Senate bill will harm immigration enforcement

Washington Times:

The Senate immigration bill makes the same mistake as the 1986 amnesty by restricting the ability of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to share information on illegal alien guest-worker applicants who are criminals and terrorists, the agency's director said yesterday.
Emilio T. Gonzalez, whose agency would have to administer a guest-worker program, said not allowing the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to share information on someone who applies means they cannot begin the process of removing criminals and national security threats, even after they are rejected from the guest-worker program.
"It is important for us to be able to act on what we get when we run a background check on somebody," Mr. Gonzalez said in a briefing with reporters in which he weighed in on the Senate immigration bill, which would offer a chance for citizenship to millions of illegal aliens, expand legal immigration and start a new foreign-worker program.

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Mr. Gonzalez, a naturalized citizen himself, has established a new tone that national security should be foremost in employees' minds at the agency. He said his agency will need at least six months and maybe as much as a year to register current illegal aliens for a foreign-worker program -- far longer than the Senate bill envisions.
On the issue of information sharing and confidentiality of applications, Mr. Gonzalez said the law usually allows his agency to share information when its employees come across an application that raises questions. But he said the 1986 amnesty included confidentiality provisions that prohibited sharing information from those applications, and he said the Senate bill makes the same mistake.
"We ought not to be kept from using that information," he said.
The issue has already been fought out in the Senate, when Sen. John Cornyn, Texas Republican, offered an amendment to change the confidentiality requirements. His amendment failed on a tie vote, 49-49.

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Ted Kennedy does more harm to the country and makes us less safe with his version of immigration "law."