Securing America's Borders Act--Continued

SECURING AMERICA'S BORDERS ACT--Continued

Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I have been advised that amendments are not being accepted at the moment, so I will withhold it until the appropriate time. I ask unanimous consent to speak to the amendment so that my colleagues will be apprised of its contents.

The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Illinois.

Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, last December, Senator Brownback of Kansas and I went to Africa and went to a part of Africa I had never visited before. It is a part most Americans are not familiar with. It is called the Democratic Republic of Congo. We have known of it throughout history as the Congo. It is a huge expanse of country, with its capital of Kinshasa in the western part of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and then in the far eastern regions is a section of the world that has been hit hard time and again by devastating loss.

In the area around Goma, in the eastern part of Congo, a few years ago they were hit by a volcano that left 2 1/2 feet of lava in this poor town, destroying most of the buildings that were there. They have been victims of disease, of all of the trappings of poverty, which we are aware of in the continent of Africa, while at the same time there has been an ongoing war, which has killed so many innocent people. It is amazing, the resilience and the courage of the people in east Congo.

Senator Brownback and I went there because we had heard that, with little fanfare in the West, 1,000 people a day were dying in this part of the world from all of the different events I have just noted. We went to a hospital in Goma, which is known as the Docs' Hospital, run by a Protestant church, in an effort to provide some basic health care in the Congo. We met with some amazing doctors who work for the Government of the Congo.

Some of you who are fans of the ``Oprah'' show from Chicago may know she has focused on a problem they are addressing which is known as obstetric fistula. This is a terrible injury a woman sustains when she is either sexually assaulted or at too young an age goes through a prolonged labor before delivering a baby and has problems that can be very devastating to her personally. So many of the women in this region of the world come to this hospital in Goma in the hopes of a surgery. There is a very modern surgical suite there financed by the United Nations but very few doctors. They have one surgeon.

I asked the doctor who was there: How many doctors do you have in this region of the world for the people who live here?

He said: We have 1 doctor for each 165,000 people. One doctor.

I said: How many surgeons?

He said: Oh, that is hard.

He did a quick calculation, and he said: I believe we have 1 surgeon for every 3 million people who live here. There is 1 surgeon for every 3 million people.

Imagine if we only had one surgeon for the city of Chicago. That is comparable in terms of numbers.

I talked to him for a while about this challenge and the fact that there are not nurses and doctors and surgeons necessary to treat these poor people. He talked to me about some of the challenges they face, not just the matter of being paid by the Government, if you are lucky--no more than $600 a month--but also the lure of the West on these doctors.

We need doctors desperately in the United States. I represent a State with rural communities that are anxious to bring in doctors. We are not really that picky when it comes to their national origin. If they are competent, well-trained doctors, they will take them from anywhere in many of the small towns I represent. My State is not unlike many other States. But what we find here is this situation where our immigration laws are written in a way to attract doctors from those parts of the world most in need of doctors at the present time. So as Africa and Asia and other parts of the world deal with the global AIDS epidemic and terrible medical problems such as tuberculosis and malaria, the doctors who could successfully treat the people living there are lured from those low-paying jobs in desperate circumstances, with limited medical facilities, to the very best opportunities in the United States.

I thought about that as I flew back from Africa: What is the fair thing to do? We need doctors in the United States, that is for sure, but they desperately need them in the developing parts of the world, and we are luring these doctors away. We are draining away this medical talent from a part of the world that needs it the most.

I am going to be offering an amendment later on to this immigration bill, and the purpose of this amendment is twofold.

First, it would require health care professionals and medical and nursing students who are applying for legal permanent residency or a temporary visa to attest whether they have committed to return to their home country. I believe that is important because if someone, for example,

in Congo has their surgical residency--it costs about $50,000--paid for by the Government of the Congo with the understanding that they will stay and serve for a certain number of years, we should honor that contract. I think that Government has gone out of its way to provide the most basic need of every person on Earth--medical care--and for the United States to step in and say: We will ignore that commitment you made to the Government that paid for your education because we want you to come to the United States I believe is wrong. So this amendment would say that we have to honor those commitments made by those who said: For the cost of my education, I will work for a year or 2 years or 3 years in the country that paid for it. That is No. 1.

No. 2, with this amendment, we would allow doctors and nurses who are legal permanent residents to return temporarily to help countries of citizenship or to reside in certain developing countries to work as health care professionals. What that means, of course, is if you are here in the United States as a legal permanent resident, you can return to a country that is desperately in need of doctors without jeopardizing your right to come back to the United States. So those who feel a special bond with their home country can go in a medical crisis, help the people, and then come back to the United States without penalty.

These are two changes which are not massive but are important because they address, first, keeping your word. If you say: I will help the people of this country if you pay for my medical education, you should keep your word, and the United States should not ignore the fact that you have made that promise.

Secondly, if you are here in the United States and want to return to help people in some of the poorest parts of our world, we should say we want you to do that. It is a compassionate decision on your part that we will honor and not penalize you for in terms of your legal residency here in the United States.

I believe this amendment addresses two aspects of the problem that are important, but as I reflected on it, there is much more to this.

Why is it that we bring in so many medical professionals from other countries around the world? The obvious answer is we are not graduating enough doctors, we are not graduating enough surgeons, specialists, nurses, health care practitioners, to meet the need in the United States. So in addition to keeping an eye on the needs of the world, we need to focus our attention as well on the needs of the United States. That means in the bills that we are considering relating to education and scholarships, assistance and encouragement, we need to put in place programs which will help these health care professionals complete their education in the United States.

Now, what does that mean? Let me give you one illustration. I was born in East St. Louis, IL. I am very proud of my hometown. It was a blue-collar town. It has gone through some extremely tough times. Just 2 weeks ago, I returned to East St. Louis Senior High School, which is six blocks from where I grew up. We met with students to talk about a number of things.

A group came up to me afterward. These were six male students at East St. Louis Senior High School, and they said: Senator, we want to talk to you about our school.

I said: Sure. What do you want to talk about?

They said: Why is it that at our school in East St. Louis, the students don't have personal computers, and yet, just up the hill in Belleview, they do? Why is it that in our school we don't have the equipment in our chemistry lab or our physics lab that we need to really learn these subjects, while in schools just a few miles away they do?

The answer is obvious: It is the way we finance education in America. There are school districts that have and school districts that have not and, sadly, in many respects, East St. Louis is one of those school districts that do not have the basics when it comes to some of the equipment they need so their students can be well trained.

If we are serious about having enough doctors and nurses and health care professionals, we have to be serious about the education we provide for the students across America. I believe we are falling dreadfully short.

No Child Left Behind tests students across America to find out where they are deficient, where they are falling behind. That is a good thing. Kids hate to take tests; I always hated to take a test. But if you can't measure it, you wonder if there is real value. In this situation, a test at least tells you whether a student is progressing. Equally important, the tests are divided in schools, so it isn't just the average score you are reading; you will read the score for majority students, minority students, those who are special education students, those who are taking English as a second language. You may find that the average score is comforting, but when you break out the groups, there are some that need extra attention, extra help.

The problem is that the President encouraged us to pass No Child Left Behind, which tests for and identifies the problem, but then the administration refuses to send resources to deal with it. So now we have school districts testing kids right and left, coming up with results, some of them being labeled as failing schools, and they turn to us and say: Well, will you give us a helping hand? You put mandates on us, such as treating special education students, and instead of providing 40 percent of the cost of that education as you promised, you are only providing 18 percent. And now you identify students within our schools who are falling behind in testing, and yet no resources come forward--resources for smaller classroom sizes, resources for tutoring and mentoring, resources for afterschool programs and summer programs.

So if we are serious about being competitive in the 21st century, if we are serious about producing the health care professionals and engineering specialists and scientists we need to make sure we are competitive in this world, we must be serious about education at East St. Louis Senior High School and every school across America. We must focus our resources on America. A strong America begins at home, and it begins at home with our schools. It has been the ladder for generation after generation in America.

As I stand here, we spend $2 billion a week on the war in Iraq. I voted for every penny for it. Although I voted against the resolution to go to war, it was my feeling that if it were my son or daughter in uniform, I would give them everything they needed to come home safely with their mission accomplished. But it is an expensive undertaking with no end in sight.

We decided--the President decided--that for our national security purposes, we would have to shoulder this burden of $400 billion. That is what the war has cost us to date, approximately. I will leave here in a moment and go to the Senate Appropriations Committee, where we have been asked for another $100 billion for the war in Iraq. I am confident it will pass quickly with bipartisan support. But if we are coming down to the basics in America, we have sacrificed things we need in our country in order to strengthen the country of Iraq. We have put billions of dollars on the plate for hospitals and schools and infrastructure to rebuild this country, while America has fallen short in many of the same areas.

So when we deal with this amendment on the future of health care in the world and in America, we need to focus on fairness when it comes to immigrants, health care professional immigrants from other countries. We need to create opportunities for health care professionals to help in other countries, but we need to focus resources in America on making us strong as a nation right here at home. That means strengthening our schools, demanding of our kids that they not only do well on tests but stand by them to help if they are not doing well so they can improve and do better on the next test, and make a commitment as a nation for that to happen.

According to the World Health Organization, Africa loses 20,000 health professionals a year. It is part of a brain-drain. The United States is the largest consumer of health care professionals from some of the poorest places in the world, followed by France, Germany, and Great Britain. In the United States, we deal with rural and inner-city health care shortages, which we need to continue to address.

But we understand now that many nursing schools have long waiting lists of qualified applicants. We don't have the capacity in many of our schools--nursing, medical schools, and the like--so we need to expand that base within our own country to produce those who can teach and those who can learn to serve us in medical professions in the years to come.

Let me give an example of another country aside from the Congo, which I mentioned earlier. Ethiopia has only 3 doctors for every 100,000 people and 20 nurses; 3 for every 100,000 people. In the United States, we have 549 doctors for every 100,000 people and 773 nurses. Yet according to Ambassador Randall Tobias, who has been confirmed as the U.S. Director of Foreign Assistance, there are more Ethiopian-trained doctors in Chicago than in the country of Ethiopia.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, which I mentioned earlier, there were severe shortages of doctors and medical professionals at a time when those areas were desperately fighting the global AIDS epidemic. In Zambia, nearly a quarter of the adult population is infected with HIV/AIDS. But Zambia has lost over 90 percent of its doctors who graduated from medical school in the 1980s and 1990s and emigrated out of the country to the West and to Europe.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recently said:

HIV/AIDS is not only a human tragedy of enormous magnitude, it is also a threat to the stability of entire countries and entire regions of the world.

We must make certain that we have the resources available through the Global Fund, through our PEPFAR appropriations, as well as appropriations to USAID and other agencies. But we also have to make certain that when a country overseas that is battling disease, that is trying to provide the most basic health care for its citizens, is doing its best, we should not be luring away their health care professionals who promised they would stay. I think we can extend America's health care capacity. We can do it with a strategy that includes good education for our children, focusing on math, science, and critical languages but also making certain our professional schools can generate the doctors and nurses we need.

Today, with this amendment, we would take two modest steps in the right direction by passing the amendment to require would-be immigrants to fulfill pledges of service and to offer members of the Diaspora community who are working here a chance to share their badly needed skills. Imagine living in a country with 3 doctors for every 100,000 people. Then ask yourself what can we do about it. This amendment is a start.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Senator Kennedy be recognized as the next Democratic speaker for up to 30 minutes.

The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. DURBIN. Let me commend the chairman of the Judiciary Committee. It is the hardest working committee on Capitol Hill. I am glad I am on it. I look at others and they seem to have a lot of time off and we don't. I am a member of that committee. I respect the chairman for all we have done and tried to do in a short period of time.

Let me say to the chairman that I am troubled by one of his comments during the course of this conversation. That was the comment that what Senator Kyl seeks to do would improve the bill. I would suggest to the chairman that a careful review of the Kyl amendment will find that it defeats the purpose of a major portion of this bill.

If that is the intent--to strip from this bill a path to legalization--then I think it is a much different bill than the one which we approved 12 to 6 out of our committee, a bill which the chairman supported and which I supported on a bipartisan basis, and which Senator Kyl of Arizona opposed.

Let me be specific. The Kyl-Cornyn amendment which they are seeking to bring to the floor eliminates the path to legalization for potentially millions of undocumented immigrants who have committed no crime. It eliminates it from this bill. It creates a condition for qualification to be eligible for that path that would be, frankly, impossible for many to meet. Let me tell you what I mean.

I ask the chairman if he would still believe this improves the bill. Proponents of the Kyl-Cornyn amendment claim that the Judiciary Committee bill would allow criminals to become permanent residents. I think the chairman knows, as most people do, that the bill expressly lays out in specific words those crimes which would disqualify a person from a path to legalization. I could go through this long list, but I will not, other than to tell you that every crime of moral turpitude, and many others, would disqualify one from this legal pathway.

What the Kyl-Cornyn amendment really does is undermine the earned citizenship program in the bill. It prevents potentially millions who are in the United States from applying for legal status because of status violations and not crimes. The vast majority of undocumented immigrants who would be affected by the Kyl-Cornyn amendment are not criminals but rather the exact classes of immigrants which we intended to help with title VI of the Judiciary Committee bill.

Our analysis of the Department of Homeland Security data shows that over 95 percent of the people who would be affected by the Kyl-Cornyn amendment have committed no crime. The only crime they have committed is the fact that they are undocumented in America today.

I ask the chairman how it would improve the bill to remove the path for legalization for 95 percent of the people who would be affected by the Kyl-Cornyn amendment. If the Kyl-Cornyn amendment passes, the United States will still have a crisis of illegality, and we will not have what we hoped in the committee, a balanced approach which allows those who are currently here a long, arduous but legal way to reach their citizenship at some point in their lives.

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