Congressman David Price (D-NC) and Chair of the DHS Appropriations Subcommittee spoke at length about his views on what must happen to protect the homeland, and specifically he mentioned how immigration reform should be viewed (through what lens) and what priorities he feels should be set for immigration reform.  A must read for anyone who wants to understand the challenges in passing immigration reform and why immigration reform efforts have stalled.
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money quote: “Whatever the rationale, the next Administration must make immigration reform a higher priority and pursue it more effectively.  Such reform will strengthen our economy, reaffirm the rule of law, and enhance homeland security, allowing DHS to focus more effectively on that small percentage of illegal immigrants that has the capacity and the intent to commit crimes and do us harm.”

The full text of Congressman Price’s remarks after the jump

Homeland Security in Perspective

“I have been asked today to focus specifically on the homeland security policy priorities I would put at the top of the list for the next administration.  I will also indicate how our Committee, under Democratic leadership, has addressed these priorities, although my ability to be specific about our fiscal year 2009 bill is hampered by the fact that we are still a day away from full Committee markup.

“I want to begin, however, by reflecting for a moment on a question I am often asked as Chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security:  are we safer and more secure than we were before 9/11, or before the Department of Homeland Security was formed in the wake of 9/11?  If we look at efforts to detect, deter, and respond to specific threats, the answer is a qualified yes, as I will elaborate in a moment.  But if we look at the broader context of security, both internationally and domestically, the answer is almost certainly no.

“The security of our country fundamentally depends on the degree of friendship and respect we enjoy around the world.  We have implacable adversaries with whom we must deal firmly, sometimes harshly.  But we also have a long history of moral leadership in the world and a bipartisan foreign policy tradition predicated on mutually supportive alliances and cooperation through international organizations.  The Bush Administration has abandoned much of that legacy and has squandered the tremendous outpouring of worldwide public support for the United States that followed 9/11.

“The President never devoted sufficient troops and resources to the war in Afghanistan, which had almost universal support; he instead initiated a war of choice in Iraq that has made the threat of terrorism worse, not better.  He disengaged, and announced he was disengaging, from Middle East peacemaking, with disastrous results for Israelis, Palestinians, Lebanese and others across the region.  He labeled North Korea, Iraq, Iran and, in effect, Syria as an “axis of evil,” and pursued policies that helped make that label a self-fulfilling prophecy.

“America’s moral leadership has also been gravely damaged by the way we have pursued what the Administration conceived as a “Global War on Terrorism.” Stopping active terrorists is a critical challenge, but preventing the development of new generations of terrorists is, in the long run, equally important.  Winning “hearts and minds” is no exercise in sentimentality; it is absolutely central to protecting our nation from another 9/11.  But when we fight terrorism with arbitrary detention without recourse, the torture of detainees, and the failure to restrain or bring to justice hired guns under our employ, the effect is the opposite of what we intend.  Such policies and practices make our nation less secure.

“Homeland security also has a domestic context, one that goes beyond the conventional understanding of that label.  Let me express the point in budgetary terms.  The Congress has rightly provided greatly increased resources – now approaching $40 billion annually – for Homeland Security programs and agencies.  I argue strongly for our Subcommittee’s share of the federal budget – but only up to a point.

“We could spend ever-increasing portions of the budget on countering one threat or another, real or imagined.  But an outsized Department of Homeland Security budget, if it came at the expense of crumbling infrastructure, diminished public health, reduced economic competitiveness, and depleted human capital, would hardly add up to a more secure or confident nation.  The Bush years have seen a dangerous erosion of security in this broader sense.  The same is true of our fiscal security and soundness, as the hard-won budget surpluses of the 1990s have given way to mountains of debt and an unprecedented dependence on foreign creditors.

“So our investments in the Department of Homeland Security are not made in a vacuum.  Thinking about security requires us to think about America’s role in the world and about the full range of domestic needs we face after years of neglect.  The agenda for repair, renewal, and reform is vast and urgent, and it is within that broader agenda that the program of the still-new, still-consolidating Department of Homeland Security should take a proportionate place.

Immigration Reform

“Today I will suggest five principal homeland security priorities on which I would advise the next administration to focus.  The first is comprehensive immigration reform.  This might, at first glance, seem an odd choice as a top priority for the Department of Homeland Security, which – after all – was formed in response to the terrorist threat.  But the historic missions of the departmental components did not go away when the Department was formed, and subsuming them under the rubric of combating terrorism is apt to confuse as much as it clarifies.  Homeland Security encompasses critical areas of national policy that would demand attention even if 9/11 had not occurred.  Immigration, I believe, leads that list.

“That is not to say that immigration policy is unrelated to terrorism; control of our borders and knowing who has entered our country – legally or illegally – are directly related to our defense against terrorist threats.  Moreover, the intense focus on the broader illegal immigration problem – consisting primarily of an effort to intercept, detain, and deport individuals who illegally cross our borders in search of work and a better life – is distracting the Department’s attention and diverting the Department’s resources away from the truly dangerous threats and challenges we face.

“I want to be clear on that point.  The illegal presence of foreign nationals in the United States is a problem, and calls into question our commitment to the integrity of our immigration laws.  But we need to put that problem into perspective on two counts:  First, the integrity of our immigration laws is compromised primarily by the fact that those laws are grossly unrealistic in relation to our labor market demands.  And second, there can be no credible argument that deporting illegal workers should take precedence over efforts to combat smuggling, prevent terrorism, and deport criminal aliens.

“As comprehensive reform has floundered, our Subcommittee has used the power of the purse to take on the Administration’s skewed priorities in immigration enforcement.  In 2007, the number of individuals ICE deported because they crossed the border illegally or overstayed their visas was 91 percent higher than in 2003, while the number of criminal aliens identified for deportation by the agency rose by only 16 percent.  In other words, while we have been using scarce resources to detain and deport laborers at meatpacking plants, we have allowed tens of thousands of dangerous criminal aliens to be released back into our communities after serving their sentences, with no awareness on our part of their immigration status.

“At our Committee’s direction, ICE has now developed a plan for identifying all those criminal aliens now serving time in our Federal, state, and local prisons and jails, and for deporting them upon the completion of their sentences.  This plan will require dogged dedication and significant additional resources to fully implement.  We have provided such resources in the FY 2009 bill.  No matter what one’s opinion about the broader illegal immigration problem and how to address it, we should all be able to agree that ICE’s highest priority should be to identify and deport unlawfully present aliens who have already shown themselves to be a danger to our communities and have been convicted of serious crimes.

“Our Subcommittee has also taken on the challenge of border security – through what will be a one third increase in the number of Border Patrol officers from the beginning of FY 2008 to the end of FY 2009; by compelling attention to the vast Northern border (which is more significant as a potential entry point for terrorists than the Southern border); and by requiring some accountability as DHS spends hundreds of millions of dollars to build fencing along the Southwest border.  We are insisting that cost-benefit estimates be provided and that alternative means of border protection be seriously compared before funds are spent on expensive fence construction.

“The illegal immigration problem cannot be solved by border security and law enforcement actions alone – I have yet to meet an experienced Border Patrol agent who believes that it can.  We are fooling ourselves if we believe that fences and worksite raids will do the trick.  Our illegal immigration is more about demand than about supply, so as long as our immigration policies are not responsive to the realities of our labor market, illegal immigration will drain our resources and distract attention from the apprehension of criminal and terrorist aliens crossing our borders and living among us.

“The current Administration made some effort last year to promote comprehensive immigration reform, but it now seems to have turned 180 degrees toward an enforcement-only approach.  This might be interpreted as an attempt to appeal to the most hard-line anti-immigrant segment of the population, but some have painted it as an effort to drive home the need for immigration reform by inflicting pain on businesses and communities who depend on these workers.  If it really is some sort of perverse “tough medicine” policy, I find it doubly hard to understand, given the negative impacts on hardworking immigrants and their children, and because it has tradeoffs with other activities that could be helping to make our country safer.

“Whatever the rationale, the next Administration must make immigration reform a higher priority and pursue it more effectively.  Such reform will strengthen our economy, reaffirm the rule of law, and enhance homeland security, allowing DHS to focus more effectively on that small percentage of illegal immigrants that has the capacity and the intent to commit crimes and do us harm.