Thread: Letter from Carper

Dear Mr. and Mrs.

Thank you for contacting me about our nation's immigration policies. I appreciate hearing your views on this issue.

Let me say from the outset, our immigration system is broken. We have some 12 million immigrants in our country illegally, with more arriving each day. While the numbers have slowed, last summer as many as 10,000 people came across our borders without permission every week, mostly seeking work. This is an unacceptable fact which fosters a black market in fake documents and criminal smuggling that one day may be exploited by those seeking to do harm to our nation. America needs to have control of her borders and, in recent years, we have not.

The majority of the 12 million here today entered our country unlawfully; however, some 40 percent of them did enter our country legally and then overstayed their visas. The burden they place on public hospitals, schools, and other systems is costly and, in many cases, unfair to legal residents and citizens.

Let me take a moment to share with you how I believe we should address these problems. It is clear to me what we must do first is secure our borders. Our border patrol personnel need to be better trained and provided the resources to succeed. We also need to improve our technological capabilities to better use unmanned aircrafts as well as sophisticated land-based surveillance systems that are effective 24 hours a day, 365 days a year to deter and catch immigrants crossing into U.S. territory.

I also agree we need to construct a combination of fences and walls along significant portions of the U.S.-Mexico border. In the past, I've supported legislation to authorize, fund and build hundreds of miles of fences and/or walls along our southern border where the Department of Homeland Security believes barriers of that nature would be cost-effective.

Another major problem we need to address is the lack of enforcement of our nation's laws against employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants. We saw the number of employers prosecuted under immigrant-employment law in the last six years drop by some 30 percent compared to the previous decade, while the number of immigrants coming here illegally continued to increase.

Under current law, employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants are to be prosecuted. And yet, one recent study found it was more likely for someone to get bitten by an alligator in recent years than for an employer to be sanctioned for hiring ineligible workers.

We must make sure employers have the resources to determine whether they are hiring ineligible workers and ensure that those employers who knowingly hire ineligible immigrant workers are prosecuted. One of the best ways to deter those who would come into America illegally is to make sure employers know that if they hire illegal workers, they are likely to get caught, and they are going to pay a severe price. Another excellent way is for us to develop and distribute, as appropriate, tamper-proof ID's incorporating bio-metrics and other similar technologies.

As you know, the Senate recently considered legislation to address our nation's immigration crisis. Immigration reform was a major domestic priority of President Bush. This summer, after weeks of contentious debate, on June 28, 2007, the Senate rejected, by a vote of 46-53, a motion to invoke cloture and effectively end debate on the immigration bill. Effectively, the bill is now dead in the water. I believe it has little chance of being revived.

The Senate bill would have provided an additional $4.4 billion in mandatory spending for border security and enforcement, including doubling the funding for hiring, training and deploying border patrol agents. Moreover, the measure would have authorized the construction of 370 miles of fence on the U.S.-Mexico border and the dramatic expansion of detention facilities where those entering the country illegally could be held until their deportation hearings, rather than simply releasing them on their own recognizance, never to be seen again.

The bill also would have strengthened worksite enforcement by improving systems through which employers verify a worker’s immigration status as well as increasing penalties against employers for non-compliance.

That immigration bill was not perfect, but it was a step in the right direction. It started to tackle serious immigration problems and represented a good-faith compromise. However, passage of a Senate bill would have only been the first step in drafting final comprehensive immigration reform.

In addition to significantly improving border security and work-site enforcement, we must also be realistic about how we address the 12 million illegal immigrants who are in the United States today. I can understand the views of many in our state who suggest that we simply deport people who are here in an undocumented status. Scarce funds and space at many publicly-funded hospitals and schools in Delaware and other states are badly stretched in many places to accommodate these men, women, and children. However, I don’t know how realistic it would be to deport some 12 million people to their native lands in a timely fashion. Such an effort may actually have the unintended consequence of driving some deeper into the shadows and make a workable solution even harder to eventually implement.

We need a sensible, practical solution that allows these 12 million to come forward without granting them amnesty. Amnesty is not the answer. It wasn’t the answer in 1986, when President Ronald Reagan and the Congress offered amnesty then, and it is not the answer now. Amnesty sends the wrong message to those people who have waited patiently for years to come into the United States legally. It says to them: “You are foolish for playing by the rules.â€

Do our senators think we are all idiots? I guess,just like the Illegals,if they say it long enough somehow it will make it true "our immigration laws are broken" Instead of the truth "Big business needs cheap labor so we have not enforced our immigration laws"!!

Guess we need to send a few more MILLION faxes & emails & make a few MILLION more phone calls.....

The most we can to achieve at this stage of the game is to hold them off until the next elections and then vote straight third party and independent.

It is a taking of the good with the bad. Few third party and independent runners are without their problematic eccentric idiosyncrasies however when compared to what is in office now the idiosyncrasies pale in comparison to the treason currently taking place.