Mark Souder: “tonight I would like to focus on our border policies and drug and anti-terrorism policies and want to share a number of…”

“tonight I would like to focus on our border policies and drug and anti-terrorism policies and want to share a number of things that we have been working on, and hope to continue to do this as we are in session the rest of this year. First, I want to begin with a series of hearings that we are working with on the north and south borders. The actual conception for this idea came out of the U.S.-Canada Parliamentary Conference last May. Some of the Canadian legislators had expressed concerns that the slowdowns at our borders, much like on the Mexican border, were impacting commerce. We have become so interconnected in all of our border states, particularly you think of California and Texas, but in the Midwest, Michigan, as well as my home State of Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, New York State and all of New England, are very interconnected with the Canadian trade. We have gained almost as many jobs in our trade with Canada as we have lost to Mexico in Indiana, and in Texas they have gained from Mexico, but lost some to Canada. That is what the North American Free Trade Agreement was originally conceived to do, and ironically seems to in a way that many of us were skeptical about, be working, but only if our borders work.”