Jon Kyl

Mr. KYL

Mr. KYL. May I ask my colleague a couple of questions with the understanding he retains the floor?

Mr. KYL. Might I ask further, the number that I have of the estimate of how much this is going to cost the American taxpayer over the next 5 years is $7 billion. Does that number comport with what the Senator from Oregon has?

Mr. KYL. And then what happened was in the Energy bill we adopted, we thought, well, if it was a good enough idea then, even though these mandatory provisions of the act expired in 2001, it would be a good idea to continue them, but the administration at that time, observing the fact that oil prices were going up now, came to the conclusion that the extension of this royalty relief was not necessary and, in fact, issued its statement of policy on the Energy bill on June 14, 2005, saying the President believes that additional taxpayer subsidies for oil and gas exploration are unwarranted in today's price environment and urges the Senate to eliminate the Federal oil and gas subsidy and other exploration incentives contained in the bill. So when the President made his statement about whether we should extend this mandatory royalty relief, he was saying at that time--this was in June of 2005, not quite a year ago; the prices were up but not nearly where they are now--but even at that level he was saying this provision is not necessary to encourage more exploration. Is that the Senator's understanding?

Mr. KYL

Mr. KYL. Reserving the right to object, I offer an amendment to that unanimous consent request which is that those amendments occur as identified but to be preceded by a vote on amendments that are in the regular order.

Mr. KYL. With all due respect, I think that is a bit of spin to say I am stopping the amendment process. On Thursday, Friday, Monday, and Tuesday, I asked unanimous consent to proceed to amendments. Democrats objected. The amendment following mine is the amendment of the Senator from Georgia. That is not on the list, either. What is happening is that the Democratic side wants to vote on certain amendments--most of which do not go to the heart of the bill-- and does not want to vote on other amendments. What we are saying is, we have a right to lay down amendments and vote on those amendments. I am happy to vote on every single amendment that has been laid down. But Members on the other side will not give me an opportunity to lay down another amendment. I have asked for that repeatedly. Unanimous consent has been denied. I asked the distinguished minority leader this morning. He said no, there would not be consent for me to even lay down the amendment I just got through talking about. So let's understand that the objections to moving forward are not on this side. They are on the other side. I simply ask for the regular order.

Mr. KYL. Mr. President, with all due respect, I think that question was pretty far off the mark. Mohamed Atta committed his crime before he could have been convicted of being a terrorist, and he obviously killed himself in the process. The time to apply this legislation to him is not after the fact but hopefully before the fact. The problem is that at the time he overstayed his visa, to our knowledge, he had not committed any other crime except perhaps forging some documents or making false statements to an immigration official-- something such as that. What I am saying is we have drafted this in a way that it would not have caught people such as Mohamed Atta because to do that would be to exclude others from the benefits of the legislation both the Senator and I agree should not be excluded. I am simply trying to say we have to be careful with the language because if we simply say--and I know the Senator from Illinois would agree with this proposition when he says we don't want to exclude just people who have overstayed their visas, and he gave the example of the student who overstayed a visa--I know he doesn't mean to include within that somebody such as Mohamed Atta because the reality is that is exactly what we have done here. If we could find some other way to add a provision that says if we have evidence to believe somebody is a terrorist, they would also be included, that probably would be a good idea, and we would both agree to do that.

Mr. KYL. Mr. President, it may well be that Mohammed Atta may not want to take advantage of the provisions of the act. That is speculation. Although these terrorists did take advantage of our immigration laws in many respects, we did not expect them to do that. We thought they would sneak into the country. Instead they filled out the forms and came in, many of them, with legal visas. I am not sure we can assume what he will do or what he will not do. Here is the point: Under the bill as drafted, only crimes relating to drug offenses, moral turpitude, and the conviction of five offenses totaling 5 years in prison would exclude someone from the benefits. That is why we have added the other elements which, by the way, I inform my colleague from Illinois, the conviction of a felony and three misdemeanors, are precisely the language from the 1986 bill. Those who think the 1996 act was unworkable and amnesty and not a good idea should be aware that all we are doing with respect to the criminal violations is taking that same language and putting it into this bill. We have had a good discussion of this amendment. I am happy to see if there is any way to further clarify the language that might get the Senator from Illinois to support the amendment. I want to get a vote on it. As I said before, I want also to be able to lay down the previous amendment which simply provides a trigger that before the temporary worker program kicks in, certain things we promised to do under the bill would have been done.

Mr. KYL. Mr. President, I note that under the regular order, my amendment is the first in line, having been offered on Thursday. These are subsequent amendments. It seems to me our colleagues would be willing to take up these amendments in the order they were offered. What is curious to me is why some amendments are more worthy than others to be voted on. Maybe it is that people don't want to vote on certain amendments because they are troublesome. But if the object here is to try to get this bill completed, then we have to agree on some fundamentals, and that is that all the amendments that have been offered ought to be voted on. It is logical they would be voted on in the order they were laid down. There is no reason anyone can give me why there shouldn't be a vote on the amendment I laid down and that that should not precede the other amendments. I consider mine at least as worthy as the other amendments, particularly because it goes directly to a point in the underlying bill, and to my knowledge, the other amendments, by and large, do not do that.

Mr. KYL. Mr. President, let me answer the question again by saying I know my colleague is a good lawyer, but you have to read the whole sentence. You can't read half of a sentence and drop off the last part of the sentence. It specifically says under section 217, 235, 238, or 240. It is not simply subject to a final order of removal. It is subject to a final order of removal under one of those four sections. The last section the Senator referred to is section 240. That is where there has already been a formal proceeding before an immigration judge, an order of removal has been issued, and it has been violated. Yes, the person is subject to a final order of removal because that person has already violated the judge's order. As to each of these sections, as I said, there is a specific reason why it is included and why it isn't merely subject to a final order of removal.

Mr. KYL. Mr. President, I appreciate the suggestion. I would be happy to visit with the Senator from Illinois who, as I said before, is a good lawyer and who understands the details of this to make sure we are denying the privileges of the underlying legislation only to those people whom we intend to deny those privileges to. I think we have a rough meeting of the mind as to who those people are. I will say, however, it does get difficult because when the Senator from Illinois says, for example, we don't just want visa overstayers to be caught up in this, as a general proposition, I agree with that. What that means is, of course, Mohamed Atta and many of his cohorts would not have been denied the benefits of this legislation because they simply overstayed a visa. The point here is it is hard to draw these distinctions and deny the privileges to people you don't want to get them and yet not sweep too broad a broom and preclude people you have no intention of denying the benefits to from participating in those benefits.

Mr. KYL. I would be happy to yield again.

Mr. KYL. Will the chairman of the Judiciary Committee tell us what those four amendments are?

Mr. KYL. I appreciate the suggestion of the Senator from Illinois. It is a usual legislative drafting tradition to say what you mean by referring to other sections of law and only those sections of law that you intend to cover. That is what we have done here. We have not referred to sections of law that would refer broadly to anyone who has overstayed a visa. Let me reiterate. The Senator asked about the court proceeding. That was the section 240 I referred to. That is specifically where there has been a proceeding. The others I mentioned I will reiterate again. The visa waiver: As the Senator knows, there are 27 countries where we have a relationship with a visa waiver. What that means is the individual, upon entering the United States, waives rights somebody under section 240 would not have waived because they do not even have to present a visa to the United States. They, in effect, agree as they come in, as a condition to the use of that provision, to be removable for violation of their visa. As I said, last year, according to our information, a grand total of 900 people were removed under that particular provision. This is not something on which we round people up and send them home. The expedited removal, sections 235 and 238--as I said, 238 is the removal of aggravated felons--and expedited removal under the provision the Department of Homeland Security has now established for other than Mexicans who come to the United States, for whom there is no detention space and who are being removed from the United States, are subject to this as well. To talk about what this problem is and why we are trying to solve it, you have 39,000 Chinese citizens in the United States illegally whom the Chinese Government won't take back. There are similar numbers of people from other countries, although I do not know of any quite that large. It is not a simple matter with people from countries such as this to take them to the Mexican border and turn them over to Mexico which obviously won't take them. They are not Mexican citizens. We don't have the detention space right now to accommodate about 165,000 other-than- Mexican illegal immigrants. The Department of Homeland Security has announced their streamlined procedure of expedited removal where it tries to get the country to take the individual back within a period of less than 4 weeks. They are trying to get it down to a couple of weeks. But as I said, many countries won't take them back. What happens is you end up with people we don't have a place to put. There is no detention space available. They are given an order to appear before the court in 90 days. Basically, they are released on their own recognizance and asked to come back in 90 days to the Department of Homeland Security and show up for their removal. They do not do so. There is no place to put them. They do not show up for removal, and they meld into our society. I doubt the Senator from Illinois is saying these--I believe it was about 165,000 such people last year--are people we should put on a path to citizenship. Those are the four categories of people we are talking about: aggravated felons, people who have already violated a court order, expedited removal, and a small number of visa waiver people. It does not apply to you simply if you overstayed your visa or if you came into the country illegally and, therefore, violated our law that says you are to present yourself at a port of entry. They violated that law. But merely coming into the country illegally is not covered by this amendment. So the roughly 12 million people, or however many we are talking about here, would not be covered by this; at most, perhaps, in the neighborhood of 300,000.

Mr. KYL. Because I advise you in advance I will object to setting aside pending amendments for consideration of further amendments.

Mr. KYL. Why don't I explain it, and then the Senator from Illinois won't have to keep asking questions about what it actually does. There are four different sections. One of them has to do with the removal of people where there has been a formal proceeding and the alien has been detained. That is section 238. There are probably about 20,000--well, probably more than that, but there is at least a minimum of 20,000 because many of those are other than Mexicans. We do not have the number for people, for example, who would be Mexican citizens. There are also formal proceedings before an immigration judge. This number of absconders is far greater. That is section 240. There are a lot more in that category, perhaps 200,000 to 300,000 people.

Mr. KYL. Mr. President, I am glad the Senator from Illinois asked the question. That was the second point I was going to get to. The first had to do with crimes, but I will be happy to leave that conversation and move to the absconders, as I said. ``Absconders'' is the word that is used to describe those people who have been ordered by a judge to leave the country because of something they have done--more than simply overstaying a visa--and have refused to do that. In other words, they have already demonstrated an unwillingness to comply with an order to leave the country. Obviously, part of the enforcement of all of this legislation depends upon our ability to enforce the law for people who are unwilling to comply with the law's terms. If someone has already demonstrated an unwillingness do that, it seems to me they should not be eligible. And let me go on to say that the suggestion that a simple visa overstayer is caught up in this is not true--not true.

Mr. KYL. Let me finish the discussion so the Senator will not have to interrupt and ask questions, please. Third, there are the situations where you have visa waiver countries where, because of the terms of the visa waiver, there has been a prewaiver of a right to contest removal, so there is no formal proceeding. There are about 900 removed under that provision per year. So this is not just visa overstayers. There are millions of visa overstayers, obviously. And finally the category of expedited removal, which is section 235, where an alien is detained until deportation. We don't have data on how many were deported but are still in the United States. These are categories of people where it is not simply violating it-- it is not coming into the United States illegally that triggers a visa overstayer. In fact, I am not sure we wrote this broadly enough because a visa overstayer such as Mohamed Atta--somebody from a country that does not have a visa waiver, from a country such as Saudi Arabia--would not be caught. So here is Mohamed Atta who overstays his visa, flies an airplane into the World Trade Center, and he would not, even under the amendment we have provided here, be precluded from participating in the program. What I am saying is I don't think we drafted this quite broadly enough, but it makes the point that merely overstaying the visa does not catch you up in this particular bill. So it is wrong to say all we have to do is overstay a visa and this amendment would catch you up. That is simply not the case. The number probably caught up in this would be in the neighborhood of 300,000.

Mr. KYL. I would be happy to.

Mr. KYL. Keep reading.

Mr. KYL. Mr. President, let me reclaim my time. The reason I said ``keep reading'' is because I just read to you under each of those sections, 217, 235, 238, and 240, the specific circumstances under which someone would be precluded from participating in the benefits of the bill. It is not, with due respect, as the Senator from Illinois said, overstaying a visa. You have to have been subject to one of these four specific sections. As I said, the first one is a visa waiver. There were 900 people last year who were removed under that. It wouldn't even include a person such as Mohamed Atta, as I said. I need to go back and try to fix the amendment with regard to that. Sections 235 and 238 are the expedited removal of aggravated felons and I am sure the Senator doesn't want to allow those people to remain. Section 240 is where there has been a formal appearance before an immigration judge and a person has specifically been ordered to depart and has not done so. It is simply wrong to say if you come across the border and stay here, or if you overstay your visa, you are caught up in my amendment. My amendment is much more specific than that and specifically only deals with those people you would not want the benefits to apply to.

Mr. KYL. Yes, I would be happy to yield.

Mr. KYL

Mr. KYL. Mr. President, before the Senator from Massachusetts leaves the floor, I wonder if I might ask him a question--if he would be kind enough just to respond to this, I hope. The Senator from Massachusetts was one of the prime participants in our Judiciary Committee markup and meetings. He was on the prevailing side of the vote which passed out the bill which we are now debating. I inform the Senator, by the way, it was my recommendation at the leadership meeting that rather than the leader's bill, the Senate judiciary bill be the underlying bill. The question I wanted to ask the Senator is this: The Senator is aware of the Cornyn-Kyl bill, which to some extent is a competitor of the bill that passed. That was rejected in the Judiciary Committee; that is to say, we lost that vote. The Senator was talking a moment ago about alternatives in the Senate, I believe. I don't think he would want to be misunderstood in this regard. He said there is no answer but to criminalize them. I know the Senator--I presume the Senator did not mean that in the Senate there has been nothing proposed except to criminalize the people who are here illegally because the Senator, of course, is aware of the alternative legislation Senator Cornyn and I introduced. Would the Senator at all like to comment on that?

Mr. KYL. Mr. President, if I could just ask the Senator from Massachusetts, I was not referring to the amendment which is pending on the floor of the Senate. I was referring to the Cornyn-Kyl bill, which is a comprehensive immigration reform bill that deals with enforcement at the border, enforcement at the worksite, a temporary worker program, a way to deal with the illegal immigrants different in ways from the bill that passed the Judiciary Committee but nonetheless is a comprehensive reform bill which was voted down. But it does represent an alternative on which we would like to have a vote on the Senate floor. I wanted to give the Senator an opportunity to acknowledge that in the Senate there are alternatives to criminalizing the illegal immigrants--if he wanted to?

Mr. KYL. I thank the Senator from Massachusetts. In the debate and characterization of things, sometimes we make a characterization and it might be subject to misinterpretation. It may well not have been, but in any event, I appreciate the Senator's clarification. I want to respond to several things that have been said here--first of all, to join the majority leader and the others who have spoken to the issue of the need for a debate and the ability to offer amendments and to vote on those amendments as a part of this very important legislative effort. I don't know that we will do anything more important this year than try to adopt comprehensive immigration reform. It is critical to my State. There are an awful lot of people in the State of Arizona illegally who do not enjoy the protection of the law, and should. Simply because they came here illegally, they should not be denied that protection. We need to find a way to ensure that in some way the status of everyone who works in and remains in the United States is in a legal status. It is also critical that we secure the border and provide an enforcement mechanism to ensure that people who work here work here legally. Let me divide my remarks in two pieces, if I could, first of all, to respond to something the Senator from Illinois, the minority whip, had to say when he was here. He noted there are about 200 amendments that have been filed. His point was it is hard to figure out which ones to consider. My point is this. If anything is certain, it is that if you do not start, you don't consider any of them. It is always the case that there are more amendments filed than are considered. But at least we start the process at the beginning of the debate. I laid down an amendment last Thursday afternoon. It is the pending amendment. This is Wednesday afternoon. Tomorrow it will be pending an entire week. It was the first amendment laid down. The other 199 followed it. We have not even gotten a vote on amendment No. 1 yet. To complain that there are 200 amendments out there and we just don't know where to start and it has been a whole week and we can't figure out where to start and that is why we are stopping you from voting on any of them doesn't wash. Let's be very clear. The reason the Democratic side has prevented us from offering amendments and from voting on amendments is because they don't want to vote on them-- period. It is not that there are so many they can't figure out which ones to allow a vote. They don't want to vote on them. Why? There are two reasons. The first is they like the bill as it is. That is a perfectly legitimate point. But that is always the case with one side or the other. But whichever side doesn't like the bill gets a chance to try to amend it. If the majority is right, that they have the votes, they can vote these amendments down. Senator Kennedy just spoke to the amendment that is pending. He obviously does not think it is a good amendment. He is going to vote against it. I think it is a real good amendment and it goes right to a point of the bill that is pending before us: should criminals be allowed to participate in the benefits of this legislation? I say no. That is an amendment that people do not want to vote on. I guess that is the other thing. Not only do a lot of folks on the other side like the bill as it is, and therefore they don't want to see it changed-- although that is not really a good reason for denying us a right to offer amendments--but I don't think they want to take a vote on some of these amendments perhaps because it is somewhat embarrassing. I am willing to concede that there are lots of drafting errors. I have made some including on this bill. So it is not always the way you want it to be. But including crimes of moral turpitude and drug crimes--whoever drafted the bill on the other side--they felt they had cut out criminals from participating in the program. The problem is, there are a lot of crimes besides drug crimes and crimes of moral turpitude. I read that list. I think it would be better to simply say we agree that we didn't mean for criminals to participate, and either table the amendment or again vote for it or vote against it, whatever. But we could have had that done with a long time ago. Instead we have spent a day debating on whether to vote on the amendment. As I said before, with all these 200 amendments you are never going to get any of them done if you do not start. The Democratic side has prevented us from starting. As the majority leader said, that is not acceptable. And for the minority leader to file cloture to cut off debate and cut off the filing of any other amendments, that adds insult to injury because then it says not only can't you debate this bill or amendments that are offered, but there can't be any other amendments offered. There is talk about some kind of compromise. Clearly, if a new amendment is offered there should be an opportunity to respond to that in some way, including potentially offering an amendment to it. It is very difficult because of the complexity of this bill to ensure that any amendment is germane. That is a term of art which you will hear in this body, but that is all you can do after cloture is invoked, and it is hard to do that. It is no simple proposition to say let's close off debate and finish the bill, whatever is germane. That is very difficult to do. Choking off debate with a cloture motion is done to stop filibusters. There hasn't been a filibuster. We would like to get a bill. We would like to have debate and vote on amendments and vote on a bill. Most of us in this body want comprehensive immigration reform. The reason I engaged in the colloquy with the Senator from Massachusetts is because we have two competing versions. His version passed in the Judiciary Committee; mine did not. Both are comprehensive. They both deal with border security, with security in the entire area of the country, including at the workplace with a temporary work program and with providing a new status for the people who are here illegally. They do that in different ways, but they both tackle the same comprehensive issue. It is a straw man that anybody on this side doesn't want a bill. It is also wrong to say that we can't start voting because we just do not know where to start. The reality is, we could have started and we should have started and this bill is not going to be completed until we start. There were a couple of things that the Senator from Massachusetts said that I want to clarify. One is there is quite a bit of derogation with the House position. While there are some things in the House bill that I agree with and others that I disagree with, I must say this is a very different picture of what the House stands for and what Republicans stand for than what has been portrayed. For example, I think there are probably many out there who believe the House bill stands for the proposition that we need to make it a felony for people to be in this country illegally. And since the House is controlled by Republicans, that must be the Republican position. Nothing could be further from the truth. I don't know of a Republican Senator, No. 1, who wants to have it a felony for a status violation of the immigration law or for crossing the border illegally. What happened in the House of Representatives? Representative Sensenbrenner, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said we need to take that felony status and change it to a misdemeanor. So a vote was taken. On that vote there were 164 ayes and 257 nays. The vote lost. So it remained a felony. Who voted against the amendment to make it a misdemeanor? Mr. President, 191 of the 202 Democrats voted against the amendment to turn the felony to a misdemeanor; 191 of the 202 Democrats voted to leave it a felony. The majority of Republicans voted to make it a misdemeanor. Let us stop denigrating the House of Representatives, and in particular the Republicans, by somehow contending that either Republicans, or the majority of the House Members who are Republicans, wanted this to be a felony. It was the Democratic Members of the House of Representatives who voted to keep it a felony. The majority of Republicans voted to make it a misdemeanor. We need to clear up some of the impressions that have been created around here because of very sloppy language. I will put it that way so I don't ascribe any bad motive to anyone. Part of that impression could have been created. That is what I was trying to correct with the Senator from Massachusetts a moment ago when he said that the alternative was to round them up and send them back and that there was no answer but to criminalize them. I appreciated what the Senator said because the Senate does not have a bill to criminalize the status of aliens, certainly not to make them felonies. And no one I know of has proposed an alternative to round them up and send them back. Everyone has agreed. I shouldn't say everyone because there are people who believe it is possible to somehow force all of the illegal immigrants to be returned to their country of origin. I think that is a very unrealistic option and that, therefore, it would not be appropriate to round up everybody and send them back. That is a false choice. There isn't a bill on the floor of the Senate today that does that. Why are these false choices presented as the only alternative to the bill that is before us on the floor? As I pointed out, there are several other choices. One was introduced by Senator Cornyn and myself, a comprehensive bill that doesn't round up everybody and send them back but criminalizes everyone. I think to engage in this debate we should engage with reason and without mischaracterizing things. There are good enough reasons to oppose each other's bill without mischaracterizing them. If I have ever mischaracterized anything--I hope I haven't--I apologize for it. The Senator from Massachusetts said something else that is very important. He said it was a necessity to have an incentive for illegal aliens to come out of the shadows, and the bill that he and others had crafted provided this potential for citizenship to provide that incentive. That is one approach. I disagree with it. But that is certainly an approach. But it is not the only approach. I want to go back to what most people have said about the people who are here illegally to illustrate a point. Most folks say they just came here to do work that Americans won't do. Let me stipulate that many--in fact, the majority--of the people did come here to work. There is no question about that. Let us not forget that between 10 and 15 percent of the people who are apprehended when they come here by crossing the border illegally are criminals. These are bad people. They don't just come here to work. They come here for illicit purposes. They are criminals and they need to be dealt with as criminals. That is between 10 and 15 percent. But there is another 85 to 90 percent who undoubtedly come here primarily to work, to earn money, mostly to send back to friends or relatives in their home country. So let us stipulate to that. Most of them did not come here to become citizens of the United States. As a matter of fact, Senator Hutchison pointed out something which is very true. If you know one thing about Mexican citizens, it is that they are very proud. They have a beautiful country. It is actually a wealthy country. Their culture is a tremendous culture and they are very proud of it. They are very patriotic and nationalistic. I think it is a bit odd that we--not me but many here--just assume that they all want to be citizens of the United States. Many want the ability to be here permanently, to reside here and to work here permanently, if that is their choice and they have green cards for that reason. Many other people from other parts of the world have green cards but don't choose to become citizens. That is fine. But we shouldn't presume that everyone wants to be a citizen simply because they came here to work. The other fallacy is they came here to do work that Americans won't do. I think you have to amend that slightly to say that they came here to do work that Americans won't do at the price that people from other countries are willing to do it for. In fact, there is a lot of work that Americans are willing to do, if the work is there, that people from foreign countries are doing today side by side. I mention the construction industry as a good example because in my State of Arizona it is hard to get enough good construction workers. There are many thousands, tens of thousands or more, working in construction that are illegal. I would quickly grant them temporary permits to work in the United States in construction. We need their help. But I also know that in the field of construction there have been many times when a very well-qualified American citizen construction worker can't find a job. It is very cyclical employment. What we don't want to do is assume that all of the people who came here from another country came here to do jobs that Americans won't do and, therefore, there will always be a job for them because Americans will never do the work. Americans will do this kind of work. They will do it gladly. They don't want to do it for free. They do not want to do it too cheaply. But there aren't very many jobs that they will do for a pretty cheap price. If the jobs aren't there, obviously the reason we have a temporary program is to issue a temporary permit while the job is there, and when the work returns you can start issuing more temporary permits. One of the problems with the underlying bill is you convert all the temporary permits into permanent legal residency and then you have no ability to ask anyone who is a guest here to leave because they have a right to stay here permanently even though there is no job for them some years in the future. The point is, it is true that you need an incentive for illegal immigrants to participate in a legal program. All of the bills have different kinds of legal programs. The Cornyn-Kyl bill has one; the bill on the floor has one. We provide a lot of incentives and some disincentives. You can stay for up to 5 years under our bill. Nobody is rounded up and deported. You can stay for 5 years. One reason that number was fixed was because the survey of over 35,000 Mexican citizens who are illegal immigrants said if they could stay for 5 years and participate in the guest worker program, 71 percent of them said they would then return home. I don't know that they all would. I think it is totally wrong to assume they all won't. There is an incentive to stay here for 5 years. You can also participate in a temporary work program when you go home. The sooner you go home the longer you can participate in that program. You can build a nest egg and take that back with you when you leave. There are incentives in our bill as well. It may not be the incentive of citizenship. I don't think you have to have that incentive in order to, as the phrase goes, bring people out of the shadows. Different people can argue about this. Reasonable people can differ about all of these things. I am willing to listen to the debate on the other side. But I would ask a favor in return. Just as we allowed the bill to be passed out of the Judiciary Committee, as the Presiding Officer is well aware--and we didn't filibuster the bill there, though it could have been filibustered--we allowed it to pass out knowing that it would pass over our votes. We had an alternative. It didn't have the votes to pass. We would like an opportunity to vote on that alternative on the floor of the Senate. Is that too much to ask? We would like an opportunity to vote on about five amendments. I am speaking now for Senator Cornyn and myself. That is all. We boiled it down to just five along with our underlying amendment. I would like the opportunity to do that. When we debated the energy bill, I think the comment was there were over 70 amendments, and these were significant amendments. This isn't like the amendments to the budget bill. I think there have been two relatively insignificant--well, one good--I won't characterize them. There have been two amendments voted on. The authors, I am sure, thought they were all significant. But the bottom line is nothing has gone to the heart of the bill one way or the other until that debate occurs and until those amendments are allowed to be offered and until they are allowed to be voted on. It is unfair to think that we could just shut off the debate, have one vote on final passage and be done with it. I will say this because there is another Member of the minority here. I have another amendment that I have repeatedly tried to lay down. All it does is say with regard to the temporary worker program that before that program actually starts, the mechanisms be in place for it to work. The experts say that it takes about 18 months. You can start getting ready for it. You can put those mechanisms in place, and the minute they are ready, the program can start. You might disagree with the amendment, but it is not an unreasonable amendment. There are a lot of folks who say: How can we trust you to have a workable program? And the answer is, watch us. We will create it. The sooner it is ready, you can start your program. That is the kind of thing we are talking about. I don't think they are unreasonable. I appreciate the indulgence of my colleagues, but I wanted to clear up some things. You can't finish the voting until you start the voting. We need to start it. There are legitimate amendments. Nobody is filibustering. Let us get on with the process so that we can conclude this important piece of legislation, get the bill to the House of Representatives, and hopefully be able to say at the end of this year that we were able to tackle and to successfully resolve the most difficult issue domestically facing this country today, the problem of illegal immigration. I thank the Chair. While the Senator from Maryland is present, allow me to congratulate her on her Lady Terps who in the first half didn't look like they were going to pull it out but came back like the champs they are.

Mr. KYL. There was a misunderstanding.