Press Briefing on Comprehensive Immigration Reform by Joel Kaplan, Assistant to the President and Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, Via Teleconference

Business Wire, June 25, 2007

WASHINGTON -- 4:08 P.M. EDT

MR. STANZEL: I appreciate everyone's patience, and thank you for joining us today. I'm joined here by Joel Kaplan, who is Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy at the White House, and has been very involved in the immigration effort. And he'll start off with some opening thoughts, but we really want to provide this opportunity to you to get the perspective of the White House as the Senate brings comprehensive immigration reform back up for consideration this week.

So with that, I'll turn it over to Joel. And I should make clear, this is a pen and pad briefing, not for broadcast, but it is on the record. Thank you.

MR. KAPLAN: Thanks, Scott. And thanks, everybody, for joining us.

Just want to say at the outset that the President is pleased that the leaders from both parties were able to come to a compromise on a process to bring immigration reform back to the Senate floor. After the Majority Leader brought the bill down a couple of weeks ago, the administration redoubled its efforts, and working with bipartisan group of senators to determine an orderly and fair process in which both important Republican and Democratic amendments would have an opportunity to be considered.

As the Senate turns to the bill this week, the administration will continue to work with the bipartisan group of senators on the bill to see this process through, until Congress sends a workable bill to the President that does the following things:

First and foremost, it puts border security first; it gives employers the tools they need to verify the status of the workers that they hire; it provides a legal and orderly way to match willing foreign workers to jobs Americans aren't filling and which our economy demands -- because until you remove the magnet for illegal immigration, you will never truly get control of the borders; it brings the current undocumented workers here out of the shadows and does so without amnesty; and it helps to assimilate both those undocumented workers and, importantly, all newly arrived immigrants into our society in a way that this country has done so successfully over its history.

In bringing the bill back to the floor I think it's important to recognize that the senators understood very well the failures of the 1986 reform bill that have caused, I think, legitimate skepticism among the public, and among members of Congress, as well, about the government's commitment -- the federal government's commitment to keeping its promises on enforcement. That's why the President a week or so ago welcomed a new provision in the bill that would provide $4.4 billion in immediate additional funding for the border security and enforcement triggers in the bill, and other enforcement mechanisms in the bill, which we think of as a direct deposit for border security and work site enforcement.

This funding will bypass the lengthy and often very contentious and political appropriations process and will instead put the money up front, to be paid out of the general fund. That funding will then be reimbursed over time by penalties collected from those who are in the U.S. illegally and come out of the shadows to apply for a Z visa.

There are other very critical provisions in the bill which reflect an understanding of the failures of 1986, and a commitment not to repeat those failures. Those include the presence in the bill of an effective temporary worker program. As I mentioned earlier, one of the big failures of 1986 was that it did not provide for a legal and orderly way for employers to fill jobs in this country that Americans weren't doing. And also, very importantly, it will -- this bill will provide, in a way that 1986 didn't, an employer verification system so that employers can quickly and reliably determine the identity of people who are applying for jobs.

You've got to make it easy for employers to verify and authenticate the identity of the people who they're hiring if you want them to abide by the law. And then, once you've provided, as this bill does, a reliable and effective employer verification system, you need to toughen up the sanctions so that hiring illegal aliens becomes a liability on the balance sheet, not an asset, as it is today. And this bill does that in spades.

Finally, I'll just close by taking the opportunity to note that immigration reform is too important to our national security and to our economic competitiveness and growth in this country to let this opportunity pass. So we're looking forward to helping out as we can, as the debate returns to the Senate floor this week. And with that I will shut up and take some questions.

Q Hi, Mr. Kaplan. Senator John Cornyn, just about 40 minutes ago, was on the Senate floor, and he was blasting a provision in the bill that he said would allow 24 hours for criminal background checks. And he said this could allow criminals and terrorists into our country, because there's no way -- it's an unrealistic goal to do that. And I wanted to get your response to that. His words were pretty strong about it.