Jon Kyl

Mr. KYL

Mr. KYL. I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. KYL. Mr. President, might I just interrupt with a question to the Senator?

Mr. KYL. Mr. President, is it not true that under this amendment, this amendment would wipe out the difference between a citizen of the United States and a green card holder with respect to their right to immigrate the nuclear family? So there would be no distinction between a green card holder and a citizen's rights?

Mr. KYL. Mr. President, I appreciate not waiving the budget in this last point of order. I will confess to you, I think that Senator Menendez had a point in saying we should only allow people who had a reasonable expectation to be immigrants, and those who didn't should not. The bill itself drew an arbitrary deadline. Senator Menendez drew a different arbitrary deadline. This side-by-side actually is constructed so that, under existing law, everyone who has a reasonable expectation of being allowed to immigrate under a family visa will be able to immigrate under a family visa. Only those people who never had any reasonable expectation would be denied. What it does is to take it out to the year 2027, 20 years from now, and anyone who could have had a reasonable expectation of immigrating within that 20-year period would be allowed to immigrate under this amendment. It is a more precise and fair and just way to allow family members to come into the United States. The numbers are approximately identical to those who would be allowed to immigrate under the bill.

Mr. KYL. Mr. President, I make a point of order that the pending amendment, No. 1194, to S. 1348, violates section 201, the pay-as-you- go point of order of S. Con. Res. 21, the concurrent resolution on the budget for fiscal year 2008.

Mr. KYL. Mr. President, could we have order?

Mr. KYL. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. KYL. Mr. President, I say to the Senator from New Jersey that what he said, as far as he said it, is, of course, exactly correct. What I was talking about was the tradeoff that existed between the accommodation to the 12 million people and--by the way, I don't use that phrase ``those people.'' I hope the Senator understands that I was referring to the criticism of those who say we shouldn't allow the illegal immigrants in the country, especially if we chain migrate their families. We ended the chain migration. We had to draw a time when applicants would be able to apply and their applications would be considered. We had it at one point. We agreed to move that date to accommodate the people on the Democratic side of the aisle. The Menendez amendment would move it to January 1 of this year, bringing in, I think, a total of well over 800,000 people. That, obviously, would undo the rather delicate balance of agreements that was reached that deals with this subject. Recognizing, however, we wanted to make sure anybody who had a reasonable expectation of being able to immigrate should be able to do so, we have prepared an amendment that would, in fact, allow anybody with a reasonable expectation to be able to immigrate here. We put the date way back to 2027, and we say that if you could have reasonably expected to get here by 2027, you are in and you are in within an 8- year period from now. I think that is very fair. The person who is excluded under our proposal is the person who, as I said, is the sibling of a Mexican national who is a sibling of a U.S. citizen who might be 101 years old when he gets to the United States of America. That is not a reasonable expectation. I think our approach is reasonable. It is consistent with the underlying agreement we reached. I regret to say--and I appreciate the Senator from New Jersey has every right to raise a budget point of order on the underlying bill--we fully expected there would be points of order at the conclusion presumably of the consideration of the bill and we would have to vote on those. Obviously, it is a 60-vote point of order. We expected to have 60 people who would support the legislation, and we believe that to be the case. But if the Senator wants to bring the bill down, as the Senator from South Carolina said, by raising an amendment such as that which has been proposed or at this time trying to conclude the budget point of order, I don't think that is the best way forward. As the Senator from South Carolina said, we have one good chance to get legislation passed. I don't think we want to blow that chance. Now is our time. We were sent here to do difficult jobs. I hope, in the bipartisan spirit that has so far characterized our debate, we can move forward and continue to keep this bill as literally a beacon of hope for a lot of people who are counting on us.

Mr. KYL. Mr. President, I appreciate that from the Senator from South Carolina. Let me make one final point. I know Senator Kennedy wishes to speak. It was not easy for some people to agree to allow at least 12 million immigrants who came to this country illegally to stay here and eventually become citizens. That was not easy. One of the bases upon which we were able to do that was to respond to an argument that had frequently been made: Why should we let all those people, is the way it is described, become U.S. citizens and then chain migrate all their family--their uncles, cousins, grandparents, and so on? The answer to that question is we probably shouldn't. So that was ended in this legislation. That is what was stopped. That is part of the agreement that was reached, the consensus that was reached. The adoption of the Menendez amendment would undo that. You can imagine how someone like me feels. I have taken a lot of heat for agreeing that the people who are here illegally should stay here, but I knew one of the reasons that was more palatable was because we had at least stopped the chain migration that would occur for anybody subsequently in the future, after we cleared the backlog of people who already applied.

Mr. KYL. Yes, I will be happy to yield. I was going to conclude and turn to Senator Kennedy. I will be happy to yield.

Mr. KYL. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Massachusetts, since it is important that, prior to a meeting we have at 5:30, to speak to an amendment offered by Senator Menendez. I want to be clear that we have a side-by-side amendment that we will also be voting on, which I think goes to the heart of what Senator Menendez is trying to get at here, but it does so in a way that will not upset the bipartisan consensus that has been worked out on the legislation. I think the Menendez amendment has been discussed in the past. It is an amendment that would, in significant ways, change the basic agreement that has been made by some of the Senators. Therefore, it would be very problematic were it to pass. There is a budget point of order against the Menendez amendment, and that point of order will be raised. Because of the extra cost that would be imposed by additional immigrants being permitted to come into the country over time, in fact, I think there is more than one budget point of order because of those increased costs. The general proposition is that some have said the bill is not family friendly and that we need to do more for families. I want to try to dispel that, Mr. President. We start out with the proposition that somewhere between 12 million and who knows how many million illegal immigrants who are in the United States, for the most part, are going to be able to stay. If everything that can be expected of them is accomplished, they have the ability to apply for a green card and eventually potentially become citizens of the United States of America. That is a tremendous benefit for people who came illegally. One of the reasons some of us have been willing to accommodate that is people have come here with families or have created families here, and we do not want to disrupt those families. Secondly, there are family visas that historically have been issued by the United States. This bill doesn't in any way affect the ability of any legal permanent resident or citizen to bring into the United States their spouse or minor children. That is the so- called nuclear family. In addition, 40,000 parents per year can be brought into the United States, and there are extraordinarily liberal visitations for parents beyond that 40,000 number. We have said the so-called nonnuclear family--the extended family--in the future is going to compete the same as workers are going to compete, so that we can get in balance with some of our competitors in the global economy, where more of the visas are reserved for work purposes and fewer for family purposes. But in the meantime, some 4 million people, roughly, who have applied for a family visa--extended or nonnuclear family--are going to be allowed to immigrate to the United States, and instead of taking 30 or 40 years, in some cases, it is going to all happen within an 8-year period of time. That is extraordinarily helpful to families and family reunification. Now, it is true, if somebody has come here illegally and their family is still outside the country, we don't permit that family to come. But the object, obviously, is to try to encourage that individual to go back with his family. That would be family reunification. But the problem the Menendez amendment poses is, instead of allowing those people who have applied for visas for extended families who have a reasonable expectation to come to the United States, he would change the date that measures their eligibility in such a way as to allow a lot of people--thousands, hundreds of thousands, actually--to immigrate to the United States who, today, under current law, have no reasonable expectation they would ever make it to the United States. What we have tried to do is to be fair and say, if you have a reasonable expectation you will be permitted to immigrate to the United States, we will allow you to come in, and we will do it within a very short period of time--8 years, or perhaps less than that period of time, as opposed to the perhaps 20 or 30 years it may have otherwise taken. If you didn't have a reasonable expectation to get in, then you are not going to come. The reason the date was drawn where it was in May 2005 is that represented a compromise. I believe the original date was March or July of 2004--the time when people who were in line but had no reasonable expectation--that their application was going to be processed and were notified by the U.S. Government. Basically, the Government said: For the time, we are not going to be processing these numbers anymore because the backlog is too long. The backlog numbers are truly astounding. There are people in Mexico, for example, who have no reasonable expectation of getting here. For example, if you are the brother or sister of a U.S. citizen, and if you are a Mexican national and you recently filed to become a legal permanent resident of the United States, you have an expected wait of about 80 years. So even if you are 21 years of age, at the time when you can expect to get here you would be 101 years of age. That is not a reasonable expectation you will be allowed into the United States. I went to Senator Menendez and said: I think you have a point because we have drawn an arbitrary deadline. Remember, the date at which they were told we were no longer going to be processing, temporarily, these applications was in 2004. But in order to be more liberal, we moved the date to May 2005. His argument was, there may be some people who still had an expectation because they filed last year, and maybe they had an expectation they could make it. I said: You know, there may be some such people, so let's take a look at it and see if we can redo this so everybody who had a reasonable expectation they could get here will be allowed to be here, no matter when they applied--whether it was 2 years ago, last year, 2 months ago, or 10 or 12 years ago--if they had a reasonable expectation of getting in. We have crafted an amendment that I offered to Senator Menendez, but he preferred to go forward with his amendment. But the side-by-side that I will be proposing is an amendment that stretches the date out to 2027. It says: If you had a reasonable expectation, based upon your category of immigration, the country you are from, the lines that currently exist with that country, if you had a reasonable expectation within the next 20 years you could have made it into the United States, then you get to come in under a family visa. That is extraordinarily liberal--everybody who really had an expectation that they could make it. Like I said, if you are this Mexican national, and you are the brother of an American citizen, and you were 21 years of age when you applied, you would be over 100 years old today. That is not a reasonable expectation. So you would not be permitted to come into the United States. You never had a reasonable expectation that you could make it. The effect of my amendment and the Menendez amendment is almost identical in terms of the number of people who would be allowed to come to the United States. There is only a 3,000 difference out of about 600,000 people. So we are not reducing the number of people. We are making it accurate as to who can actually come. There is also a general notion that somehow we are being unfair to families. As Senator Kennedy has frequently pointed out, after this legislation is passed, for a period of 8 years, the total family percentage coming into the United States will be 74 percent. And you add another 15 percent for humanitarian visas, and there is only 11 left for the employment visas. Today, 65 percent are family visas. In subsequent years, families will still be the majority of immigrants to the United States--51 percent. Then you add to that another 17 percent for asylum seekers and other humanitarian visas; 17 percent of the total is a very humane number for the United States. We can still be very proud of our tradition of allowing the poor, hungry, and downtrodden to come to this country, and we will still have a majority of family-based visas in this country.

Mr. KYL. The answer I give the Senator is that family visas alone are 51 percent--a majority--and another 17 percent is humanitarian.

Mr. KYL. Mr. President, that is almost exactly right. I know in the case of--in fact, I will give you the exact number. In Canada, it is 24 percent. If we have 51 percent, obviously, that is close to twice that number. In Australia, it is 27 percent. And, again, if we are at 51 percent in the future, that is almost exactly twice. But remember, that is only after 8 years. For the next 8 years, it is 74 percent because of what the Senator from South Carolina was pointing out.

Mr. KYL. Mr. President, first of all, this is an amendment that would enable people to enter the United States and become immigrants, green card holders, and eventually citizens, who, under the current law, have no expectation of ever getting those rights because they are in categories or are from countries in which the waiting line is so long that they would never, ever be able, under existing law, to become a U.S. citizen. In addition, because it would allow several hundred thousand immigrants to come into this country who would not otherwise be legal under existing law, there are three budget points of order, and, therefore, at the conclusion of these remarks, I will be making a budget point of order. I hope my colleagues agree that we should not waive the budget under these circumstances.

Mr. KYL. Mr. President, if I might interrupt the Senator for a question. Would it be possible also to make sure Senator Domenici will be able to speak after the Senator from Vermont?

Mr. KYL

Mr. KYL. Mr. President, I make a point of order that the pending Clinton amendment, No. 1183, to S. 1348, violates section 201, the pay- as-you-go point of order of S. Con. Res. 21, the concurrent resolution on the budget for fiscal year 2008.

Mr. KYL

Mr. KYL. Madam President, I am going to have a statement printed in the Record, but I did wish to say something this evening before the evening is over about our colleague, Craig Thomas. Craig was a wonderful friend of all of us. In my case, being a fellow Westerner, I had a special affinity for Craig. He was a fellow I could talk to-- without talk. Particularly a cowboy such as Craig can communicate with you in a real Western way that doesn't require a whole lot of ``jibber- jabber,'' as he would say. Craig was a man of the earth. He really was a cowboy, and a good one at that. He took that kind of set of Western values, of not talking a whole lot but meaning what he says and saying what he means, into the political life. When he came to the Senate, I think everyone appreciated that quality in him. By the way, I would say he reminds me of my colleague, the Senator from Alabama, in that regard. You never have any doubt about where the Senator from Alabama stands and you never had any doubt about where Senator Craig Thomas stood. That is a quality we need in our public officials today. Craig's wife Susan is a wonderful friend of mine and of my wife Carol. Our hearts go out to her and their family tonight. But she does have, at least, I think, the solace in knowing that people all over this country--not just from their home State of Wyoming--have tremendous respect for the achievements of her husband Craig and the way in which he handled himself as a Member of the Senate, never letting an ego take over what he understood to be his primary responsibilities. He was quiet and he was humble. He was serious and he was very hard working. He stood up for the interests of the people of his State. He was a great patriot for the United States of America. But he never took himself so seriously that he gave even a hint of pomposity or being someone who didn't understand where he was grounded. We will miss Craig Thomas immensely. We will never forget him as a loyal friend, a patriot, and someone who was quintessential in the way he represented his area of the United States and, in particular, his constituents in the State of Wyoming. I thank the Senator from Alabama.

Mr. KYL

Mr. KYL. Mr. President, on May 24, I voted for H.R. 2206, but I am disappointed that it took so long to complete work on this legislation, while we have troops deployed and under fire fighting against an enemy that, as few others have in history, seeks our total destruction. For 108 days, the majority held up vital funding for our troops' equipment and training. All this time, the majority was playing politics with this funding, even sending to the President a bill that they knew would be vetoed. And this is not my analysis; we know this through the Democrats' own words. Senator Harry Reid, the Democratic leader in the Senate, said, ``We are going to pick up Senate seats as a result of this war.'' And ``well, it doesn't matter what resolution we move forward to. You know, I can count. I don't know if we'll get 60 votes. But I'll tell you one thing, there are 21 Republicans up for reelection this time.'' So, with that in mind, we finally received the final version of the security supplemental at 8 p.m., the last night before the Memorial Day work period. While Democrats finally decided to listen to our generals and not MoveOn.org and yielded to Republicans' demand to exclude an arbitrary withdrawal date, this bill still has serious flaws. A policy that would potentially restrict the very economic reconstruction funds that are necessary to achieve the political and diplomatic solution General Petraeus says we need represents bad public policy, to say the least. What's more, I am disappointed to see, yet again, that the majority would use the needs of our troops as leverage to include extraneous, and in many cases ill-conceived, spending and policy provisions. Among these are a raise in the federal minimum wage to $7.25 an hour; $22 million in Corps of Engineers funding specifically earmarked for Long Island and Westchester County, and certain areas of New Jersey; $40 million in agriculture assistance specifically earmarked for certain areas of Kansas affected by the recent tornadoes; $10 million for radios for the Capitol Police; several new provisions to give certain labor unions and Continental and American Airlines relief from their employer pension plan contribution obligations; and a provision that mandates that the Secretary of Health and Human Services approve a state's request to extend a waiver for the Pharmacy Plus program, making Wisconsin the only state to benefit from this provision. The delay in passage of the security supplemental caused by the majority party created significant disruptions for the Department of Defense and for our men and women deployed in the war against terrorists. Since the emergency request was submitted by the President, the Department of Defense has realigned significant funds internally and submitted to Congress approximately six reprogramming requests driven by the delays in the supplemental. Secretary Gates stated in an April 11 letter to the Senate Appropriations Committee, ``[i]t is a simple fact of life that if the . . . [supplemental] is not enacted soon, the Army faces a real and serious funding problem that will require increasingly disruptive and costly measures to be initiated--measures that will, inevitably, negatively impact readiness and Army personnel and their families.'' Then, Secretary Gates in a May 9 letter to Senator McCain wrote: [i]n submitting the FY07 supplemental request in early February, the Department planned on these funds becoming available by not later than mid-April. Accordingly, starting in mid-April, the Department began a series of actions to mitigate the impact of the delay in the supplemental on our deployed forces by slowing down spending in less critical accounts. In addition, funds budgeted for fourth quarter Army operations and personnel costs have been or are in the process of being moved forward and expended to partially make up the shortfall. These actions have resulted in the Army having to take a series of steps including deferring repair of equipment and restraining supply purchases. In short, these steps, while necessary to account for the delay in the supplemental, have already caused disruptions within the Department. Mr. President, here are just a few specific examples of disruptions that have occurred within the Army: Facility maintenance and purchases for barracks, mold abatement projects, and dining facilities has been deferred. As a result, there is a risk of troops returning from combat tours to sub-standard barracks and facilities that had been scheduled for renovation or updates while soldiers were deployed; Orders of supplies have been reduced. Deferring orders for major repair parts and unit level maintenance items creates system lag and an accumulation of backlogged orders waiting to be placed. Units can sustain operations for only a limited time by consuming existing inventory. In his May 9 letter to Senator McCain, Secretary Gates also made clear that these disruptions would have effects on the war effort: [T]he lack of timely supplemental funds has limited the Department's ability to properly contract for the reconstitution of equipment for both the active and reserve forces. This situation increases the readiness risk of our military with each passing day should the nation require the use of these forces prior to the equipment becoming available. In other cases, the funding delay negatively impacts our forces in the field by needlessly delaying the accelerated fielding of new force protection capabilities such as the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicle and counter-IED technologies developed and acquired by the Joint IED Defeat Organization (JIEDDO). Finally, the ongoing delay resulted in the depletion of funds necessary to accelerate the training of Iraqi security forces. Multinational Force-Iraq spokesman, Army Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, on April 4 said, ``At the current moment, because of this lack of funding, MNSTC-I--Multi-National Security Transition Command-Iraq--is unable to continue at the pace they were in the developmental process of the Iraqi security forces . . . It is starting to have some impact today, and will only have more of an impact over time.'' While I firmly believe that the manner in which Democrats managed this legislation reveals their misplaced priorities, it is absolutely necessary that we get this funding to the men and women on the front line without further delay. That is why I voted for this supplemental. Having forced our troops to wait 108 days for this needed funding, there is no other choice but to accept this legislative blackmail. I would also like to speak to a larger point, Mr. President. My friends on the other side of this issue in both houses talk about a failed strategy, and about a war that is lost. How do they know the Petraeus strategy has failed? It isn't even in place yet. The fifth brigade of the surge isn't there yet, and the fourth has only just arrived. Even commentators like Joel Klein of Time magazine, no friend of this administration or this policy, have been forced to admit that progress is being made. While pointing out the many struggles that remain, Mr. Klein said: There is good news from Iraq, believe it or not. It comes from the most unlikely place: Anbar province, home of the Sunni insurgency. The level of violence has plummeted in recent weeks. An alliance of U.S. troops and local tribes has been very effective in moving against the al-Qaeda foreign fighters. A senior U.S. military official told me--confirming reports from several other sources--that there have been ``a couple of days recently during which there were zero effective attacks and less than 10 attacks overall in the province (keep in mind that an attack can be as little as one round fired). This is a result of sheiks stepping up and opposing AQI [al-Qaeda in Iraq] and volunteering their young men to serve in the police and army units there.'' The success in Anbar has led sheiks in at least two other Sunni- dominated provinces, Nineveh and Salahaddin, to ask for similar alliances against the foreign fighters. And, as Time's Bobby Ghosh has reported, an influential leader of the Sunni insurgency, Harith al-Dari, has turned against al-Qaeda as well. It is possible that al-Qaeda is being rejected like a mismatched liver transplant by the body of the Iraqi insurgency. What is now happening is an attempt to reconsider the vote of four years ago when, by large bipartisan majorities in both chambers, we authorized this war. In an effort to appease far left-wing groups, some are attempting to distance themselves from their votes to authorize this policy, and from their own statements acknowledging what the intelligence information told us: Saddam Hussein posed a grave threat to America's national security. What they're not doing is talking about the consequences of defeat. It is clear from respected national security figures like General Anthony Zinni that ``This is no Vietnam or Somalia or those places where you can walk away. If we just pull out, we will find ourselves back in short order.'' Additionally, even the Brookings Institution released a study that argues: Iraq appears to have many of the conditions most conducive to spillover because there is a high degree of foreign ``interest'' in Iraq. Ethnic, tribal, and religious groups within Iraq are equally prevalent in neighboring countries and they share many of the same grievances. Iraq has a history of violence with its neighbors, which has fostered desires for vengeance and fomented constant clashes. Iraq also possesses resources that its neighbors covet--oil being the most obvious, but important religious shrines also figure in the mix. There is a high degree of commerce and communication between Iraq and its neighbors, and its borders are porous. All of this suggests that spillover from an Iraqi civil war would tend toward the more dangerous end of the spillover spectrum. We cannot forget that Iran and Syria are fostering instability in Iraq. Al-Qaida and Hezbollah are both active there as well. As I have mentioned before, but have not heard answered from the critics, we know that chaos in Iraq could draw in others in the region. For example, Saudi Arabian officials have threatened ``massive intervention to stop Iranian-backed Shiite militias from butchering Iraqi Sunnis.'' A Kurdish secession would likely cause Turkish intervention. Does anyone in Congress disagree that failing in Iraq would be a dramatic setback in the war against terrorists? Iraq must not be divorced from its context--the struggle between the forces of moderation and extremism in the Muslim world. After all, al-Qaida has been in Iraq since before the U.S. invaded and has dedicated itself to fomenting sectarian violence there. Osama bin Laden referred to Iraq as ``capital of the Caliphate,'' arguing that ``[t]he most . . . serious issue today for the whole world is this Third World War . . . [that] is raging in [Iraq].'' Terrorism expert Peter Bergen has told us that a: [U.S. withdrawal] would fit all too neatly into Osama bin Laden's master narrative about American foreign policy. His theme is that America is a paper tiger that cannot tolerate body bags coming home; to back it up, he cites President Ronald Reagan's 1984 withdrawal of United States troops from Lebanon and President Bill Clinton's decision nearly a decade later to pull troops from Somalia. A unilateral pullout from Iraq would only confirm this analysis of American weakness among his jihadist allies. Failure in Iraq will encourage further attacks against the United States and provide a base from which to plan and train for attacks. I will remind my friends who pushed so hard for this legislation, and who cheered for votes on an immediate withdrawal, and the passage of the first security supplemental which the President correctly vetoed, if you are going to advocate a strategy for failure or a precipitous withdrawal, you have the responsibility to tell the American people what the consequences would be, and to tell them how you would respond. These are the burdens of leadership.

Mr. KYL

Mr. KYL. Mr. President, I compliment the Senator from Colorado, who frequently during the very difficult negotiations over the last several months was able, because of his legal skills and sunny personality, to bring contending factions together. I could not agree with him more that, as responsible public servants, we cannot allow this problem to continue to fester. Surely, working together in a bipartisan way, committed to fairness, justice, and a solution, we can come up with a resolution of the problem that will work, as well as anything might work. Our colleague from North Dakota said a moment ago that he disagreed with this bill and that we need to find a way, and he described pretty much what we are trying to find a way to do. He is right. Well, we have tried to find a way. It is just that not everybody agrees with exactly what we have come up with. One of the reasons for that is that if you are not part of the process of trying to reach a bipartisan consensus, you may have the idea you can get most of what you want without conceding anything to people who have a different point of view. The reality is that this is one of the most contentious, complex, emotional issues of our time, and no one is going to get 100 percent of what they think is the right solution. We are alleging we have to recognize that there are other points of view and that in order for us to be able to politically reach a decision, we might have to be supporting something that none of us like 100 percent, and that is certainly the case with me. I wish to explain this evening a couple of things that came from my discussions with constituents during the time of the Memorial Day recess and why I agree with the Senator from Colorado that this is the time to try to tackle this very tough issue. I was asked by a reporter why I was doing this, especially since I voted against the bill last year. The answer is that last year I didn't have an opportunity to participate in the construction of the legislation the Senate voted on. By the time it came to the Senate floor, the die was essentially cast. We had several amendments we offered; some were accepted and some were defeated. It was not possible at that point to substantially change the legislation. I thought it was a bad bill and I voted against it. It is also true that the situation in the United States, and in my State in particular, is getting worse every day. If you represent a State such as Arizona, on the border with Mexico, you simply cannot continue to ignore the problem, hoping it will go away or some magical solution will be developed that everyone can support. You realize you are going to have to get in there, fight like heck to do the best you can, and get the problems resolved, even though the solution is not going to be perfect from anyone's perspective. Here is what is happening every day: Thousands and thousands more illegal immigrants are pouring across the border. We wish to stop that. We have crime and violence increasing at an unprecedented rate, much of it due to illegal immigration. The drug smugglers are using the illegal immigrants as decoys to try to get the agents to chase the illegal immigrants so they can bring the drugs across. Because the Border Patrol is getting much more effective at controlling the border now, the violence is increasing because the people smuggling immigrants and drugs are finding their territory is now being contested by the Border Patrol. They are fighting back. They are fighting back with weapons, including large caliber weapons. This violence is a scourge not just at the border but on our society as a whole. We had a shootout on the freeway between Tucson and Phoenix, where two rival gangs were fighting over a load of illegal immigrants. Why? Because those illegal immigrants represented more potential income for whoever controlled them. They are essentially kidnapped and ransomed, and their families back in El Salvador, Mexico, or wherever they are from, are contacted and are told if they want their relatives to be freed, they have to pay additional money. As a result, a lot of money is paid and there is a lot of violence. The harm perpetrated on the immigrants--and, frankly, the harm perpetrated by some of the coyotes and smugglers and other criminals crossing the border--is infecting our State to an unacceptable degree. Last year, over 10 percent of the illegal immigrants coming across the border from Mexico were criminals, people wanted for serious crimes. These are not just nice people wanting to work in the U.S., though that is far and away the majority of them. It is a national security problem. We don't know how many of these people may have terrorist inclinations. Many come from countries that are on the terrorist list. Again, between 10 and 13 percent, approximately, we know to be criminals. As a result, we have to do something about the problem. I was mentioning to a reporter this morning--she said: What differentiates Arizona from a Midwestern or an Eastern State? Well, two things. The violence associated with this, first, has a deleterious effect, all the way from the people the violence is perpetrated on, to the court system which cannot handle it, to the jail system, to the social network that has to be established; all of this is enormously expensive and disruptive. Secondly, I said, you have the problem of the environmental degradation, with thousands of people--millions over the years-- crossing through into our State, and the impact on the desert environment has been dramatic. We have national monuments, parks, game refuges, military bases, Indian reservations, as well as private land and national forests right on the border. With this many people coming across with very little regard for the impact on the environment, they have left thousands of tons of trash. They have cut fences. They have let water run. They have let animals run loose. They have threatened, in some cases, to hurt individuals. They have burned property. They have trashed the properties, as I have said, and they cut literally thousands of trails which will take thousands of years to revegetate. That is the least of the problems. But one can see it in my State of Arizona, and I think anybody who says we shouldn't try to do something to stop that simply has no sense of responsibility, especially if they are in a position to do something about it, as we in the Senate are. That is what has motivated me to do something about this problem as best I can. One can sit on the sidelines and complain about how bad the legislation is. One could say, as some of my colleagues have said, we need to find a way to do something to solve this or one can try to find a way and work with their colleagues on the other side of the aisle, do their best to come up with a consensus that has a chance of passing and being signed into law. That is what those of us who have worked on this legislation have tried to do. Is it perfect? No way. Are there many provisions in it I don't like? Absolutely. Or that my friend Senator Salazar doesn't like? Absolutely. But that is the nature of attempting to reach a bipartisan consensus. I next wish to talk about what my constituents have told me in the last couple of weeks. It is very interesting that the same question keeps coming up over and over. In my campaign last year, it was the same question: Why do you think a new law will be enforced when the existing law is not being enforced? And that is a very good question because the truth is, neither the current administration nor the previous administration nor Congresses working with the administration nor the bureaucracies and people responsible for enforcing the law have done a good job of enforcing the law. One can argue that in some cases there hasn't even been a significant attempt to enforce the law. When we do attempt to enforce it, a lot of roadblocks are thrown in the way. So it is a legitimate question: Why do we think this new law might be enforced when the current law is not being adequately enforced? Unless you can answer that question, you can't really support some new proposal, as we have here. Before I answer the question, let me say something else. It is absolutely wrong to accuse the people who ask that question, who are skeptical of our ability to enforce a law and, therefore, skeptical of this new law, and call them bigots or restrictionists or nativists or leftwing or rightwing nuts or people who simply want to obstruct the process. The reality is, these are hard-working, tax-paying Americans who believe in the rule of law and are extraordinarily upset that their Government has let them down, and that is exactly what has happened-- their Government has let them down. They have a right to be angry, and they have a right to ask the question: Why should we believe a new law is going to be enforced when the existing law is not being enforced? Remember, I say to my colleagues, we work for them. They hired us. They pay our salary, and they pay the President's salary and all of the people who work in the executive branch. They have a right to answers to these questions rather than having people suggest that because they may oppose what we are proposing, somehow or another we think less of them. I think a great deal of them, especially those people who disagree with me agreeably, such as one of my constituents with whom I spoke today. She said: I trust you, but I don't like this new bill which has been proposed. I appreciate the question she asked, which was the same one: How are you going to enforce it? So let me try to answer that question. First of all, we understood that the experience of 20 years ago with the amnesty bill of 1986 demonstrated that unless we took enforcement seriously, we would end up with something unenforceable. So we tried to do that in this new legislation. The first thing we did was to ensure that several new actions will be done for enforcement before any of the benefits accrue to people who are here illegally. That is a way of ensuring that at least some enforcement gets done. What did we do? We applied triggers. We said that until the following things are done, no temporary visa will be issued to an illegal immigrant in the United States. What are those things? No. 1, we are going to increase the numbers of the Border Patrol. By the way, this isn't the end of it. We said 18,000, and an amendment has been adopted that says take it to 20,000, and that is great, and we will need more than that. Do you know what 20,000 Border Patrol agents represents, Mr. President? It is half the New York City Police Department. So if they have about 39,000 people on the New York City Police Department--and I don't know how many square miles that is, but we have 2,000 miles of border to Mexico, not to mention our northern border--I think one can appreciate probably 20,000 Border Patrol agents is not enough, but we at least get to that mark before any of those triggers are pulled. We do the same thing with fencing. We have authorized 700 miles of fencing. We are going to have at least 371 of those miles completed before the trigger is pulled. We are going to have over 300 miles of vehicle barriers. Incidentally, on fencing, there is a rumor, a myth out in the land that we only have 2 miles of fencing. We have over 80 miles of fencing, and it is being built several miles a day. I have seen it being built on the border near Yuma, AZ. We will have something like 70 more radars, maybe more than that. I have forgotten the exact number. We will have four unmanned aerial vehicles. We have over 26,000 detention spaces, so there will be no more catch and release of people who are detained. These are some of the items which will actually have to be done before the trigger is pulled and a visa can be issued to an illegal immigrant, even a temporary visa. In addition to that, we will have up and operating and ready to go the electronic employee verification system, or so-called EEVS. This was lacking in the bill in 1986. We had a requirement that employers check to verify the eligibility of employees. Mr. President, do you know what they had to check? A driver's license and Social Security card, which are counterfeitable and I think cost 30 to 35 bucks apiece, or about $60 for the two of them, and employers can't hold them up to the light and say: This is a counterfeit and that one is real. We cannot expect employers to do that, as a result of which they suspect a lot of the people on their payroll are illegal immigrants, but they have the documents to prove they are legal, and the U.S. Government very seldom comes to audit them to check to see whether the people they hired are legal. Of course, we preclude them from asking insensitive questions that might violate their legal rights, such as: Are you an illegal immigrant? So employers are stuck in a catch-22 situation. That is the situation today. For those who say we don't like the bill, I say, fine, do you want the situation where today we have a totally unenforceable employee verification system or would you like to see something like that which is in this bill put into place? It is very effective. It will require the Government to do the validating, not the employer. The Government will have two different items to validate. No. 1, it is going to clean up the Social Security system and the database, and when an individual applies for a job, that database is going to be accessed with algorithms developed to ensure that not only do you ensure that the number which has been issued is a valid number issued to that person on that date but that it hasn't been used by somebody else for employment purposes or the individual hasn't died and so forth. So they can determine whether the Social Security eligibility is real. Second, you can determine who the individual is. There is a variety of ways to do this. If you have a U.S. passport, that is the gold standard because the information is typed in and the real passport that was issued will then be displayed on the computer screen of the employer. All the employer has to do is match that with the passport the prospective employee has given them and determine if they are identical. If the photographs are identical, it looks like the individual in the photograph, that is him. If they are not, then that situation is noted and the individual cannot be employed. If it is a driver's license, a REAL ID Act driver's license, it is the same thing--the photograph has to match. There is a system, in other words, that will be put into place that this time will not rely on the employer trying to determine the validity of the document but, rather, having that document checked through the database of the U.S. Government or States in the case of driver's licenses or birth certificates, and the employer is able to verify that, in fact, is a proper document. There are very difficult sanctions. If an employer violates this law more than once, it is a $75,000 fine, as opposed to $250 for a violation today. This is serious. And I think employers want a legal way that doesn't impose too big a burden on them to ensure the people they hire are, in fact, eligible to be hired. I think they will appreciate the speed and the ease with which this new system will allow them to determine eligibility of their employees. This will work so that the combination of strong border security and the inability to get a job if you are here illegally will reduce, we believe right down to the bare minimum, the number of people who shouldn't be here but are. That bare minimum, of course, is the criminal element--absconders, gang or terrorist members, and those people who have committed crimes. They are here today, and it is going to be much easier to find and catch them tomorrow if they are the ones on which we can concentrate. Instead of having to concentrate on 100 percent of the people who are here illegally, we can focus on that 15 percent or so we really want to catch. This is the second way in which we have anticipated we need to enforce the law. Third, amazingly, in the 1986 law, you couldn't even prosecute someone for fraud if they told you they had been here for longer than 3 years or 5 years and it turns out they hadn't been. Last year, there was an attempt to amend the bill to at least allow people who made such fraudulent claims to be prosecuted, and that amendment failed. Needless to say, the ability to prosecute fraud is in this legislation. There are many other ways in which we have sought to ensure this legislation, unlike the past, will be enforced. I conclude this part of my remarks with this statement. Let me answer in another way the question about whether the law will be enforced. If you are unhappy with the status quo, if you don't like the way things are today, then why would you oppose a change that at least offers the prospect that the new law will be enforced when we know the old law is not being adequately enforced? If you say: Let's just enforce the current law, I ask you, with regard to the employee verification system I just discussed, how can you enforce a law that is inherently not enforceable? You can't prosecute for fraud, you can't check the status of prospective employees, you cannot hold an employer liable because you can't prove that person knowingly hired the illegal immigrant. You can't enforce the existing law at the workplace. We have to change the law. That is the whole point of this legislation. I think you have to argue that the status quo is better than what this bill offers if you are going to oppose the bill. Let me mention two other points since I see my colleague from New Mexico is in the Chamber. Like me, he appreciates the impact on our society of illegal immigrants who are imposing themselves, who are using social services, who are stressing our court system, and I appreciate the fact that the senior Senator from New Mexico has offered legislation to add judges so that we at least have enough judges to handle the cases that come before the courts. A lot of our colleagues say that the problem with this legislation and the only reason they can't go along with it is that it represents amnesty. Of course, everybody has a different definition of what amnesty is. I don't think it is amnesty. It seems to me that arguing over whether something is amnesty or isn't amnesty is a dead-end argument. The question is, What would you like to see done so it isn't what you don't like? I argue this: If merely allowing the illegal immigrants to stay here is amnesty, which is what a lot of my constituents have said they believe, then the status quo is amnesty because we are letting them stay here and we are not doing anything about it. So if your definition is the mere fact you allow them to stay here is amnesty, then I say, fine, you, too, are for amnesty. I am just trying to do something about it. What are we trying to do about it? The first thing is that what we want to do is to ensure the people who came here illegally will appreciate that they did something wrong, they are going to have to pay a penalty for it, and for them to continue to stay, they are going to have to meet serious conditions of probation. They are going to have to say: I came here illegally; if you find I committed fraud or if you find I am ineligible for the benefits of this program in any way, I waive my right to contest that, in effect, and I am going to pay a fine, and I am going to be on probation, I am going to have to not violate the law, I am going to have to continue to work, if you are the head of the household. If you violate any of those conditions, you are going to have to go home, and so are your family members. If you want to stay here permanently, you are going to have to go home and apply like everyone else. You are going to have to get in line. You are going to have to pass an English test. And that is all simply to get a green card. After that, of course, if you want to be a citizen, you have to wait the 5 years and do the things necessary to become a citizen. That deals with the second point. To me, one of the definitions of amnesty is this automatic path to citizenship. We have done away with that. In addition, we have established a merit-based system for green cards for those people who want them who are here illegally. Finally, one of the benefits of amnesty is the ability to chain migrate your family. We have eliminated that in this legislation. You no longer have the right to chain migrate your family. By that, what we are talking about is to bring in the nonnuclear family, someone other than your spouse and minor children, simply because you are a green card holder or a U.S. citizen. We say: no longer. When this bill goes into effect, once the current backlog is cleared up, there will be no more chain migration of this nonnuclear family. Incidentally, there was an error made in the description of our bill by one of our colleagues. The visa that will be issued to people illegally here today does not allow chain migration. In fact, it doesn't even allow the migration of your nuclear family, your spouse, or minor children, if they are in another country. The last thing I want to talk about is the matter of the amendments we will have to deal with during the course of this next week. There will be a lot of amendments, some of which improve the bill. I know the Presiding Officer has an amendment which I think is a good amendment, and it doesn't in any way disrupt the basic agreement that was reached on a bipartisan basis but strengthens the bill. There will be many other amendments that either do or do not strengthen the bill, and we will have a chance to vote on them. We also understand there are some amendments which go right to the heart of the negotiation that occurred, to the agreements that were reached, and there are some Members in the Senate who, frankly, want to see them adopted because they do not want to see the bill passed. They know they are killer amendments, and they have been so dubbed, and I wish to illustrate what I mean. We have a temporary worker program. We worked very hard to make sure it gave people an opportunity to come here temporarily to work and to return home. Any amendment that would allow them to morph into legal permanent residency and citizenship would convert that from a temporary worker program to a permanent worker program, and that would violate the basic understanding of the bill. We already have a permanent worker program. Now, speaking of that, we were very careful to try to balance that permanent worker program, the so-called green card program, legal permanent residence, based on worker visas. We carefully calibrated that with family visas and the need for high skills versus low skills. We developed a merit-based system that establishes points for that and allocated the different visas for different groups. It would be a deal killer, a killer amendment, a breaking of the bipartisan agreement here if that is substantially altered. There is an amendment out there that would in fact substantially alter it by increasing by something like 300,000 per year the number of green cards that would be provided for employers to dole out to their prospective employees, as a condition of employment, basically. This is not a green card applied for by the individual. This is a green card the employer applies for and says to a prospective employee from another country, if you will come work for me for 5 years and take substandard wages, I will give you a green card at the end of that 5-year period. I remember studying in school the concept of indentured servitude. You come and work off your debt for 7 years and then you get to stay in the United States of America. It is not the same thing, but it is analogous. What we say here is we are going to make visas available for both the employee to apply for and the employer, and we are going to substantially increase the number of those visas. But we are not going to substantially increase it and then add another 300,000 on top of that. That would break the deal. Moreover, that particular amendment goes right to the heart of some other reforms, reforms that I support, that the Presiding Officer supports, and would, frankly, undercut what we have tried to do here in terms of worker rights. To be real clear about it, we already have 150,000 green cards per year, most of which will go to skilled workers because of the merit-based system we have. In addition to that, we have created another 107,000 per year to clear up what we believe is a 5- year backlog for those high-skilled workers, those so-called H-1B workers, and we add another 240,000 at the end of 8 years when they are no longer needed for family purposes. We have a merit-based system, as I said, that will pretty much ensure these green cards go to the best and the brightest, the high-skilled people who will bring with them the kinds of things we need to compete in the global economy. Another killer amendment has to do with the nonnuclear family migration, the so-called chain migration. We have decided that, even though some people would literally never get to this country with a family visa because the backlog is too long, we are going to allow about 4 million people to come into the country over an 8-year period. This is extraordinarily generous, and let me mention one country where I believe the backlog for our neighbor to the south, Mexico, is 176 years. You cannot argue that you have a reasonable expectation you are ever going to get a visa granted and get to the United States and have anything left of your life if the timelag before you could get it is 176 years. It is also long for many other countries. Nevertheless, we said if you had applied by May of 2005, you would be able to come into this country within an 8-year period. We had originally said 2004, because I believe in March of that year, the Department of Homeland Security sent a letter to everybody who was pending and said, look, we have stopped processing these applications because there is no reasonable expectation we are ever going to get to them. So if you applied after that date, especially if you are from one of these countries that has a long backlog, forget it, you are never going to make it here. Nevertheless, we said, we will allow you to come in during this 8-year period. Well, there is an amendment that would move that date from May of 2005--remember, we moved it from March of 2004, in the spirit of compromise, to May of 2005--this amendment would move it 2 years forward to today, basically, for another over 650,000 applicants. These people have no reasonable expectation of ever coming into the country. Finally, there is an amendment that deals with spouses and children. Both legal permanent residents and citizens are enabled to bring in spouses and legal children. If you are a legal permanent resident, there is a cap and there is some waiting period. It is not substantial, but it is a waiting period. This amendment would eliminate that difference between citizenship and legal permanent residence for the sake of bringing the nuclear family in. I think it is very important for us to retain the distinction. Citizenship has to mean something in this country, and one of the key things we think it means is being able to bring your spouse and minor children into the country when you want to do that. My point in discussing these amendments is to make the point that as anxious as I am to solve this problem by getting legislation passed that we believe does offer the opportunity for enforcement to end illegal immigration, to end the employment of illegal immigrants, and to ensure that from now on people who are here are playing by our rules rather than someone else's rules, as much as we want to ensure this legislation can pass the Senate and the House and be signed by the President, we also appreciate the fact that it represents a consensus based upon an extraordinary amount of negotiation. I go back to the point I made starting out. Nobody got 100 percent of what they wanted. We all made sacrifices in the sense that we agreed to things we didn't like. The end result was a bipartisan bill which I believe can pass. But if any of these other amendments are adopted, then many of us have made the commitment that we will no longer support the legislation. I certainly will not support the legislation, and I would do everything I could to get it defeated. It seems to me unless there is a bipartisan consensus that represents a balanced bill that can pass both Houses and that the President will sign, we are simply engaging in an exercise in futility, and perhaps worse. So I want my colleagues to appreciate the fact that I am very anxious to support some of their amendments, that I will oppose others, but they need to come down and get their amendments pending so we can get them voted on. Again, there are some things which go right to the heart of this bargain, and many of the people who will support those amendments know that. I am sad to say one of the reasons they will be supported by some Members is precisely to kill the bill. I don't want to see the bill killed. I want to see the bill passed. As a result, I hope my colleagues will keep this in mind when we consider these various amendments. Mr. President, I think there are other people here now who wish to speak to the bill, and I yield the floor.

Mr. KYL. Mr. President, I compliment the Senator from Colorado. He has correctly pointed out that there are moral, humanitarian, judicial, and fairness dimensions to this debate. The stories of people dying in the desert are well known to Arizonans because we are coming into the hot time of year. That is when it begins to hit home that there are people who, because of desperation on their part, seek to cross the desert, which is difficult under the best of circumstances, and they are frequently ill-prepared. The coyotes take advantage of them. They take their money and send them on their way without adequately preparing them to cross. The stories are heartbreaking, and there is a great deal of other crime--sexual assaults and other kinds of crime-- that is perpetrated on people and has to stop. The best way to stop it is to get the border secure, find a legal way for people to come here, and help them to realize their dream. People say we are a nation of immigrants. We are also a nation of laws. One thing that distinguishes us from other countries is that we have respect for law. I always use the example of the intersection on the street. When you have a green light and you drive through, you don't think about it. You know that because other people respect the law, you can drive through the intersection without worrying that someone else is going to run the red light and hit you. It is very rare that happens. Because we understand and respect law in our society, when we see law that is not enforced, we begin to wonder whether we are a society of law, and some people decide it is OK for them to begin to break the law in little ways. It is corrosive, when you drive down the street you see people whom you presume to be illegal immigrants congregating around a hardware store, looking for work in the morning, or you hear stories about people being picked up. It is, frankly, hard to fool the American people. They know there are millions of illegal immigrants employed in the country today, and they don't like it. They don't like the fact that we can't control the border. It is corrosive to respect for the rule of law. They say: Gee, it is nice not to be able to pay your taxes. Maybe I would like not to pay my taxes, too. You don't want American citizens beginning to think the Government doesn't care about enforcing the law and that they should begin to disrespect and therefore not abide by the law. Yet that is exactly the kind of attitude that crops up when the Government is not careful about enforcing the law in a fair and just way. Unfortunately, we have a law today that is not easy to enforce. It requires employers' cooperation in ways that make it very difficult. One of the reasons we need to work our hardest to pass a new bill is so that we have a law that can be enforced. It will be up to us and to the administration, whatever administration is in power, to see to it that it is enforced, but at least it has to be something we can work with. When those who say: Let's just let the situation be by enforcing the laws today, that is the answer to the problem, my response is, the law today is very difficult to enforce and, as a result, we have to change it. That is one of the reasons for adopting a new law. Getting back to respect for the rule of law and recognizing the humanitarian aspects of this are two of the things that are not discussed enough. I appreciate the Senator from Colorado bringing them up.

Mr. KYL. Mr. President, the Senator from Colorado is here. He and I are in the unenviable position on a Monday evening of managing this bill for a little while. Senator Salazar will speak on behalf of the majority. I do think it is the majority's desire that no amendments be laid down this evening. We would like to get Members to come to the floor first thing tomorrow morning to begin laying down amendments, and we will work out an order for the amendments, voice votes and rollcall votes, and advise Members of when those will occur tomorrow. We hope to do that later this evening. We wish to encourage our colleagues to bring their amendments to the floor and get them pending after this evening, so that we can work as much as possible this week in getting the bill concluded. I have several things I would like to say in response to the Senator from North Dakota. Let me yield at this point to the Senator from California.

Mr. KYL

Mr. KYL. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that an article entitled ``Remembering Victims Key to Death Penalty, Executing Justice: Arizona's Moral Dilemma,'' by Steve Twist, be printed in the Record.

Mr. KYL

Mr. KYL. Mr. President, unless the Senator from North Dakota wishes to briefly respond to Senator Specter, let me speak for 3 or 4 minutes. I join Senator Specter in urging our colleagues to defeat this amendment. This is simply a light version of the amendment we defeated a couple days ago that would have eliminated the temporary worker program. The problem here is twofold. First, there has been a basic agreement that even though Republicans generally did not want to allow illegal immigrants to remain in the United States and, in some situations, be permitted to stay here for the rest of their lives, if that is their desire, and even get a green card and ultimately become citizens, there was an understanding that certain tradeoffs had to occur if we were going to get legislation. Part of the legislation does enable some 12 to 15 million people to have that right, as well as immigrants whose applications are pending, many of whom have no reasonable expectation of being able to naturalize, to actually be able to come here and get green cards and naturalize, perhaps some 4 million people. If we have a temporary worker program, which is part of what Senators such as myself were proposing to relieve our labor shortages, if that program is only in existence temporarily but these other benefits are conferred permanently, you can see that you have a significant imbalance in the legislation. Somebody said: What is mine is mine, and what is yours is up for grabs. In other words, one side pockets the ability of all the illegal immigrants to stay here, to get citizenship rights if they go through all of the process that enables them to do that, but the temporary worker program, which is desired by many in the business community and many foreign nationals who want the opportunity to come here and work, is only going to be temporary, and that might go away. That is not a fair way to proceed to the legislation, to have what you like is permanent, what I like is only temporary. But there is a deeper problem. The whole point of having a temporary worker program is to ensure we are going to meet our labor needs in the future. We don't know exactly what those labor needs are, but they are going to be substantial. If you cannot plan with certainty that you know you can expand your business, you can make the capital investment in whatever the business is--let's say a meatpacking plant--that you are going to need some foreign nationals to come here on a temporary basis with a temporary visa to meet the employment needs because you found in the past that there are not sufficient Americans who have applied for that kind of work in the past, so you know you are going to need the temporary worker program, but you don't know whether that program is going to be in existence in 5 years, are you going to make the capital investment necessary? Are you going to be able to provide more tax base, more employment opportunities for Americans, as well as others, provide for more consumer choice in the country if you don't know you are going to have the labor force necessary to meet your needs? Having a temporary worker program is not going to meet our long-term needs. As a result, I suggest that for planning purposes, for being able to know that labor pool is going to be available if we need it, we are going to have to have this temporary worker program. Therefore, there is not very much difference between simply eliminating the program now and saying in 5 years it is going to evaporate unless we take steps to reinitiate it. I urge my colleagues to vote against the amendment. We defeated an amendment a few days ago. This is a killer amendment. Everybody knows that if this program goes away, it undercuts the entire program we tried to craft in a bipartisan way. We have to relieve the magnet of illegal employment in this country. That magnet is jobs that Americans won't do. As long as there is an excess of labor demand over supply, that magnet for illegal immigration is going to continue to pull people across our borders. That magnet is demagnetized when we have a temporary worker program that says we now have a legal way for you to meet your labor needs. It can be done within the rule of law. It is based on temporary workers. We need to keep that in this bill. It cannot be subject to some kind of a sunset so that it disappears 5 years from now and we have no idea at that point how to meet our labor needs. I urge my colleagues, as we did 2 days ago, to reject the Dorgan amendment.

Mr. KYL

Mr. KYL. Mr. President, I have 1 minute of comments to make on the amendment of the Senator from South Carolina, and then I wonder if we can proceed with the possibility of three amendments being disposed of in quick order so that then the Senator from New Hampshire can begin with his amendment. Let me make my comments about the amendment offered by Senator Graham. I support this amendment because it provides a deterrent to future illegal immigration. While there are a great deal of statistics I would like to cite, in the interest of time, let me make this point. There is a very interesting operation going on right now in the Del Rio, TX, sector, in something called Operation Streamline in which they actually have the jail space available to detain, for up to 180 days, illegal immigrants caught coming across the border. This has been in operation now since 2005. Anyone caught entering the United States illegally faces prosecution under this particular operation unless for humanitarian reasons they need to be released. It has proven very effective in reducing the number of crossings in that area. The word has spread very quickly to people in Mexico that if they try to cross in this sector and they are caught, they are not just going to be returned home, they are going to spend time in jail. That totally disrupts their lives. They cannot afford not to be back working someplace, either in their own country or in the United States. As a result, the word has spread quickly: Don't try to cross in that sector or you are going to go to jail. As a result, I think the amendment of the Senator from South Carolina is very well taken. It will provide a deterrent for future illegal crossings into the United States. And that is what this legislation should be all about, the stopping of illegal immigration. So I support his amendment. Mr. President, if I may address the Senator from Massachusetts, would it be possible at this point to address three amendments that have been offered and dispense with them?

Mr. KYL. Mr. President, if I could interrupt my colleague to give a couple of bits of further information, the next opportunity for an amendment should be from the Democratic side. Senator Cornyn is ready to proceed with an amendment, and also Senator Hutchison has an amendment I think that is cleared on both sides that we could do by voice vote, when that is appropriate. But the next amendment should come from the Democratic side. My suggestion would be, while we are deciding the immediate future ahead of us, that Senator Alexander be allowed to proceed on a matter that is unrelated, and then we could go to the Democratic side.