Cross-Border Trade Enhancement Act of 2016

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. CUELLAR. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Neal) and his staff for helping to put this together. I appreciate it.

I also want to thank the gentleman from Louisiana (Mr. Boustany) and his staff for putting this bill on a very fast-moving track.

And in particular, I want to thank my good old friend--and I say ``good old friend'' in a nice way--Chairman Kevin Brady. We go back to working together in the State legislature. We have been working in Texas on issues like this for so many years, and I certainly want to thank Chairman Brady for his work and the bipartisan staff for moving this bill quickly.

In particular, I want to thank my colleagues. Mr. Hurd over here, who has a lot of border and he has got a lot of ports of entry, I want to thank him for his leadership on this bill.

I also want to thank Beto O'Rourke, my friend from El Paso, who also understands, just like Mr. Hurd does, the importance of trade.

I thank our Senate sponsor, Senator Cornyn, who has done a great job on this particular bill.
The Cross-Border Trade Enhancement Act of 2016 is a bill that builds upon the work that Chairman John Carter and myself added in the appropriations bill back in 2013 and 2014 to ease the delays and improve the infrastructure at our Nation's land and sea and air ports of entry.

As has been said, trade and travel to the U.S. has been increasing for the last 10 years. In fiscal year 2015, our Nation saw 382 million travelers processed at the Nation's 328 land, sea, and air ports of entry. In particular I want to emphasize the land ports of entry. Over 80 percent of all of the people who come into the United States, all of the goods that come into the United States, come in through land ports of entry, and that is why this bill is very important.

As was mentioned a few minutes ago, $2.4 trillion of trade was processed at our ports of entry. And just as an example--and I know Mr. Hurd mentioned it; I know Mr. O'Rourke is going to mention it--in my port of entry, Laredo, for example, it is a small town of 250,000, but it handles 14,000 trailers a day of trade between the U.S. and Mexico.

If you look at the largest customs districts, you have L.A., New York, and then you have Laredo. So this bill is very important to Laredo and the rest of the border itself.

Despite this growing trade that we have at our ports of entry, CBP staffing levels have been stagnant. Back in 2014, the Appropriations Committee and Congress authorized over $255 million to increase the CBP workforce, which includes hiring 2,000 new CBP officers. However, they have been struggling to hire those 2,000 CBP officers due to attrition, but also due to the long time that it takes to hire those new officers.

The other part that is important is, if you look at the land ports of entry, for example, there are a lot of challenges--and I am talking about the southern and the northern ports of entry that we have. In fact, it would cost us about $5 billion in capital improvements to make sure that we do this work.

What are we doing in Congress? Well, we are adding about $146 million a year to meet this $5 billion that we need. So at this rate of $146 million a year, it would take 34 years to meet that $5 billion that we need. Therefore, the Federal Government is not going to add those appropriations.

I understand money is tight. We need to bring in the local government and especially the private sector to make sure that we address the undersized facilities, the outmoded technologies that we have, the officer safety issues that we have, and the long wait times that we have, which I call parking lots, because a lot of times these trucks are waiting in the middle of the bridge.

Therefore, on sections 559 and 560, what we did is we said we are going to bring the private sector in, and it has worked well in doing this. We have seen--and I think it has been mentioned, but I will mention it again. We entered into 29 of those stakeholder reimbursement service agreements, and we saw more additional processing hours to make sure that we moved 3 million additional travelers and almost 460,000 new vehicles.
Again, this is going to help us.

What does this bill do? This bill will help us expand that pilot program in many ways and authorize it for 10 years. This bill will limit the number of reimbursable service agreements that we have at the ports of entry, but, more importantly, it is going to allow us to hire CBP officers faster. I know the chairman knows this very well. Imagine if we have this. We have got to bring officers into the CBP faster, and this is what this bill will do.

So again, I want to thank the House sponsors, Kevin Brady, Chairman Michael McCaul, Mr. Hurd, and Mr. O'Rourke, and, of course, on the Senate side, Senator Cornyn and Senator Klobuchar for making sure that we did it and that we are doing it in a bipartisan way.

I ask that we pass this bill.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source