The Reform Process: Setting the Legislative Agenda BARACK OBAMA: Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp! Give me your tired, and your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to be free Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door! Let us remember these words, for it falls on each generation to ensure that that lamp, [1:00] that beacon, continues to shine as a source of hope around the world and a source of our prosperity here at home. Thank you. God bless you. And may God bless the United States of America. JANET NAPOLITANO: Only Congress can pass a bill. The president can advocate, he can get them to the table, as he has in the Roosevelt Room upstairs. He can give a major address that spells out what s needed in a bill, but only Congress can pass a bill. TEXT: The Process of Reform: Setting the Legislative Agenda PROTESTOR VOICE OVER: They re doing nothing. Our government is doing nothing to stop the illegal drugs coming from Mexico. They say it s immigration. It s not immigration. It s drugs and violence. Drugs and violence. TEXT: May 25, 2010 There are twelve million people in the country illegally. It stands to reason [2:00] that we can t deport twelve million people and that if we tried to do so, it would be devastating economically. So the question is, though, how do you deal with immigration enforcement, understanding that it s not tenable to have that many people in the country illegally and to have our laws not really mean what they say? I grew up literally on the border. I could see the Bullring by the Sea from my front yard. There were 2 houses between my childhood home and the Mexican border. I m the only member of Congress who s rescued illegals when they were drowning. I was a lifeguard
before I got into politics. I ve recovered their bodies when they didn t make it. I ve actually seen them slaughtered on the highways as they were trying to rush across a freeway trying to avoid immigration agents. I ve seen the human cost of illegal immigration. People don t understand what a mess we ve made of the law until they run into it personally and it desperately needs reform.[3:00] And there are so many strident voices about the immigration issue that really gloss over the fact that here is an area of the law that s just screaming out to be streamlines and to be made efficient and to work for the American people. My own view is that immigration policy in this country is a shambles. That there s a gross mismatch, a gross disparity, between our labor-market needs and demands and what our official immigration policy permits. And so there are huge incentives for people to come into the country in search of those jobs illegally. The number one, overwhelmingly number one, cause of illegal immigration is not welfare, it s not birth-right citizenship, it is employment. People come here to work at jobs because there are employers who are willing to break the law to hire them. Something [4:00] like eighty percent of all the farm workers in America are undocumented. Well, you know, every time I eat a salad, I think, somebody picked this lettuce. Now I don t see a line out the door of Americans wanting to go in the hot sun in Salinas to pick that lettuce. ED SCHULTZ: For more, let me bring in California Congressman Brian Bilbray. He s the chairman of the Immigration Reform Caucus. Congressman, good to have you with us tonight. Do you really think that we re making headway when it comes to securing our borders, making sure everybody s paying their taxes? I mean, where are we going with this whole conversation in this country, in your opinion? Ed, we ought to be finding those things we do agree on I happen to be the chairman of the Immigration Reform Caucus which is a group of Democrats and Republicans, almost, just a little under a hundred. And so it s really a way to sort of give a group a voice, specifically to the issue NEWSWOMAN: and with me tonight, Republican [5:00] Representative Brian Bilbray
we also create a whole environment to be someone for the media to come to NEWSMAN: I d like to welcome back to C-Span s Washington Journal California Representative Brian Bilbray. He represents the 50 th District The committee will come to order. This morning we ll be focusing on I m the chairman of the Homeland Security Appropriations Committee. The main committee handling immigration in the House is the Judiciary Committee. There are other committees that have a piece of it, but the Judiciary Committee is the main one that has the authorizing authority, whereas, the funding authority for both immigration services and immigration enforcement, that funding authority is in the Homeland Security appropriations bill. So the first thing for me to say, probably, as the chairman of that appropriations sub-committee is to acknowledge that,[6:00] we are not the masters of immigration policy. In fact, we are dependent on the authorizing committee to write the basic statute. And it s no secret that that has been a tall order in recent years. I serve on the Judiciary Committee and a number of other committees, but for the purposes of immigration, that is an important assignment. The Judiciary Committee has jurisdiction over the immigration laws. on the ethical imperative for reform of our immigration system Traditionally, a bill is introduced, it s sent to a committee, hearings are held, a subcommittee does what s called a mark-up, which is to go through the bill line by line and take amendments and then you go to the full committee in a similar process and then to any other committees that might have some piece of jurisdiction and then to the Rules Committee and then to the floor. This issue may not work in that way. It s possible that [7:00] the consensus that will be reached may not be totally within the Judiciary Committee. Now the Judiciary Committee will not cede jurisdiction. Our Chairman Conyers has been very supportive of the reform effort and I m sure that he would insist, and properly so, that the Judiciary Committee have a role in marking up any bill. But I think, if it s important and something this big, to have bipartisan support if we can. The Speaker and Senator Reid, the Leader in the Senate, have agreed that the United States Senate should be the first to act. The reason for that, and I agree with the decision, is that under the Senate rules, they need sixty votes to do anything. It s an extraordinary majority and therefore, the House needs to see they can move forward. Meanwhile, on the House side, there have been active, although discreet, discussions[8:00] across the
aisle and with conservative Democrats as well, to see if we can find consensus on reform. And I think it s clear we can. Of course, finding consensus on the substance is very different than a political path forward. President Bush, with a credible bipartisan effort in the closing years of his administration, failed to get comprehensive immigration reform passed. And President Obama, so far, hasn t had much better luck. And there s a lot of debate right now about when and how and if we can pass comprehensive immigration reform. CROWD: USA, USA, USA, USA, USA. TEXT: May 1, 2006 We passed a bill out of the House that was considered a little bit too harsh MAN: I think that 4437 is nonsense, it s ridiculous, it s way too [9:00] drastic of a measure. Through that whole process we were in constant communication with the White House. We even had a meeting with President Bush. It was just Chairman Sensenbrenner and myself and his top legislative aide and somebody else on the immigration issue. But in the end, the bill collapsed in the Senate. PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: I thank the members of the Senate and members of my administration who worked so hard on the Border Security-Immigration Reform bill. I m sorry the Senate was unable to reach agreement on the bill this morning. The big sticking issue on the immigration issue was citizenship. The was virulent opposition to doing anything short of citizenship and there was virulent opposition to doing anything other than deporting people. President Bush tried[10:00] to get things together but it just didn t work out. The bridge was just too wide. PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: Legal immigration is one of the top concerns of the American people and Congress failure to act on it is a disappointment. The American people understand the status quo is unacceptable when it comes to our immigration laws. A lot of us worked hard to see if we couldn t find a common ground. It didn t work.
I think there are divisions within both parties on this issue. It s not an issue that sorts out neatly along party lines. So while there are a few Republicans who have a history of more balance and moderation on this issue, John McCain would be one, now I think the center of gravity in that party is pretty much anti-immigrant. Which is to say, just focusing on the large[11:00] presence in the country of people without documentation and just saying that the main purpose of immigration policy is to get them out of the country. I think the center of gravity on the Democratic side is in favor of comprehensive reform. By which I mean, combining enforcement actions, enforcement actions with employers, enforcement actions in terms of protecting the borders, with some programs which let workers come into the country temporarily and some other programs that let individuals who have been here, who have worked hard and who can earn their way to legal status, it gives them a chance to do so. Not amnesty, not blanket amnesty, but case by case, a chance to obtain legal status. So while there are all sorts of views in both parties, I would say there is a pretty significant[12:00] difference on this issue. I don t think there s been the effort to reach across by the Democrats, to reach across party lines, to come up with a bipartisan solution. And I actually think the Republican party is more galvanized right now against comprehensive immigration reform than they were before. Well, I think one of the biggest things is getting people to understand that the perspectives that may be misperceptions and direct them over. I mean, pointing out the fact that there s this talk about, oh, path to citizenship, that we must legalize those who are here illegally. But not understanding that what they re talking about is actually creating a special program and a benefit for those who ve broken our laws while you have millions, if not hundreds of millions, that would love to be able to immigrate to the United States legally and never broken our laws and are not getting the same offer. That s what we call amnesty and it s a way [13:00] of accidentally, if not purposefully, rewarding people for illegal activity. Something very un-american. I think what we need to do is find some way for people who didn t follow the rules, to get right with the law. It s the only area where, if you did something that wasn t right, that didn t comply, there s no way to ever fix it. If you violate some other law, you can atone, you can pay your penalty, and you can get right with the law and you can move on with your life. So we need to come up with something like that and then we need to have a system that we build, an immigration system, that actually will work. What we need to do is we need to do little things that matter. Why hasn t the Social Security card been upgraded since 1937? Make it as tamper-resistant as the new green card, the new work card that s being created. Make the Social Security card something that has a picture on it. Kind of a pretty simple thing. Why not require every employer[14:00] to check on a computer that the Social Security number and the name
matches? Little things like that, I think, will, could, actually be passed by Democrats and Republicans and then, and only then, are we going to be able to prove to the American people that we can be trusted with this issue. Once we ve proven that, then there s a lot of opportunity. But you can t do that in an environment where you re going to announce to the world that you re going to give amnesty, that you re going to reward illegal immigration and that s the kind of thing that Democrats and Republicans and especially Independents would be outraged on. Part of the reason there s partisanship in the House and the Senate and with Republicans and Democrats is there are such different views of issues and sometimes you just can t bridge those. There s no compromise on some of these things. But that doesn t necessarily mean that just because people get emotional and people think very strongly about issues, that there s something wrong with the way the Constitution is set up or the way in which everybody else reacts.[15:00] We ve certainly had more difficult situations; in the Civil Way where senators got beat on the Senate floor with canes and stuff like that. So I still think there s a path forward.