Joe Lieberman

I appreciate your testimony today. I think you have been really quite impressive.

Thanks, Senator Collins.

I believe it would be a significant loss for the Department, and so I hope that not only will our Committee confirm him again, but the full Senate will, as well.

Mr. Borras, I think, brings a lot of energy and experience to what is an unglamorous but vitally important job.

Under the circumstances, it appears they are not able to be successful, to win, without substantial allied support.

The last few days have been unsettling. The last 2 days, there have been reversals for the rebels.

Our goal, politically, is for Qadhafi to get out of there, and yet, the boots on the ground, which are the Libyan boots, are themselves unable to win this fight.

Isn't it critically important, even as part of realizing our political goal of getting Qadhafi out, that we or our allies provide either more weapons and/or training, discipline, command and control, soon so that they can put up a fair…

It's, however, our political goal. In my opinion--and we're going to advance that, hopefully, through diplomatic, economic, and political means.

It's unacceptable for our involvement to end with Qadhafi still in power.

It is just unacceptable that we are still unable to systematically identify people who overstay.

I may be quixotic in saying this, but we still, in my opinion, have a chance in this session to try to achieve some significant improvement in border security and in a related way some what I called earlier 'smart immigration reform.'

So how can we better deal with this part of the illegal immigration problem?

We may be able to reduce the flow of illegal immigrants by altering immigration law.

Total operational control over our border is effectively an unreachable goal.

Identifying individuals who overstay is a crucial component of securing our borders and making our immigration system credible.

It is certainly my impression that bin Laden, himself, continued to be focused on attacks on the United States of America.

We are always at a state of alert.

My hope: That if we reached the level of finding out what is not working in border security and could fix it, that we would not only have achieved that good result, but it would be a preface to going back and considering reform of our…

The premise we have been operating on--part of why we are doing this series of hearings--is to see if we can agree on a common ground on what we are striving for in terms of border security.

I only supported Senator Collins' proposal because it happens to be right.

You have directed Customs and Border Protection to come up with a new index.

We are dealing with how we can form a consensus to both improve the security at our borders.

I think it is very important.

It was interesting, and, of course, as I said at the beginning, the odd thing is that when the apprehensions go down, we conclude that there is less illegal immigration, right?