With the possibility looming last week that the major immigration reform bill pushed by Marco Rubio and the Gang of 8 might be in trouble, a veritable bomb was dropped on Thursday in the form of a border-security amendment proposed by two GOP Senators, Tennessee's Bob Corker and North Dakota's John Hoeven. Their amendment would add 20,000 new border patrol agents and the completion of 700 miles of fence along the southern border. Funding the patrol agents would cost $30 billion over ten years, and estimates show the fence could cost up to $6.5 million per mile.
But that's still not going to move certain Republicans in the Senate to support the legislation, including Kentucky's Rand Paul and Alabama's Jeff Sessions, who told CBS' Bob Schieffer on Face The Nation that the bill "grants amnesty first, and a mere promise of enforcement in the future."
On CNN's State of the Union, Rand Paul said," I’m all in favor of immigration reform, but I’m like most conservatives in the country in that I think reform should be dependent on border security first. So I introduced an amendment that would have done just that, border security first and then immigration reform, with congressional checks on whether or not that’s occurring. That wasn’t voted on favorably. Without some congressional authority and without border security first, I can’t support the final bill."
When asked specifically about the Corker/Hoeven amendment, Paul dismissed it, saying it won't solve the problem with undocumented people coming over the Mexican border.
“We’ve thrown a lot of money at a lot of problems in our country,” Paul said. “To me, what really tells me that they’re serious would be letting Congress vote on whether the border’s secure. If the people in the country want to be assured that we will not get another 10 million people to come here illegally over the next decade, they have to believe they get a vote through their Congress. If this is a done deal once the bill’s over and it’s a done deal, we never get to revisit it because it will be very difficult, I don’t think we’ll really get a truly secure border.”
The emphasis on border security is angered the Obama administration and other Democrats who point to statistics indicating that the border has never been more secure, and certainly is more than in 2006-2007, the last time the legislation had a chance to get through Congress.
According to the Center for American Progress:
Net undocumented migration is now at or below zero.
The number of people apprehended crossing the border has decreased, even as border agents now patrol every single mile of the border every day and in many places have 100 percent eyes on the border—meaning that they can view nearly all attempts to cross the border in real time.
Annual deportations have reached historic levels.
There are more “boots on the ground” at the border than there have ever been in history
The Corker-Hoeven proposal will also include a $3.2 billion high-tech border surveillance plan — including drones, infrared ground sensors and long-range thermal imaging cameras — and require both an electronic employment verification program for all employers and a visa entry/exit system at all air and seaports, in order to limit immigrants who overstay their visas.