Thread: Secretary Michael Chertoff on the State of Immigration

Monday, October 27, 2008

Secretary Michael Chertoff on the State of Immigration

U.S. Department of Homeland Security

· Secretary Chertoff announced the issuance of the No-Match Supplemental Final Rule, which provides guidance to help businesses comply with legal requirements intended to reduce illegal employment of unauthorized workers, in his quarterly State of the Border address.

SECRETARY CHERTOFF: Good morning everybody. I recognize Ralph Basham and Julie Myers, who are head of Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Obviously, their agencies play a major role in how we deal with the border and the issue of illegal migration, as well as in conjunction with Citizenship and Immigration Services for legal migration as well.

As you know, over the last year we have provided State of Immigration addresses to the American people highlighting our efforts to secure our border, enforce our national immigration laws, and improve temporary worker programs, and legal migration. This is the fourth address and it comes at the close of the fiscal year that ended on September 20, 2008. It gives us an opportunity, at this point, to step back and assess our progress over the last past year using a variety of different measurements and also to look back over five years since the department was created in 2003.

I think what will be evident, if you have an objective evaluation of the facts, is that we have achieved a tremendous amount over many fronts in turning the tide on illegal immigration. We developed a comprehensive multi-year strategy for dealing with the issue of illegal migration, we have implemented that strategy, and today we are seeing positive results of our actions. In fact, we are seeing the kinds of results that the country hasn’t seen for many years.

As I always do, I have to emphasize that to get the problems of illegal migration under control in a sustainable long-term way, it has to be part of comprehensive immigration reform so we take the economic pressure that drives migration illegally into this country, and we take some of that off the table, which makes it much easier for our enforcement agencies to do their job.

We have to work with the law, as it currently exists. Of course we have to assure the American public that we will enforce the law that is on the books. As a consequence, using existing laws and using existing tools as they may be, we have put our country on a path moving in the right direction, with respect to illegal migration. We have reversed the trend of increasing illegal immigration into our country, which I think is something that would not have been thought possible just a few years ago.

As part of our effort to refine the tools that we have available under existing law, and I want to take a moment at the outset of my remarks to make an announcement regarding our No-Match Rule. As many of you will recall, in August 2007 we published a final rule that outlines the reasonable steps an employer may take when that employer receives a no-match letter from the Social Security Administration that indicates an employees’ name or social security number may not match the records in the database, or may be false, or misleading in some other way.

Basically, a no-match letter is a sign that something is wrong. It is either a sign that there is a mistake in the way the data is being kept and ought to be corrected, or, more seriously, it is a sign an employer has hired somebody who is providing a false social security, and or a false name, and is likely not authorized to work in this country. There can be innocent explanations for no-match letters as our regulation recognized. For example, someone may have gotten married and failed to update their last name. In that instance what the regulation indicates is you ought to correct the problem. That is in the interest of the employer, it is in the interest of the Social Security Administration, and, by the way, it is in the interest of the worker so that in ten, twenty, thirty years when the worker is expecting to get their social security, they don’t discover that it has all been deposited in an account that belongs to someone else.

That problem can be dealt with as a clerical matter and everybody is going to be better off. But, there are many instances where the reason for a no-match is that we have an un-authorized worker using phony documentation. What the regulation would propose is that in that instance an employer cannot, simply put, put their head in the sand, but must take steps to ensure they are brought into compliance with the law.

Essentially, this is kind of an anti-ostrich regulation. It says you need to look at the facts, you need to make a reasonable effort to determine the truth, and you need to take appropriate steps. Unfortunately, after we issued the rule last year it was challenged in court and we were barred by the court from implementing it. That litigation continues, but rather than take the course of fighting the litigation through the various levels of appeal, we determined to look at what the court had criticized and see whether we could make corrections ourselves that would enable us to respond to the courts’ concerns about the original rule.

As a consequence, in March of this year, we proposed a supplemental rule to address those concerns and we also provided a more detailed analysis of how we developed the No-Match Rule and what the consequences would be. Not surprisingly, we got a lot of comments with regards to the supplemental rule. I am pleased to say we have carefully considered the comments and that this week I signed the final rule that revises the original rule, addresses the issues that the court raised, and that will be published in the Federal Register in the coming weeks.

We will be notifying the judge that we have taken action to address the courts’ concerns on the original rule, and we will ask the court to lift the injunction, and let us proceed with implementation of the rule immediately. Once the rule is in effect, it is going to give a very clear roadmap to businesses that receive no-match letters. It will say that there is a period of time in which you need to address the discrepancy with the employee. If there is an innocent explanation then it ought to be corrected. That is a matter of fairness to the worker. If there is not an innocent explanation and it is in fact the case that someone is using phony documents, and someone is not authorized to work, then you have to make sure you bring your employment situation into compliance with the law.

Having laid out what we are doing in today’s announcement with no-match, let me go back and look generally at the landscape as it relates to illegal immigration. First, the fence. As we speak we have over 370 miles of pedestrian fence and vehicle fences that have been completed. Our goal was approximately 670 miles by the close of the year. I should say we have other miles that are currently under construction, but we are not counting those as completed until all the elements of construction and, essentially cementing the fence, have been undertaken.

We remain committed to achieving our goal of 670 miles of fencing in the areas that the border patrol has identified as operational priorities. Although for reasons I will explain briefly, we have experienced some delay. I believe at the end of the calendar year we can get close to our goal, in terms of miles that are actually finished, or under construction, or in some cases under contract. I believe by the time the administration has completed its term in January we will have the vast majority of this 670 miles either done, or close to being done, with actual physical work being completed on the ground.

The next element we have been looking at over the past year is Border Patrol agents. As you know, we committed to double the number of agents from what we had when the President first took office, which was about 9,000, to 18,000 plus by the end of this calendar year. Here I am pleased to say we are ahead of schedule. Our current table of organization indicates we have 17,628 border patrol agents and I am confident that we will be able to exceed our goal of 18,000 by the end of the calendar year.

We continue to rollout and deploy technology. Our Project 28 prototype is currently being used and continues to be refined. It has aided the Border Patrol in over 4,000 apprehensions of illegal migrants in the part of the border in the vicinity of Sasabe. It has also led to the seizure of almost 8,000 pounds, 4 tons, of marijuana during the fiscal year 2008. We continue to work with the system and expect to be deploying the system in the Tucson sector early next year and subsequently expanding it to the Yuma sector.

In addition to this particular configuration of technology, SBInet contemplates a whole range of technological solutions to the border, therefore we can continue to deploy thousands of sensors along with ground-based mobile radar units, and fixed ground-based radar units. Those continue to deployed all along the border. We currently have four unmanned aerial systems that are operational and two more planned for delivery in the next few months.

Those are the inputs, so now let’s talk about the results. With respect to apprehensions, we can see that fiscal year 2008, if we compare it to the prior fiscal year, reflects a 17 percent decrease in apprehensions. That is actually 40 percent less than in 2005. This is a clear indicator, but only one indicator, that enforcement is working, that fewer people are crossing, and that we are deterring people because we are making it more difficult.

More globally, Pew Hispanic Center recently issued its annual survey of where the country is with respect to lawful and unlawful immigrants. As you can see, for the first time since 2001, we actually have, according to Pew, at worst a completely flat rise in immigration meaning no increase, and likely a decrease in the net number of illegal migrants. Let me spell it out what that means. That means this is the first year for as long as many of us can remember, there has been no net increase in illegal immigration in this country. In fact, it is likely that there has been a net decrease in the number of illegal migrants in this country.

That means we are finally beginning to move the direction of illegal migration down rather than up. While it certainly does not suggest we can declare victory, it tells us for the first time that the efforts we are undertaking at the border have begun to turn the tide on illegal immigration and have begun to move that tide away from increased migration and towards decreased migration.

Let me give you some quotes from what Pew said in the report that was issued a couple of weeks ago. “From 2005 to 2008 the inflow of immigrants who are undocumented fell below that of immigrants who are legal permanent residents.â€

I'm eagerly waiting on those thousands and thousands of no-match letters to go rolling out.

It is my conviction that if we do that, there will come a time in the near future where the American public will finally say okay; we trusted the government to control immigration. Now we are prepared to open the door to more legal immigration or to more legal temporary workers.

And try to trick you into another amnesty, more visas, more citizenships.... More, more, more...

I'm not convinced we need more!

Dixie

You're right Dixie. We do not need more. We can't take care of all the people we have here now. At least they're enforcing the law and building the fence and have added all those new agents and if what he said is true, I'm impressed with their numbers. I just don't know whether to believe him or not.

They think unemployment will be up to 8% next year, we can't handle the people we have here now. These people have to be stopped completely from entering and if arrested and caught crossing the borders, deported immediately, and those that got in undetected and who are already here now, rounded up and deported.

Great article. A must read for everybody.