| Recently, I spoke out on illegal immigration in North Carolina. Here is my plan to reform our immigration system.
1) We need to seal off America’s borders. To do this we need to make sure the Department of Homeland Security quickly hires the more than 2,300 new Border Patrol Agents, Immigration Criminal Investigators, Immigration Enforcement Agents, and ICE attorneys Congress has authorized. And if we need to put troops on the border to seal it off, then lets do it. Congress has already authorized the military to do so.
2) Here locally, North Carolina needs a freestanding Immigration and Customs Enforcement office. Currently our immigration office is under the jurisdiction of Atlanta, GA. North Carolina has over 300,000 illegal aliens. It is incomprehensible that our state should have to rely on Atlanta for immigration decisions!
3) We need an immigration court headquartered in North Carolina. Currently, North Carolina deportation hearings are held in Atlanta. This system is wasteful, inefficient, and leads to unacceptable backlogs in deportation hearings. What good is it to have deportation orders for an illegal alien if they never get a deportation hearing? I will fight to bring this court to North Carolina.
4) I will work on getting a Federal Detention and Deportation Facility located in North Carolina. Our local Immigration Agents detain aliens in neighboring jails at a cost of upwards of $109 a night. In Mecklenburg alone it costs about $7,000 to detain illegals each night. That’s one county—I cannot imagine what it is costing us statewide. To be better stewards of the taxpayers’ dollars, I call for an end to this wasteful and piecemeal detention method and will work to build a center for North Carolina that houses nothing but illegal aliens awaiting deportation.
5) Last year in Congress, I voted to allocate federal money for Charlotte to get a Fugitive Operations Team, which consists of 7 Immigration and detention officers and agents. These positions have been funded and were to be hired in fiscal year 2005. We are less than six weeks away from the end of the Fiscal Year and they are still not hired. Again, the immigration office in Atlanta is holding us up. Likewise, Raleigh is scheduled to get a Fugitive Operations Team in place by the end of 2006. I call on Atlanta to not treat Raleigh like they've treated Charlotte.
6) There are currently over 600 vacancies nationwide for deportation officers. Congress has given the money for the hiring of these positions, yet the bureaucracy fails to hire the agents. If the Department of Homeland Security and office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement is having a hard time hiring, I invite them to North Carolina where I will personally hold a job fair for them. North Carolina needs more officers; it’s time for the bureaucracy to get off their collective butts and provide them.
7) I call on the Governor of North Carolina to stop accepting taxpayer identification numbers as valid forms of identification for the purposes of getting a drivers license. The current leadership of our state must wake up to this problem. People’s lives are at stake. When the General Assembly reconvenes for the next session, I will travel to Raleigh and personally lobby to change the way our state gives out drivers licenses.
8) In the meantime, in an effort to encourage our Governor to action, I will offer a bill in the United States House of Representatives that will strip all federal transportation dollars to any state, North Carolina included, that continues to issue drivers licenses based on the issuance of tax payer identification numbers.
9) Finally, knowingly hiring an illegal alien is against the law! The current fine for a business knowingly hiring an illegal alien is $250 per alien. I will introduce a bill that raises that civil fine to $10,000 per alien and will give the arresting law enforcement agency a cut of the fine. I am no mathematician, but if North Carolina has 300,000 illegal aliens and just half of them are employed, this action could raise at least $1.5 Billion dollars that could be rolled back into the fight against illegal immigration.
10) To end the reckless abuse of our drinking and driving laws in North Carolina—an abuse that recently led to the death of one of my constituents, Scott Gardner. I will introduce the Scott Gardner Act, when Congress reconvenes in September. Among other things this bill will make DUI an automatic deportable offense.
Illegal Immigration will only be addressed by your elected officials when you, the people, demand it of them. I encourage you to lobby for the plan I have outlined above. I need your help!
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