I would like to congratulate Senator Brownback for becoming the new Chairman of this subcommittee, and thank him for holding such a positive hearing to open his tenure. I am confident that we will be able to work together on many issues that have gone unresolved for too long, and I am hopeful that immigration policy can be an area of bipartisan cooperation in the 107th Congress. I also commend and congratulate Senator Kennedy for his decision to continue his long service to this Committee and to the Nation as the Ranking Member of the subcommittee.

The varied witnesses on today’s panels demonstrate that those who have pitted business and family immigration against each other have presented a false choice. With the commitment of our new Chairman and our dedicated Ranking Member, we can address both issues in a comprehensive way. Before hearing from these distinguished witnesses, I would like briefly to discuss a few of the immigration issues that I believe should be priorities in this Congress.

Five years have now passed since Congress passed the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act. Taken together, these bills contained a series of provisions that have seriously harmed our historic commitment to both refugees and to due process. Along with many of our colleagues, particularly Senator Kennedy, I have worked during the ensuing Congresses to correct the mistakes that a deeply partisan Congress made in 1996. With an evenly divided Senate and a Chairman who shares a strong commitment to refugees, I hope this Congress will be different.

First, I look forward to working with Senator Brownback again in this Congress on the Refugee Protection Act. That bill, which I introduced with his cosponsorship and strong support in the 106th Congress, would restrict the use of expedited removal, the process under which aliens arriving in the United States can be returned immediately to their native lands at the say-so of a low-level INS officer. Expedited removal was the subject of a major debate in this chamber in 1996, and the Senate voted to use it only during immigration emergencies. This Senate-passed restriction was removed in what was probably the most partisan conference committee I have ever witnessed. The Refugee Protection Act was modeled closely on that 1996 amendment, and I am working with Senator Brownback on a Refugee Protection Act for the 107th Congress, which we hope to introduce next month.

The use of expedited removal calls the United States’ commitment to refugees into serious question. We now have a system where we are removing people who arrive here either without proper documentation or with proper documentation that an INS officer simply suspects is invalid. This policy ignores the fact that people fleeing despotic regimes are quite often unable to obtain travel documents before they go: They must move quickly and cannot depend upon the government that is persecuting them to provide them with the proper paperwork for departure. In the limited time that expedited removal has been in operation, we already have received reliable reports that valid asylum seekers have been kicked out of our country without the opportunity to convince an immigration judge that they faced persecution in their native lands. To provide just one example, a Kosovar Albanian was summarily removed from the United States after the civil war in Kosovo had already made the front pages of America’s newspapers. I believe we must address this issue this year, and I know that Senator Brownback feels the same way.

Second, I hope that this subcommittee will examine the serious due process concerns that remain unresolved from the passage of the 1996 legislation. Congress expanded the pool of people who could be deported, denied those people the chance for due process before deportation, and made these changes retroactive, so that legal permanent residents who had committed offenses so minor that they did not even serve jail time suddenly faced removal from the United States. This new legal regime has created numerous horror stories, including the removal of noncitizen veterans of the American armed forces for minor crimes committed well before 1996. In the last Congress, I introduced a bill that would have guaranteed due process rights for veterans, a bill that was supported by the American Legion and other veterans’ groups, and I plan to introduce similar legislation this year. In addition, I was a proud cosponsor of Senator Kennedy’s Immigrant Fairness Restoration Act, which would have restored a broad range of due process rights to immigrants. I look forward to supporting similar legislation this year, and I hope that the Chairman will be willing to hold hearings on this important issue.

Third, this subcommittee should consider the proposals that were included in the Latino and Immigrant Fairness Act in the 106th Congress. Despite the best efforts of many Senators, the majority would not allow a vote on that bill, either freestanding or as an amendment to other legislation. These proposals – to treat people who fled right-wing dictatorships the same way we treat people who fled left-wing dictatorships, to update the date of registry to allow people who have been living and working in the United States for 15 years or more to apply for permanent residency, and to protect families by restoring the law that allowed people eligible for green cards to apply from within the United States – deserve serious examination, and I hope this subcommittee can take on that task.

Finally, we need to pay close attention to the immigration needs of American employers. I supported increasing the number of H-1B visas last year because I was convinced that the information technology industry and other businesses needed flexibility to continue their growth. I am very interested in hearing what immigration measures today’s witnesses believe would be helpful to ensure that our economy remains healthy.

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