Transcript for May 28

SEN. HAGEL: Well, my friend, Jim Sensenbrenner, has not given all the story here as to what that bill does. Let’s start with a couple of the main points. Our bill is 730 pages long. The House bill is 255 pages long. The first half of our bill deals solely with enforcement. You put some of them up on the screen. It goes for hundreds of pages beyond that. So we do enforce the border, and we do things in addition to which you said, 500 miles of vehicle traps and so on. There are 60 subsections in our bill on what we would do with enforcement. In fact, our bill goes further than the House bill in some sections on enforcement.

Now, let’s get to the bigger issues after enforcement. In the first half of our bill is enforcement. Nobody questions enforcement. Amnesty, that’s nonsense. What Ronald Reagan did in 1986 was amnesty, “Unconditional, all is forgiven.” What Jimmy Carter did in 1978 with those who left this country rather than serve the country, “unconditional, all is forgiven.” That was amnesty. This is not amnesty, as you’ve already laid out some of the criteria that those who would qualify would have to go through. Not all of the criteria you laid out.

Let’s talk about the workers. For example, in the front page of The New York Times this morning, there’s a story about firefighters in the Northwestern part of the United States. It talks about half of the National Forest Service firefighters are immigrants, and probably most of those are illegal immigrants. The fact is, temporary workers—and by the way, the secretary of labor signs off on temporary workers. No temporary workers are allowed in this country unless he signs off or she signs off.

We need to deal with that. We need to deal with the 11 million to 12 million and, as you noted, those children. We can’t just defer that. This is not a sequential process. This is a process that must be comprehensive. All the pieces that we have in our bill—and yes, they are debatable and they should be debatable. Yes, they’re emotional, but they’re all part of what we’re trying to do in a wider view, wider sense of what is important to our, our country.

Let me talk about a couple of other things here. He talks about money. In fact, the Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Commission on Taxes both said—both came up with the same number, over the next 10 years the Senate bill would cost about $54 billion dollars. But what you don’t hear is they also said that the revenues coming in from that Senate bill would be about $66 billion dollars. So, yes, it’s going to take some resources, but actually the Congressional Budget Office says that our bill produces more revenues than it does expenses.

You can’t just let dangle out there for our country, for our national security, for our economics, for our fabric, our social fabric, those who are here illegally. They have broken a law, they must be dealt with, and we have a way to, to deal with them. Is it imperfect? Yes, it is. But when you asked the chairman the question, “What are you doing, Mr. Chairman?” he really doesn’t have an answer for that. “Well, let’s just fix the border first.” Well, of course you fix the border first. The problem with 1986 in that, in that bill, yes, it was amnesty. This is not amnesty. Second, we didn’t enforce our border. Third, we didn’t do anything about worker enforcement. We didn’t give any penalties or any structure to those who hire, the employers, their verification, those illegals, and we just let the rest of, of it drift. We have an opportunity now to restructure, recommit ourselves and do it right.

MR. RUSSERT: Congressman Sensenbrenner, when the president of the United States addressed the nation on this subject, you said, quote, “I think he doesn’t get it.” What doesn’t President Bush get?

REP. SENSENBRENNER: President Bush and my, with all due respect, my colleagues in the Senate don’t get the fact that Simpson-Mazzoli failed miserably 20 years ago. This bill is a repeat of Simpson-Mazzoli. First, let me say that the convoluted thing that Senator Hagel says is not amnesty really is amnesty, and former Attorney General Ed Meese, who was Reagan’s AG at the time, wrote an op-ed piece in The New York Times on Wednesday, said that at least Ronald Reagan was honest in calling it amnesty.

Now, what—the procedure that the Senate has done invites document fraud. That happened in ‘86 when illegal immigrants who were here for two years could apply for amnesty. Meese said that there was a huge amount of document fraud. The same construct is in the Senate bill. But the Senate also has got a provision in their bill that says that the immigration authorities cannot investigate beyond the piece of paper that the immigrant applies for amnesty on. So if the person lies on that application, there can’t be an investigation, and the government employee is subject to criminal investigation and liability if they try to investigate it on their own.

The other thing the Senate bill does, and I think this is really outrageous, is that it gives retroactive Social Security credit to illegal immigrants who are using fraudulent Social Security cards. That’s going to be an $80 billion to $100 billion-dollar raid on a Social Security trust fund that we all know isn’t very healthy. And what this does is that it rewards the illegal immigrants for the period that they were here illegally, work—and working illegally, not just in letting them stay here, but to dip into a Social Security fund that has got to be restructured if it is to continue to provide the benefits to people who have worked here and paid in all of their lives.

MR. RUSSERT: But isn’t it estimated that illegal immigrants have contributed over $400 billion dollars into the Social Security fund?

REP. SENSENBRENNER: And, and illegal immigrants can’t get Social Security numbers on their own, so either they contributed with a stolen Social Security number or a fraudulent Social Security number. And the fact of the matter remains is that the entire transaction was fraud and the Senate bill retroactively rewards that fraud. That’s not right.

MR. RUSSERT: Go ahead, Senator.

SEN. HAGEL: Well, let me, let me correct the chairman on a couple of points. The Senate bill puts into place a biometric identification card. Every alien, every immigrant worker must have a biometric identification card. That means you can’t get a job without it. It’s tamper-proof, fraud-resistant. And therefore, that starts to deal with some of the things the chairman’s talking about. He inconveniently forgets that.

The fact is, on workers, one of the things that we don’t talk much about is that we are essentially at full employment in the country today. Our current unemployment rate in this country today is 4.7 percent. That—any economist will tell you that’s almost full employment. The fact is, we have more jobs today than ever in the history of this country, all kinds of new jobs. Our bill deals with these, these worker visas, these temporary worker visas, both low skill and high skill.

One of the things that Europe did wrong in this years and years ago—and France is a good example—when they’re not dealing with the things the Senate bill’s dealing with, what you do is you perpetuate a, a lower class, a constant, a consistent, a permanent lower class. That’s part of the problems that the Europeans are having today. Our bill deals with that. You, you cannot perpetuate that lower class. So all of these things are, are part of what we have to deal with.

And I acknowledge, can we do something better in a conference? I hope so. That’s the whole point of a conference. But, but to just walk away from it and say, “Well, we’re going to enforce budgets—our borders first, and then maybe we’ll get to the rest of it,” we fail the American public. We fail those who sent us here not to resolve this problem. And I think the president’s right. I think the American people are starting to move in that direction, fix the problem. It will be imperfect.

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