Thread: S.330 immigration bill introduced today in Senate

S. 330 introduced Jan. 18, 2007 in the Senate by Johnny Isakson seems to be an alternate proposal to S.9 (the McCain/Kennedy mega-amnesty bill), which has not yet been released.

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/F?r ... 0BhzKEV:e0:

Comments from Congressional Record, S754-756:

By Mr. ISAKSON:

S. 330. A bill to authorize secure borders and comprehensive immigration reform, and for other purposes; to the Committee on the Judiciary.

Mr. ISAKSON. Mr. President, I am pleased to rise today before the Senate. This is an issue this Senate visited 9 months ago in the month of May. Nine months ago, the Senate tackled what I submit is the most important domestic issue in the United States of America and in every State. That is the issue of legal immigration and illegal immigration.

In that debate of what became known as a comprehensive immigration reform bill, I submitted an amendment that ended up being amendment No. 1. The amendment simply said that before any provision of this act that grants legal status to someone who is in America illegally takes effect, the Secretary of Homeland Security will certify to the Congress that all of the provisions of border security contained in the bill were funded, in place, and operational. It become known as a trigger--and it was a trigger--because the immigration issue is not like when you can never figure what is the chicken, what is the egg, and what came first. There is no way to reform illegal immigration unless you first stop the porous borders we have and the flow of illegal immigrants. But to do only one without the other is a terrible mistake.

The result of last year's debate was the Senate passed a bill without the trigger that granted new legal statuses. Although it provided for the authorization of border security, it did not provide for the guarantee of border security. The House reaction was, we want border security only, and the debate to this day between the House and the Senate has been the Senate is for comprehensive reform and the House is for border security only and never the twain will meet. The twain must meet. It is the No. 1 domestic issue.

I come to the Senate today to introduce a major immigration reform bill that is the bridge from where we are to where we must go. For a moment, I will discuss the provisions of that proposal.

First of all, it contains the trigger. It predicates any reform of immigration that grants legal status to someone here illegally to be noneffective until we have first closed the doors to the south and to the north. It provides for all the security measures the Senate passed last
year--and they are 2,500 new port-of-entry inspectors, 14,000 border inspectors, trained and ready to deploy, $454 million for unmanned aerial vehicles to give us the 24/7 eyes in the sky essential to enforcement on our border, authorization and ultimate appropriation for those barriers and those fences and those roads that are necessary for our agents to patrol, 20,000 beds for detention, to end the practice of cash and release.

When I came to the Senate 2 years ago as a Georgian and one who loves the outdoors, I thought ``catch and release'' was a fishing term. I found out it became a border term, where we would catch people, tell them to go home, release them and they would wait for us to leave and come back again.

We must remember the reason we have this problem is we have the greatest Nation on the face of this Earth. We do not find anyone trying to break out of the United States of America. They are all trying to break in and for a very special reason: The promise of hope, opportunity, and jobs. But we must make the right way to come to America be the legal way to come to America, not the ease of crossing our border in the dark of night under some other cover.

Lastly, an integral part of border security is a verifiable program, where
America's employers can be given a verifiable ID by someone who is here legally that verifies they are who they say they are. The biggest growth industry in the United States of America on our southwestern border is forged documents. We have a proliferation today of forged documents, where illegal aliens have legal-looking documents and we have a customs and immigration system that cannot tell an American farmer or an American employer that, in fact, the document they were shown is, in fact, right or wrong. That has to be fixed.

Once those provisions are in, we have a secure border. Interestingly enough, it takes about the same amount of time to put in the barriers, get unmanned aerial vehicles in the air, train the border security and port-of-entry people as it takes to get the verifiable identification system in place. We know both will take about 24 months.

When we have the trigger, it does not protract reform, but it precedes the implementation of what is going to take 24 months to do anyway. And all of a sudden we have a new paradigm in America. Those who want to come here realize the way to come is the legal way, not the illegal way. They learn there are consequences to coming illegally and employers know when they get an ID they can either swipe it on a computer or they can go up on the Internet and code to customs and immigration and find out that person is legal. The paradigm changes, and then the hope and opportunity of reforming legal immigration in this country can become a reality.

I am not an obstructionist to doing it. In fact, if anything needs to be done, we need to reform the legal system because we almost promote, through the rigidity and difficulty of legal immigration, coming here illegally because we are looking the other way on the border. We have a historical precedent.

In 1986, we reformed immigration with the Simpson Act. We granted 3 million people amnesty, said we were going to secure the border and didn't. Today, we have 12 million because we did not secure that border. That can never happen again.

Second, if the border is secure and we give people who are here illegally but are lawfully obeying the laws a chance to come forward, we can identify who is here who is not a problem.

And you, also, leave open, for those who do not come forward whom you must concentrate on, to see to it they are not here for the wrong reasons and they go home. But you can never enforce the system internally before you first close the external opportunity to come through illegal immigration.

Mr. President, in May 1903, Anders Isakson came through Ellis Island because of the potato famine in Scandinavia. In 1916, my father was born to him and his wife, Josephine. My father became a citizen of this country because he was born on our soil. In 1926, my grandfather became a naturalized citizen of the United States of America.

In my home today, framed and hanging on the wall, are his naturalization certificates from 1926, when he raised his right arm and pledged his allegiance to the United States of America. There is no one who has greater respect and greater joy in the promise of this country and the opportunity of immigration. But we must begin restoring the respect for legal immigration and shutting the door on illegal immigration, or else those lines become blurred, and the stress we have on our social service system, civil justice system, public health system, and public education system that is stretched to the limit because of illegal aliens today will increase.

We owe it to the history of our country and the greatness which makes us great to secure our borders, to honor legal immigration, and to move forward with a reform of illegal immigration that matches the economic needs of the United States of America.

I stand on the Senate floor today committed to work with any Member of this Senate for comprehensive reform, as long as its cornerstone in its foundation is that we fix the problem on our borders, have it certified, and have that fix be the foundation for the modernization and reform of our immigration laws.

Mr. President, I thank you for the time and yield the floor.

The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Tennessee.

Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I congratulate the Senator from Georgia. He has described something that for the last several months I have been calling the Isakson principle. I believe the Isakson principle is the basis for a comprehensive immigration bill that could attract 85 to 90 votes in the Senate and could, in a fairly short period of time, be reconciled with legislation passed by the House of Representatives.

It would be a single piece of legislation that would work in two stages. It would first secure our border; and then, as the Senator from Georgia says, the trigger would come in, and we would get the rest of the job done. And the rest of the job includes defining who can work and who can study in the United States if they come from overseas. The rest of the job also includes helping prospective citizens, of which there are about a million a year today--people who are here legally--to help them learn English, to learn our history, and to learn our democratic traditions so we can be one country.

There is a lot of talk this week about the borders of Iraq. I believe there are some more important borders in this world, at least to us Americans, and they are the borders around our own country. It is more important that we secure our borders at home than it is to secure the borders in Iraq.

Last year, both the Senate and the House of Representatives passed an immigration bill. I voted no on the Senate immigration bill. I opposed the bill because I did not believe it did enough to secure our borders. It had some good proposals for border security, and it had a number of other excellent proposals, but it did not guarantee they would be funded. We all know that border security on paper means nothing. It requires boots on the ground. It requires jeeps on the roads and unmanned aerial vehicles in the air. It requires an employer verification system. And it requires adequate funding.

So I voted no. But I said at the time I was ready to vote for, and wanted to vote for, a comprehensive bill, one that fixed the whole problem. And I suggested then, as did a number of others, that the basis for such a bill was the Isakson principle.

Well, instead of getting a bill passed into law, it was a political year, and some Members of the House of Representatives, including some members of my own party, thought the wiser course was basically to run against the Senate bill that I voted against. Well, we now know how successful that turned out to be. That was not successful because the American people expect us to act like grownups, deal with big issues, and come to a conclusion.

There is no issue upon which we in the Congress have more need to come to a conclusion on than the issue of immigration. It is our responsibility. We cannot kick it to the Governors. We cannot blame the mayor of Nashville. We cannot blame anybody in Iraq. It is our job in the Senate and the House of Representatives.

We should begin to do our job. We should take it up within the next few weeks. We should base our bill on the Isakson principle. And we should not stop our work on the immigration bill until we are finished.

The Isakson principle is the basis for success with immigration because of the so-called trigger. As the Senator from Georgia said, once we put into effect all of the things we need to do to secure the border, the trigger operates, and then we get to all the rest of the issues, some of which are hard to solve. But they are made much easier to solve once we and the American people are assured the border will be secured.

It is outrageous for us in the Senate to preach about the rule of law to the rest of the world and ignore it here at home. The rule of law is one of the most important principles of our country. We should make no apology, not be embarrassed 1 minute for insisting upon it. Every new citizen knows that. They do not come to this country to become an American based upon their color or their ethnic background. They come because to be an American, you believe in a few principles which you must learn if you are going to become a citizen. Foremost among those is the rule of law.

So we start with that. But that is not the only principle new citizens learn. There is the principle of laissez-faire-- in other words, a strong economy. And immigrants help a strong economy, whether they are going to be Nobel Prize winners or whether they are going to be picking fruit in California.

There is the principle of equal opportunity. There is the principle of e pluribus unum, engraved right up there above the Presiding Officer: How do we become one country? We learn our tradition. We learn a common language. We adhere to common principles, instead of color and background. And there is the tradition of the country that we are a nation of immigrants. By our failure to act, we are showing a lack of respect for the rule of law and a lack of respect for our tradition as a nation of immigrants.

It is especially outrageous for us not to act when there is no one to blame but us. We cannot blame Syria for this one. We cannot blame the Iraqi Government. We cannot blame Iran. We cannot blame al-Qaida. It is us. It is our job. So, Mr. President, I am here today to commend the Senator from Georgia. Since last fall, he has had before us the basis for sound, comprehensive immigration legislation--all in one bill; two parts: secure our borders; and once that is done, then all the rest of it. I believe that would attract 85 or 90 votes. And I would suggest, respectfully, to my friend, the Democratic leader, and my friend, the Republican leader, that if we are looking for things to do that are important, that the American people expect us to act on, that we have already demonstrated we can work on together, that within a few weeks we take up the matter of immigration, we base it on the Isakson principle, and we do not stop until we finish the job.

It is the Pence Plan and still amnesty, only postponed, MAYBE!!!!!!!! And MAYBE they would secure the border. At this point I think the American people have lost all trust in them and it is hard to believe they would really secure the border or enforce the law. They have simply lost the trust of the American people and they are going to have to prove themselves to gain it back and I don't think they are willing to do that.

Sawdust wrote:

It is the Pence Plan and still amnesty, only postponed, MAYBE!!!!!!!!

I don't know sawdust, this plan does have the potential to save our bacon. It would certainly be better than anything McCain & Kennedy plan on introducing into the Senate. Look at it this way, a 24 month delay buys us more time. Furthermore, Bush will be history. If given only two choices, this or the planned McCain/Kennedy bill - I'd jump all over this like white on rice because the M/K bill will, no doubt, give immediate amnesty!

Got a question, will the democrats even allow this onto the floor? They want the bad one. In is there any way for the republicans to bring it to the floor. Thanks

Got a question, will the democrats even allow this onto the floor? They want the bad one. In is there any way for the republicans to bring it to the floor. Thanks

It looks like this was submitted to the Committee on the Judiciary. Isn't this headed by Patrick Leahy? He happens to be an original co-sponsor on S.9, assuming this is the eventual McKennedy bill. So, I don't know what will happen, but I have my doubts about this bill getting very far.

Kate wrote:

It looks like this was submitted to the Committee on the Judiciary. Isn't this headed by Patrick Leahy? He happens to be an original co-sponsor on S.9, assuming this is the eventual McKennedy bill.

This definitely isn't the McCain/Kennedy bill that will be forthcoming. This bill is being played as the alternate bill, much like the Pence/Hutchinson bill in the 109th Congress. Remember, the Pence/Huntchinson bill was supposed to be an alternate bill to S. 2611 - it was Pence's idea of a compromise.

Matthewsclosedborders wrote:

Got a question, will the democrats even allow this onto the floor? They want the bad one. In is there any way for the republicans to bring it to the floor. Thanks

Honestly, with the Democrats in charge, I don't think this bill will get the support it needs to reach the Senate floor. Personally, at this point, I think I would support this bill if by some fluke it ends up getting considered. Remember, the bill is not saying amnesty is a guarantee, it's just saying the topic will be revisited once the border is certified as secured. The congressional atmosphere is very conducive to amnesty right now and I'd rather not see a vote on the planned Kennedy/McCain bill. So yes, I like the 24 month (or more) window the Isakson bill provides.

FYI: Sen. Isakson (R-GA) is one of our friends and is a no-amnesty guy.

I think Isakson is right, and many others have said this before. You have to secure the border first and make sure that whatever measures you've put in place work, or the whole thing falls apart just like with the 1986 amnesty.