Cliff Stearns: “just a question. It costs $5 to $10 just to count a child. Let me ask you this question: When a child comes into school…”

“just a question. It costs $5 to $10 just to count a child. Let me ask you this question: When a child comes into school, do they not register and provide lots of identification when they do this? Why could this not be done at the same time? So that maybe the estimate that was given to you was on the basis of going out separately and doing this. But this all could be done simultaneously. First of all, I cannot believe it is going to cost $10 to count. But let us set that aside. Let us talk about the idea, when you collect all this other information when a child comes in, can you not at the same time establish their citizenship and at that point have the information? Second, would not the gentleman concede that once this information is provided that my colleague's amendment is offering, we might be able to save money in the long-term, because we will have a handle on a very significant problem, and we can come back here and actually tackle the problem of what are we going to do about these large number of illegal immigrants and how to correct this situation.”