Xavier Becerra

Mr. BECERRA

Mr. BECERRA. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding time to me. Mr. Chairman, we are in a situation where we just finished a day and a half worth of debate, where we were talking about eliminating about 300,000 visas for U.S. citizens to be able to bring in their family members, their parents, their children, their brothers, their sisters. Now we are dealing with an amendment that says, ``Let us bring in 250,000 imported foreign workers to do work in our fields.'' Mr. Chairman, probably the worst part about this amendment is the following: In 1992, the rural unemployment rate in the United States was 11 percent. It was even higher for young people working in rural areas. It was close to 19 percent. A substantial number of those that are employed in rural areas, about 40 percent, earned wages below the poverty threshold for a family of four. Real wages for rural workers have declined between 1979 and 1992 by over $1 an hour. The rural unemployment rate is even more pronounced in those areas and in those counties with high concentrations of migrant and seasonal agricultural workers, the same kind of people that we want to import from other countries. Even during the peak months of agricultural labor demand, we still see very high rates of unemployment. During July 1995, which is a very high, peak time of year for agricultural work, in California, in 19 of the biggest counties of California dealing with agriculture, 17 of those 19 counties had double-digit unemployment rates. Only two of those counties did not have unemployment rates in the rural areas below 10 percent. One county had an unemployment rate exceeding 32 percent. Yet, most of these folks that we are talking about importing in to do agricultural work would go into those areas of California with these high rates of unemployment. Mr. Chairman, one other very disturbing aspect of the Pombo amendment. It would dispense with any requirement that the Government verify that growers are in fact experiencing labor shortages, and that the growers have made a good-faith effort to recruit domestic American workers. This amendment would simply ask that growers self-attest that they made efforts to recruit locally, without any independent verification. This amendment should be defeated.

Mr. BECERRA. Mr. Chairman, I have a parliamentary inquiry.

Mr. BECERRA. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding me time. Mr. Chairman, let me make sure I make this as clear as I can: Section 245(i) within the Immigration and Naturalization Act, which this amendment by the gentleman from California [Mr. Rohrabacher] would repeal, does not permit anyone to gain lawful permanent residence who would otherwise be disqualified. So if you are someone who crossed over our border without documents, you cannot qualify for adjustment to status to be a permanent resident. This only applies in the cases where people would otherwise qualify. You cannot be eligible for this program unless you meet the criteria. What this particular provision in the code currently does is it just takes away the fiction of having someone fly back home just to submit an application to the U.S. consulate office in that country of origin and then come back here, because the person will be entitled to come back. These are people who will be entitled to gain lawful permanent resident status. Let me give you a quick example. If an engineer is working on a project that terminates prematurely, and this person cannot line up new employment immediately and fill out all the immigration paperwork quickly enough, the engineer would need to make a planned trip back home to the country of origin to get the green card that he or she is entitled to get. That would disrupt work, school, other things in lining up the new employment, but the person would ultimately qualify. What 245(i) was meant to do within the act was to take care of this situation. We charge these particular individuals much higher sum to apply for permanent residency status. The reason we do that is we say to them rather than pay for the airline ticket to go back and submit paperwork to the consulate office, which is already overworked, give the money directly to the INS and let them use it immediately. That is one of the reasons why we got close to $100 million last year to do work for the INS, for border enforcement activities, for filling out paperwork for those naturalizing, and also helping people become U.S. citizens who are lawful permanent residents and have the right to be here. This is a good provision in the law. It does not allow those who are crossing illegally to come in. This is not a good amendment. Defeat the amendment.

Mr. BECERRA. Mr. Chairman, I support the efforts of the Chrysler amendment to try to have a reasoned debate on legal immigration separate from the very impassioned debate on illegal immigration. I would urge Members to support that particular amendment. Let me say that the whole issue here is about family-based immigration. That is all we are talking about here. In order for someone to be able to come into this country under the provisions being debated, you must have an American petition to have that particular individual come to the country. This issue of chain migration is a false one. By the time you have someone come into this country, it usually takes 12 to 13 years before that individual can then petition to have anyone who is an immediate relative--not a distant relative-- come into this country. So this issue of chain migration is really a quarter century long before you see any additional relatives possibly having the chance to come in, if even that soon. There is no chain migration. What we do have though, if we continue to go this course with H.R. 2202, is a lack of family-based immigration, where brothers, sisters, children, and parents will not have an opportunity to join their U.S. citizen relatives. Mr. Chairman, I urge a ``yes'' vote on this particular amendment.

Mr. BECERRA

Mr. BECERRA. I yield to the gentleman from Iowa.

Mr. BECERRA. Mr. Chairman, the problem some of us have with the amendment, though, is it goes beyond what the gentleman just spent several minutes discussing, and that is the ability to go in there and detain and arrest someone who they know has committed wrongful activity, but actually allows now for law enforcement, local law enforcement, to seek out. Now, my concern is how do we seek out someone who we believe might be an undocumented immigrant? How is a local law enforcement agency, do they have the information, unless they have been fully advised by the Immigration Service that they are doing some of these things?

Mr. BECERRA. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding the time to me. Mr. Chairman, this is an amendment that we must pass, because if we do not, we set in motion some omnious measures that will not only affect our privacy, but our job security. Let me first say that we have to remember that there are 66 million job transactions that occur in this country every single year. In other words, someone is either hired or somebody changes jobs and gets a new job 66 million times every year in this country. Are there errors that occur in the systems that we have in place with the Social Security Administration and with the INS' own data base? I must answer the chairman's, the gentleman from Texas [Mr. Smith], own statement that there are no errors and say, Mr. Chairman, there are. We know it. The Social Security Administration itself has said that they cannot guarantee anything better than probably a 20-percent error rate in the first couple of years. And they are hoping they are lucky enough get it down to a 5-percent error rate in providing information. Why? Because the Social Security number was never meant to be an identifying number, but that is what we are using it for. The INS admits that in its own worker verification pilot programs 9 percent of the time the people that they say were authorized to work were, in fact, not authorized to work. In addition, in the INS's own pilot program, they tell us that 28 percent of the time they could not give the accurate information or information whatsoever to be able to make a hiring decision, and they had to go through a second, more complicated, more consuming step. Then we have the whole issue of, well, verification is going to be. OK. The gentleman from Massachusetts, [Mr. Frank] is arguing that this is not going to harm anyone. Well, let me tell my colleagues something. If it is not going to harm anyone, what would be the harm of leaving in, as the gentleman from Michigan [Mr. Conyers], said, the tester program that allows us to send a decoy in who acts like a prospective applicant for the job and check to see that employers are abiding by the law? No, that was taken out of the bill even though in committee, with the chairman's support, it was put in. In the dead of night, behind closed doors, it was taken out. Mr. Chairman, this is something my colleagues better be concerned about because it leads us along the lines of big brother telling us, ``Show me your ID before not only I give you a job, but anything else in this country.'' Vote for the Chabot amendment. Vote against any worker identification program.

Mr. BECERRA. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding me time. Mr. Chairman, to my good friend from California I would say again, I know we have talked about these issues many times, and I know he is very sincere and has legitimate concerns. But I must go along with what my colleague from California [Mr. Campbell] said earlier, and again reiterate: There is a Constitution in this country, and thank God for it, because over the years we have found that it has held us in good stead. As much as there is a concern in having someone as an adult who is not legally in this country going in to receive a benefit for a child who is a U.S. citizen, I must say to you that ultimately the Constitution says if you have a citizen, there is an entitlement to a particular benefit, a particular protection, and we should not start attacking the Constitution. If we are going to attack the Constitution, let us remember why we are attacking it. In this case we are attacking it because we are attacking children. In this Congress, when we get to the stage where we are going after kids and penalizing them for the sins of adults, I believe that we have not only sinned against the Constitution, but, quite honestly, we have forgotten what our task is as Members representing this country. 1345

Mr. BECERRA. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 30 seconds. Just for the purposes of edification for the Members here, let me read another paragraph from the letter from Secretary Shalala: Under current law as well as under H.R. 2202, the only Federal public health benefits and services for which undocumented immigrants are eligible are emergency medical services, immunizations, and testing for communicable diseases. These exceptions are made to provide immediate protection for the seriously ill and to protect the public health from disease that may otherwise go untreated in the community. The situation the gentleman from California [Mr. Rohrabacher] raised cannot occur under current law. We do not need this amendment to address that. Therefore, we should not be misled by the mischaracterization by the gentleman from California. Mr. Chairman, I yield the balance of my time to the gentleman from Texas [Mr. Bryant].

Mr. BECERRA. Mr. Chairman, I have no further requests for time that I am aware of, and I will reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. BECERRA. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself a further minute. Again, in response to what the gentleman said, if, in fact, there are these apartment complexes where there are needles laying around, if there is debris and filth, those are violations of our current State or local laws which would permit any local law enforcement agency to go in there, if for no other reason than to investigate. They would have the powers to do that. We would not have to wait for the INS to go in there and to do that. So we have to be clear. And many times someone viewing this debate would say, well, why do these folks not want to let local law enforcement agencies uphold the law? That is not the case. Local law enforcement agencies currently have that authority. What we are saying is, careful, we set up these boundaries for a reason. We should not break them unless we have compelling reasons. And when we have an amendment that says do not just help the INS apprehend people who are here as undocumented, but go out there and actively seek them out, that is a big concern. Because my father probably looks like someone who would be sought out, and I wonder what it would take to have a local law enforcement official say I better stop him. And at the end of this debate I hope to be able to bring up one final example.

Mr. BECERRA. Mr. Chairman, I appreciate the gentleman's words because I do wish to be able to work with him, and we have been able to work together on other issues. The problem we have----

Mr. BECERRA. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. BECERRA. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time. 1245

Mr. BECERRA. I yield to the gentleman from California.

Mr. BECERRA. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 2 minutes to respond. Mr. Chairman, I am disappointed that the gentleman would demean the debate here by saying that there are some of us who would rather see criminal activity run rampant and that we are not just as concerned as he is about making sure that everyone has a chance to live and work in safety. No one here wishes to have anyone worry about being assaulted or anything else having to do with criminal conduct. What we are saying is that there are some legitimate concerns here. There are people that I know who have been apprehended by law enforcement for improper reasons, and I want to make sure that that never happens. Do I have faith in the local law enforcement agencies that I know? Of course I do. I work very closely with them, both the Los Angeles Police Department, the LA County Sheriff's Department. They are very helpful in many activities that we work on together within our community. To say that we are not interested in trying to reduce crime and to say that we do not trust our local law enforcement agencies, I think, just demeans this debate and gets us away from the substance of what we are trying to say.

Mr. BECERRA. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Chairman, again I must say that we have an amendment that sounds reasonable on its face, as something that we would want to make sure we could do to try to help curtail illegal immigration. And certainly the gentleman from Tennessee, whom I serve with on the Committee on the Judiciary, has always proven himself as someone who is interested in trying to do the right thing. Again, I do not doubt whatsoever that he is, again, attempting to do so. This is an amendment that I know he had in committee that did not pass. It did fail in committee. I would say that the reason it failed was because, as the hospitals had expressed to us and as others have said, this would cause a dramatic chilling effect within our medical care system. What we would have is a situation where people may in fact not go for treatment or take a family member for treatment for fear of what would happen as a result of trying to approach a hospital. Mr. Chairman, let me read from a letter which I will later submit for the Record. This is a letter from the Secretary of Health and Human Services, the Clinton administration in this letter indicating that it is opposing the Bryant amendment. The letter from Secretary Donna Shalala says as follows: While the administration strongly opposes undocumented immigration and supports the denial of means-tested government benefits to undocumented immigrants, the Bryant amendment would impose burdensome unfunded mandates on health care providers, seriously jeopardize the health of many U.S. citizens and legal immigrant children, and endanger overall public health. The concern that the administration and others have expressed here, including hospitals, is that we would, in essence, chill the ability of health care providers to conduct the primary purpose of their being in our hospitals and our health care facilities, and that is, to provide medical assistance. What would happen in many cases is you would have to have these facilities acting as INS agents to try to find out if, indeed, the individual they are treating or are about to treat is here legally or is a U.S. citizen. Mr. Chairman, I ask Members to take the example of someone, a friend, a relative in your family, who gets into a car accident and has to be rushed to a hospital. If a hospital looks at this individual and knows that it is under an obligation to do some reporting on status, immigration status of an individual, what will this hospital do or have to do in order to satisfy that requirement as it looks at a person who is seeking emergency medical care? I would say that we are placing something that is of less importance--status--above health. I would hope that what we would do is first understand that the primary purpose of being a doctor, a nurse, a medical provider, is to be able to help those who are in need of medical assistance. Mr. Chairman, this is an amendment that, again, it is difficult on its face to argue against because it seems like this is something that could easily be done, but in practice, again, the effects will be very difficult, or will have a very dramatic effect on both the provider of the health care and the recipient, the prospective recipient, of the health care. I would say, as well-intentioned as I know the gentleman from Tennessee [Mr. Bryant] is, I must stand in opposition to the amendment, and urge Members to vote against it. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. BECERRA

Mr. BECERRA. Mr. Chairman, if I can just say to the Members who are here and to the Speaker, who just finished with his remarks, all you have to do is go to the community colleges, the night schools for adults, the community-based organizations that are doing this at their own cost, and you will see that every night the rooms are filled with people trying to learn English. They are turning people away. There are 18-month wait lists. There are 50,000 people being told you will have to come back at a later time, because they are trying to learn English. It so happens that this Congress chose to cut funds for English as a second language for those who are trying to learn English. Make sense out of that. What we see is that for the first time in this Nation since 1924, we have an amendment on immigration that would give a preference to a certain group of people, and what we are doing is we are limiting, we are crunching, we are narrowing those who can come into this country. With this amendment what we are saying is we really only want those who sound like us, who can speak like us, and it is unfortunate, because for the longest time and through this diversity program that is being attacked, we are trying to make sure that we give folks from every part of the world a chance. Unfortunately, this amendment will make it difficult. This amendment will deny the employers an opportunity to hire somebody they definitely need because of the high skill level that person brings with them, and it is unfortunate. What we see is we are turning this all around. People are starving, yearning to learn English, and here we see a Congress saying ``Yeah, you may be, but we don't believe you. We are going to stop you from ever coming into these doors to prove it.'' That I think is the wrong message to send those yearning to come to this country to provide us with their skills, their benefits, and make this a better country. That is not the history of this country. We should reject this amendment for that reason.

Mr. BECERRA. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself the balance of my time.

Mr. BECERRA. If the gentleman will yield, we have to remember, we are talking about a category of immigrants, especially those under the employment-based category, that are coming here to secure jobs. These are jobs that have been offered to them by employers here in the United States. What are the chances that these are individuals who wish to never learn English, knowing that they are coming here because a job has been offered to them? My goodness.

Mr. BECERRA. Mr. Chairman, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from Texas [Mr. Bryant].

Mr. BECERRA. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 1\1/2\ minutes. It is unfortunate that more Members of this body were not able to attend or chose not to attend a recent citizenship swearing-in ceremony that was held here in the Capitol. I believe that was the first time in the history of this Nation that we had a citizenship swearing-in ceremony held here in the Capitol of this country. I am surprised to learn that, but I think that is in fact the case. We had over 100 people from over 40 or 50 countries come to this Capitol and take the oath saying that they are committing themselves as U.S. citizens, they are relinquishing their previous citizenship, and they are binding themselves to this country. I must tell the Members that a number of those people probably still cannot communicate extremely well in English but, by God, I must tell you, you look at the faces of each and every one of those people and not a one of them would have said to you that there was a prouder American in this country at that time. To believe that there are people in this country who are saying, ``I wish to legally emigrate and become a lawful permanent resident of this country,'' in essence saying, ``I want to permanently reside here,'' and believe that these are folks that are saying they do not wish to learn English I think is myopic. I do not believe that we can really claim that we are interested in what the Statue of Liberty has always stood for if we take that type of position. Even more to the point, this amendment deals with those immigrants who are coming in based on employment offers from a firm in this country or those who are coming in from countries where we see smaller numbers of people emigrating, so we want to make sure that there is diversity in the pool of people that come into this country. To believe that someone who wishes to get employment and has an offer of employment is not interested in learning English, to me really seems very contradictory to what the initiative of that individual is. The diversity requirement, we want to make sure we get folks from everywhere. This amendment makes it almost impossible. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. BECERRA. Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Guam [Mr. Underwood].

Mr. BECERRA. Mr. Chairman, I yield such time as she may consume to the gentlewoman from Hawaii [Mrs. Mink].

Mr. BECERRA. Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to the amendment.