Bill Clinton: “Well, it's hard to know exactly because it's hard to know what the figure is. The estimates vary rather dramatically.…”

“Well, it's hard to know exactly because it's hard to know what the figure is. The estimates vary rather dramatically. But I can tell you this: Last year, in our first round of budget cuts, we still included several hundred million dollars in more money to deal with the cost of immigration, especially immigrant health care and immigrant education. This year, we have much more money in there yet again. And this year we have in addition to that enough money, as I said, to drastically increase border patrols across the country, including a 40 percent increase along the San Diego border. So we're getting closer; that's all I know. Frankly, we don't have a very good way of estimating what those costs are, and I agree that we need more. But because I have heard for years the Governors of California and Texas and Florida, particularly, talk to me about this problem, we made a commitment when I came in that each year we would try to do as much as we possibly could to help cover these costs that are imposed on States because of immigration. And we have certainly made more progress in the last 2 years, even with tough budgets, than have been made in a long time. And we'll continue to try to find more exact ways of measuring what the costs are, because I do think that if we had them measured, it would be easier to know whether we're meeting our target. Defense Conversion”