nation. The language of the bill is vague here, but it leaves discretion to bureaucrats to decide whether the system will be mandatory or voluntary for employers. Also unclear is the size of the regional project that might be initiated, or regional projects that might be initiated. For example, such regions could encompass multiple States at one time.
It is also unclear what happens during a demonstration project when U.S. citizens cannot prove that they are eligible to work. It is likewise unclear about whether or not individual Americans will have to consult the Government when they seek to hire someone even to do such things as mow their own lawn. One thing is clear. The bill sets in place the infrastructure necessary for a mandatory national system and establishes the principle that companies should gain Government approval before hiring any employee.
I think this is headed in the wrong direction. People who want to break the rules will find ways to break the rules or get around the rules. That is happening today. But, if we move in the direction of a national employee verification system, whether it is the original mandatory nationwide program the legislation included or a pilot program which starts in place the infrastructure that leads to a national program, I think we are headed in the wrong direction. We will be penalizing those who play by the rules, both employers and employees of employers. Especially for those in small business, it will be a substantial increase in business overhead. For employees, native-born U.S. citizens, it could mean huge hardship if the database of such a system is in any way inaccurate.
Just to put that in perspective, a mere 1 percent error margin in the database could, on an annual basis, affect 600,000 employment decisions in this country. To put that in perspective, that means twice the number of total illegal aliens that come into this country each year. I do not believe that is the way we should proceed, and, therefore, during consideration of this bill, I will be offering an amendment with Senators Feingold and DeWine to strike provisions for this overly intrusive infringement that is signified by the pilot program.
This amendment, striking the verification provision, is supported by a significant number of groups concerned with the rights of workers and employers from the National Federation of Independent Businesses and the National Retail Association to the U.S. Catholic Conference to the Small Business Survival Committee. I look forward to working with my colleagues on specifics, but the debate we should be having here is, How do we reduce illegal immigration?
I believe the proper place to start is by focusing on those who are lawbreakers, whether they are employees or employers, whether they are those who come over the border without documents or those who overstay their visas or if they are a criminal alien. I think it is important for us to take a very simple philosophical approach to deal with these problems.
For those who are yearning to be free, who are willing to play by the rules and wait their turn, for them we should throw open the door to the land of liberty, which has been available as long as this country has existed. On the other hand, for those who flout our laws, they should find that Lady Liberty has turned her back on them, that she will not rise up to aid those who trample on the law on which liberty is built.
Though Lady Liberty yearns to aid the righteous, those willing to work hard and to build a better life for themselves and their families, she does not allow people to come to this country simply to take advantage of the laws and of the citizens here.
Those who prize both law and liberty, those who would be Americans are those we should protect with any legislation that we should address in this context.
Mr. President, as virtually every Member of the Senate, I have a heritage that began in another part of the world. In my case, it was my grandparents who came here approximately a century ago. They did not come to this country in search of welfare payments. They did not come to this country for any ulterior motives. They came here because they wanted to live in a country that was free. They wanted their children and their grandchildren to know what it was like to be born in a nation that was free, and they made a positive contribution, both in what they did and in bringing up strong families who have made their own contributions.
Last fall, I had the opportunity for the first time to go to Ellis Island in New York where my grandparents made their first visit to these shores. I was struck as I went there and as I looked through the history of Ellis Island of what it meant and what it still means. I believe as we address immigration issues, we should never lose sight of what Ellis Island and the various other points of disembarkation have meant to those who truly wanted to come to this country to enjoy all that America offers--the American dream.
Legal immigration is the American way. It strengthens us economically, culturally, and spiritually, because by letting in those who come here playing by the rules and seeking to build a better life for their families, we welcome true Americans and live up to our own ideals. Indeed, an overwhelming percentage of people in our country have made it clear that they think we should address illegal immigration problems long before we consider changes in the legal immigration laws of this country, and indeed, Mr. President, as I will say at a later point in these debates, it is clear to me that these are very separate issues and, as a threshold matter, we have done the right thing in the Judiciary Committee, as the House did the right thing, in separating legal and illegal immigration.
Cutting legal immigration precipitously could backfire and cause more people to come here illegally. So for those reasons, I strongly support the illegal immigration bill that is before us and believe it should be considered on its own merits as a freestanding piece of legislation. Indeed, that is the position that two-thirds of the members of the Judiciary Committee took when we began this debate a few weeks ago.
I am convinced that we must concentrate on the real problem facing our country from immigration--lawbreakers--and we should not allow any fear of immigrants to distract us from the task of keeping the illegal immigrants out of the country.
Mr. President, after we conclude that and once S. 1664 has been disposed of, then it would be appropriate to consider changes that we might wish to make in the laws pertaining to legal immigration. But it is my sincere hope and certainly will be my effort here on the floor to maintain the separation that we achieved in the Judiciary Committee and that was achieved in the House of Representatives.
I think that we will make a major step forward if we pass S. 1664, hopefully with certain modifications. I think we would make a big mistake if we backtrack and begin to try and confuse and merge issues that I do not believe are appropriately linked together.
I look forward in the days ahead to working hard on the floor, as we did in the Judiciary Committee, to make sure our country moves aggressively and forcefully to address the problems of illegal immigration.
I strongly commend Senator Simpson and all the members of the subcommittee who worked hard to bring us to this point.
Mr. President, I yield the floor.
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