Immigration Reform
Floor Speech
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Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
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Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. President, I would like to express my appreciation to Senator Chambliss. This is one of the least-discussed but more important parts of our bill, ag provisions. He has delineated weakness after weakness in this process. The idea is he had to strengthen the bill. I hope the people who have heard it would draw a number of conclusions. First, there are great weaknesses in the bill. Second, Senator Chambliss fully understands, though he has worked on this--I know last time we had a bill here--at great length and contributed in great detail to it. I think the third thing we ought to understand is this is a complex regime we are trying to set up. I am not sure the government can ever accomplish a setup of as complex a regime as the effort that has been made to create in this legislation.
I thank Senator Chambliss for his positive contributions, for his work. I know he has been a constructive advocate with Members on the other side, trying to improve the legislation. I thank him for sharing in depth the difficult and confusing parts of this law.
There are a lot of things we need to understand before we move to final cloture vote on this legislation. It is late. I hope people will pay attention. We need to understand accurately what is happening. I have been an advocate. I am sure in the times we are here, sometimes we have to respond at a moment's notice and we make a statement that is not entirely accurate. But I do believe the sponsors of the bill who came to us and claimed they had the toughest bill in history and that it was going to solve our problems had an obligation to be more accurate than they have been.
Sometimes they make mistakes. Some of the disagreements make a difference in whether the legislation is good legislation or whether it is bad legislation. It is just important. I would like to point out a few things that have been talked about a lot today.
One was recently one of our Gang of 8, Senator Menendez, made reference to the border security and the officers who have written a letter complaining about this legislation and suggested, somehow, that maybe it was before the border enforcement had been improved--promised to be improved, at least. But I think it evidences a misunderstanding of how our system works.
This is a letter from the National Citizenship and Immigration Services. These are not the Border Patrol agents, these are not the ICE agents, these are the people who process the claims for citizenship and they try every day to do the right thing and treat people fairly and equally and ensure that people wait in line and wait their turn.
They are not supportive of this legislation. They represent 12,000 USCIS employees, adjudication officers, and staff. This is the statement they issued:
The amended 1,200 page Corker-Hoeven immigration bill--
Not something previously, but the last bill we moved forward today--
if passed, will exacerbate USCIS concerns about threats to national and public safety.
These officers try every day to review these applications for visas and entry permits. They try to identify terrorists and not let them come in. They turn down people who don't qualify. They said this bill will exacerbate threats to national security and public safety.
They go on to say:
It will further expose the USCIS agency as inept with an already proposed massive increase in case flow that the agency is ill prepared to handle.
In other words, they are not able to handle the flow they have now and this is going to provoke a disastrous flow that will make them all look inept. They are correctly afraid people will say they let terrorists and criminals in the country, and they had no way possible to process these matters.
They go on to make a strong statement. These are people who serve our country and who are not allowed to participate in drafting the legislation.
The proposal goes out of its way to provide legalization for criminal offenders while making it more difficult for Adjudications Officers to identify threats to the nation's security in our ongoing war against terrorism. It was deliberately designed to undermine the integrity of our lawful immigration system.
I don't think our people deliberately wanted to have the system fail, but the people who have been writing this, if they wanted to make it tougher and tighter, would have written it a lot differently than it is now. It leaves these officers exposed and unable to fulfill their requirements to identify and block people who should not be admitted to the United States, and that was a very strong statement. It represents deep feelings by those officers.
They go on to say:
This bill should be opposed and the reforms should be offered based on consultation with USCIS adjudicators who actually have to implement it. Hopefully, lawmakers will read the bill before their votes. I say put a cork in it.
That is what they say to us, and that was on Monday.
Here is another statement from the ICE officers, these officers, headed by Chris Crane, their association union president. Chris Crane is a former marine. He is so articulate and concerned about this legislation. He has raised it time and again.
The ICE officers have filed a lawsuit against Secretary Napolitano because they say she has blocked their ability to do their duty and placed them in a position where the supervisory directions to not enforce the law deny them the right to fulfill their oath to enforce the law. They filed a lawsuit in Federal court attacking this. I have never heard of this.
This whole association, which consists of thousands of officers, filed a lawsuit against Secretary Napolitano and their supervisor. They voted no confidence in John Morton, their supervisor, 2 years ago, and he just retired a few days ago. An independent survey of government morale factors found that ICE virtually had the lowest morale rating out of 179 government agencies.
Two years ago I asked Secretary Napolitano: Would you meet with these officers? She refused to say so. I asked her again earlier this year. She has not met with them. Nobody wants to listen to the people who are required to enforce the law.
Who are the ICE officers? The ICE officers are the people who deal with interior enforcement and deportations. They identify people who are here illegally, and they deport them and go through the mechanism. They have relationships with prisons where they go by the prison and pick up somebody who is illegally in the country and who has committed a crime. They are the ones who get them deported. They arrest people--or at least supposedly they used to when they had jobs. They interfaced with local police.
They have been undermined in every way by this administration and kept from doing their job. That is a fact. That is why the morale is down, and that is why they have sued the government. That is why they oppose this bill. They were never listened to.
It cannot be the policy of the United States of America that if someone gets past the border of the United States, they are never going to be deported. It cannot be the policy that the only thing that counts is having a Border Patrol, but if they can get through, they are home free. There are not that many. I think there are 12,000 of these officers. There are not nearly enough to do the job already. They are getting no strength or support at all in this legislation.
I would note further that under the Congressional Budget Office analysis of this bill, which comports with what I have been saying for months, we are going to have a big increase in the amount of visa overstays. They are not going to be caught at the border. They are going to come in on a visa and never return. If we don't have ICE officers engaged in the effort, we will never be able to deport them.
We say, well, we are going to give legal status to everybody who is here. Let's say we give legal status to everybody who is here. What about the future? The people who are given legal status here will be given a Social Security card. They will be given a legal document that allows them to be in the country. ICE is not going to deport them. But what about those who come in the future? We are going to have no mechanism so they can be deported? That is one of the biggest flaws in this legislation.
I was a Federal prosecutor. I know about law enforcement. I did it for 15 years. If we don't help and have them engaged and utilize their ability, and treat them like second-class officers or citizens, we are not going to get the kind of legality the legislation promises--nowhere close. It is flawed. It should not pass. These officers tell us that correctly.
So the ICE officers are right. They said to us on June 24:
I urge you to vote no as this bill fails to address the problems which have led to the nation's broken immigration system and in fact will only serve to worsen current immigration problems.
It will worsen current immigration problems. That is their word. They go on to say:
Instead of empowering ICE agents to enforce the law, this legislation empowers political appointees to further violate the law and unilaterally stop enforcement. This at a time like no other in our nation's history, in which political appointees throughout the federal government have proven to Congress their propensity for the lawless abuse of authority. There is no doubt that, if passed, public safety will be endangered and massive amounts of future illegal immigration--especially visa overstays--is ensured.
They go on to say:
Abuses by political appointees, who currently pick and choose laws enacted by Congress will or will not be enforced, will escalate with their increased discretion and authority provided by this bill.
They say:
A vote against this bill is not a vote against immigration reform which we all seek, it's a vote against bad legislation and the special interests that wrote it; it's a vote to start this process anew and create reforms that truly fix the nation's broken immigration system.
How much clearer can it be? They are correct about this. Chris Crane is an
American patriot and his team is courageous. They have had to stand in there against an administration that issued this directive that basically required them not to follow plain law. What does this bill do? He indicated it right there. He said it gives even more discretion to the Secretary so she can issue even more directives undermining the law.
In fact, basically what the bill does is give more legal authority to the Secretary to do what she has been doing now, which is fundamentally, in many ways, contrary to law.
The Federal judge who is hearing this lawsuit the ICE officers filed explicitly stated at one of the hearings that the Secretary is not above the law, and that is certainly correct. She has been acting above the law by directing them not to comply with the law.
We are not saying we want the ICE officers to go out and round up everybody. Remember, if this bill passes, everybody will be given legal status--the ones who are supposed to be given legal status--and others will need to be identified. If they are not legally here, they will need to be deported. In the future, people who come in violation of the law will need to be deported also.
The Gang of 8 proposal adds four times more guest workers to our economy than a 2007 plan offered. It offers four times more guest workers than were offered by the 2007 bill that failed here--that comprehensive plan. This is at a time when 21 million Americans cannot find full-time employment. Imagine that. We have a much higher unemployment rate today than we had in 2007 before the bubble burst and we had the recession. We had virtually full employment in those days. Now we have high unemployment, which is a deep problem with employment in America today, and I don't think it is going to rapidly get better. For the last quarter of last year, growth of GDP was only .4 percent. The first quarter of this year has been revised down dramatically today to 1.8 percent. That means over half a year our growth is only 1.1 percent. That will not create jobs. It is not creating jobs. It is not enough to pull down unemployment in any way.
This bill is going to bring in huge amounts of new workers to take the few jobs being created. The bill also dramatically boasts permanent legal immigration. The permanent legal flow of immigration will increase substantially. Overall, it is conservatively estimated that the bill would legalize more than 30 million people--mostly lower skilled legal immigrants--over the next decade. It will be three times the current rate, and that is something I said originally.
I asked Senator Schumer, the Gang of 8 leader, at the committee: How many people will be legalized under your bill? Well, we won't say. I said again: How many? You offered a bill; you want us to vote for it. Can't you tell us how many people would be admitted? He refused to say. I said, 30 million over 10 years. The current legal flow would be 10 million over 10 years.
CBO came out with their report last week: 30 million in the first 10 years. Who was right about that? I mean, this is a big increase. Yes, it includes the people who are here illegally, but the annual flow is at least 50 percent higher than the current 1 million, according to the Los Angeles Times. I think that number comports with what we are able to calculate. So we are talking about a 50-percent increase in the annual flow of immigrants into the country with more coming in under chain migration. All of them will be able to work. All of them will be competing for jobs in the workplace at a time we are not producing many jobs.
What does the Congressional Budget Office say? I said for weeks this flow of labor had no other reasonable impact than to pull down wages of American workers.
What did CBO say? CBO said the same thing. Last week the Congressional Budget Office in their study used this chart--I didn't make this chart. This is one of the few charts CBO put in their report, and it deals with the question of wages. ``The average wage would be lower than under the current law over the first dozen years.''
This shows in 2025 coming back to catch up. But, still, if the bill hadn't passed, we would have had more increased wages, and we would have had a different picture altogether. So it is going to be a serious impact on working Americans.
Professor Borjas from Harvard talked about this. He has written papers about this. He has written books on the subject. He is, I am sure, the most authoritative person. He is an immigrant himself--not his parents; he is an immigrant. He says also that wages are adversely impacted, particularly in lower skilled workers.
So Professor Borjas basically said there is benefit to low-income workers. Who gets it? The companies that hire the most low-income workers because those companies will be able to hire more people at lower wages. Who will lose, he said, in this process? The many more people who are workers. That is who is going to lose. We can't bring in large increases in labor at a time of high unemployment and not expect labor rates to go down.
Is the free market crowd not aware of that? Are our Democratic colleagues who talk about protecting the worker not aware of that? How can that be denied? Professor Borjas said it.
The Atlanta Federal Reserve economists found a substantial reduction of the value of working people in the Atlanta region as a result of the current flow of immigration. They detect a clear reduction in wages as a result of the current flow of immigration, and this flow is much bigger.
We are talking about not only a 50-percent increase in the legal flow of immigration every year, meaning 15 million over 10 years as opposed to 10 million. In addition to that, we are talking about the 11 million who would be given amnesty and legal status. Then there is an additional 4.5 million people who can't come in right now because there is a limit of how many each year--a cap. Those are going to be accelerated.
Then we have a guest worker program. Senator Chambliss talked about the agriculture industry. There are all kinds of guest worker programs. The guest worker programs will double the number of workers who come in. They come for one reason, and that is to take a job. They will double.
So this is a huge impact on our wages in America. This country is not creating enough jobs to sustain that.
That hurts the 11 million who are going to be given legal status. That hurts the immigrants who come here legally and have legal status already. That hurts poor people all over America, particularly because so many of these workers are competing for the lower wage jobs.
According to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and Professor Borjas, the group who will suffer the most are African-American males. This is really a matter not to be disputed.
One in three high school dropouts doesn't have a job. One in two African-American teenagers is unemployed. Twenty-one million Americans who want a full-time job cannot find one. In the city of Detroit, one in three households is on food stamps. In Washington, DC, one in three children lives in poverty.
Senator Menendez, I think, confuses total wage growth with average wage growth. Remember, more workers will increase the total wages, so if we bring in 1 million people, yes, more wages will be paid, but the average wage would be lower.
If a person is a worker, what does that person want to hear? They want to hear somebody say: Oh, the economy is going to have more wages. Isn't that great. But I am going to have less because 30 million people-plus will be here added to the workforce and everybody gets less and I am supposed to be thankful about that. I am supposed to write my Congressman and say: Oh, great, thank you for passing a bill that increases total wages in America.
Give me a break.
How about this: They say that GNP is up. Senator Menendez said that. He said GNP will increase. We are hearing that repeatedly: GNP will increase. Well, of course, just like total wages will increase when we have 30 million, 40 million people added to the economy, GNP is going to increase some if we add large numbers of people to the economy. That is the total of goods and services produced in America. But what about the average person and their share of the economy? Will it go up or will it go down?
Look at this chart. It comes right out of the CBO score, right out of their book. This is 2013 and this is 2029. This is, I guess, 2032 where the lines cross. How many years? Well, over 29 years or 26 years. This bill, S. 744, would reduce per capital GNP by 0.7 percent in 2023, out here, and it stays below the line it would have been on had the bill not passed. This is below what would have happened if the bill had not passed. Passing the bill pulls down GNP per capita, making each worker in America less able to have a full share of the wealth of America. That is what that means. It is not right.
We have had people just blindly coming down here for days now and asserting boldly, without any serious economic data to back it up--except in 2033. This is out to 2033. They have had years way out there where they try to claim improvement. We need to be worried about our people now. We have people unemployed now, looking for jobs right now. We should be helping them. So this is important.
Finally, I will show my colleagues one more chart we need to focus on. This is one of the most stunning charts I have seen. I was shocked when my staff told me about it. It was part of the Congressional Budget Office analysis and debt projections for our economy for the next 10 years. They do that every year. They do updates every year. So in the early part of this year, they did a projection of employment for the next 10 years, and they projected what kind of job creation we would have over the next 10 years. Our CBO does it every year. It is not a new report, it is something they do normally. This is what they concluded: For the next 5 years, 2015 through 2018, while we are coming out of the recovery from the recession, they project we would create 171,000 jobs a month.
That is really not enough to reduce unemployment significantly. We ought to be creating 200,000, 250,000, 300,000, to begin to pull down unemployment. But that is what they predicted. But look at this: This is the second 5 years of their 10-year window. They project only 75,000 jobs a month. So our staff called them.
They said: Tell me about this.
CBO said: We are glad you called. We are glad you called because we have given a lot of thought to this. We have studied projections and data and the case for projections for slower growth in this period of time for mature economies. This is what we come up with as the best projection, using private sector information and other data, including Department of
Labor Statistics.
Well, from 2019 through 2023, we will be bringing in 75,000 jobs a month, with this bill. How can that not increase unemployment in America? How can that not create a glut of workers that pulls down wages and creates more unemployment?
I just don't see how we can possibly justify this large flow of workers without adversely impacting the salaries of American workers. I am not talking about the 11 million who would be legalized. I am not talking about those people because that is part of the agenda we have, to be a part of any long-term settlement of our immigration problem. I am saying in the future the annual flow, the monthly flow, will be more than we will be creating jobs here. That is a pretty stunning figure.
Mr. Peter Kirsanow, who serves on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and used to be on the Labor Relations Board, I believe, writes that this bill would have ``profound and substantial costs to American workers.''
He was participating in the hearings of the Civil Rights Commission. He said every witness there said that. Professor Borjas at Harvard, the leading expert in this area, has found that from 1960 through 2012, immigration has cost native-born workers an average of $402 billion in lost wages, while firms using workers such as this gained income. He goes on to say the impact of increased immigration from 1980 to 2000 resulted in a 3-percent decrease in wages for average native workers and an 8-percent decrease for high school dropouts. This is 8 percent. That means a lot of money.
He goes on to say: ``Immigration has its largest negative impact on the wage of native workers who lack a high school diploma''--a group that makes up, in recent decades, a shrinking share of the workforce. These workers are among the poorest of Americans.
He goes on to say: ``The children of these workers make up a disproportionate number of children in poverty.'' He concludes that, based upon census data, when we have an increase of workers in a specific field of 10 percent, we can have the employment rate fall. A 10-percent increase in supplied workers from immigration levels reduced the employment rate for African Americans by 5.9 percent. That is already.
My point is I don't see how anyone can say that anything like over the next decade, we are not going to see lower wages, more unemployment, and lower per capita GNP. Frankly, I think Borjas's analysis is probably stronger on that subject than CBO's.
We know this: The Federal Reserve Bank in Atlanta has done similar studies. These studies show things such as the average worker's pay being reduced by $1,500 a year, which is $120 a month.
My colleagues continue to insist that their promise is correct, that this bill would not provide welfare to those who are given legal status. But the facts show it is not correct. I just have to rebut that. I questioned that at the beginning. We now know their promise is not correct.
Immediate access to once legalized individuals--they will first have immediate access to State and local benefits.
Senator Rubio even proposed an amendment to the bill that would have eliminated that, but it was never voted on. So the bill we will be voting on does not change that at all. He knew that was contrary to the promises made.
Immediate access that will be given to those who are given this RPI provisional status to free earned-income tax credits is in the bill. I offered an amendment in committee to fix that. In other words, the earned-income tax credit, if a person makes below a certain salary and they are working and they have a family, they get a big check, sometimes $2,000, $3,000, from the Federal Government.
It is not a tax deduction. It is not a credit against future taxes. It is a direct payment to that individual in the form of a subsidy and a welfare payment and that is the way the CBO scores it--as a direct payment, just like any other payment of welfare to the individual because that is what it is.
They will get that immediately. I offered an amendment in committee. I do think--I think I incorrectly said earlier that the Gang of 8 Members voted against it. I do believe Senator Graham and Senator Flake voted for my amendment in committee, but it failed in committee. That amendment, to be offered tonight by Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, has been blocked and will not be voted on.
So if this bill passes, there will be welfare payments immediately to all 11 million who qualify, and large numbers of these individuals will qualify because they are low-skilled. Over half do not have a high school diploma, and they will be in that wage rate that qualifies for this welfare payment.
Also, within 5 years, 2 to 3 million illegal immigrants who are given legal status will become green card holders and/or citizens and become eligible for all Federal benefits. So a big chunk of them--2 to 3 million--will be put on a pathway to citizenship in 5 years and certainly legal status in 5 years.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator has consumed 30 minutes.
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Mr. SESSIONS. I ask unanimous consent, Mr. President, for an additional 2 minutes and I will wrap up.
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Mr. SESSIONS. I thank the Presiding Officer for his courtesy.
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