Floor Statement of Senator Carl Levin on the Secure Borders, Economic Opportunity and Immigration Reform Act

Mr. President, our immigration system is broken and needs reform. Undocumented immigrants flow through our porous borders. Employers hire them with near impunity. Our government lacks the ability to adequately detect unauthorized employment, while employers in sectors such as agriculture, Michigan’s second largest industry, fear that their crops will go unpicked for lack of legal, authorized workers. The bipartisan compromise bill before the Senate was an opportunity to make progress on a very difficult problem.

The first step in immigration reform must be stronger border security. Although there were some provisions in the bill before the Senate that I did not support, this legislation had strong border security measures, even stronger than the ones we debated a few weeks ago. In fact, it contained the funding for the enhanced border security.

We need a more secure, more sensible, and fairer system of immigration. Because of filibusters in the Senate we have been unable to fully consider and amend the bill. We do not know what the final language might have been, and we were unable to vote on amendments which we favored. We should have finished the consideration of those amendments to determine whether or not the final product was an improvement on the status quo. To do that, cloture was required to end the filibuster. I’m disappointed that the Senate was thwarted in that endeavor.