Jon Kyl: “there is one more thing I wanted to say this evening about the amendment Senator Cornyn and I offered, an amendment…”

“there is one more thing I wanted to say this evening about the amendment Senator Cornyn and I offered, an amendment which provides that criminals cannot participate in the program that we adopt here--whatever that program is--in terms of being temporary workers or being put on the path of citizenship, or however this body ultimately defines what happens to immigrants who have come here illegally, or so-called future flow workers. I think almost everybody can agree it shouldn't apply to criminals, or to people who have violated a court order to depart the country. I made the point earlier, and I want to reiterate it, that it is important to separate out the group of people who have come here, albeit illegally, to do hard work and not otherwise violate our laws, except perhaps using fraudulent documents. Those people end up being the primary targets of other illegal immigrants who commit heinous crimes against them. So one of the reasons for denying these criminals the right to participate in the same program is to get them away from the people who are most susceptible to being preyed upon. We talked to chiefs of police, to sheriffs, to the Border Patrol, to other law enforcement officials, and they have different statistics, but by and large they all agree that predominantly the serious crime in their communities, particularly large communities, is immigrant on immigrant and it is mostly illegal immigrant.…”