Political Quotes

“I have taken about four or five trips to the border myself to try to look at the problems, understand what is going on. If we go to Tijuana, the crossing there, if we go to Laramie, if we go to El Paso, if we go to Nogales, what they tell us time after time is, Congressman, we have a problem. Because if this lane of traffic has an INS inspector and this lane of traffic has a Customs inspector and, in fact, in El Paso they sit up on the bridge over in Mexico and they look with their binoculars and they say, with their telephones, go into lane 3 because an INS inspector is there and they cannot lift the trunk because that is in the contract. And we know that the drug smugglers know who these people are. They know what lane they are in. They said, we cannot get everything we should get because these union contracts stand in our way. When I talk about that to my folks back home, they say, well, that is a common-sense thing. Why do we not change things that should be changed? The other problem, part of this problem, if we have a Customs agent who has been on a job and, according to their contract, they can bid on a job and they can live on the border for 20 years, the same place, their brother-in-law can live across the border. It is common sense that maybe the potential for corruption happens when somebody is too long in one place and too close to situations.”