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   That is why I am urging my colleagues to join the President, to join the administration and come together as a team to build a missile defensive system that protects the security of this Nation. We can do it. And do not let people tell you we are walking away from the treaty. The treaty allows us to do it. It is contained within the rights of the treaty. So it is absolutely necessary for this country to move forward with the development of a missile defensive system.

   Let me conclude my remarks this evening by just quickly going over or repeating some of the key points. Key point number one: the airport security in this country must immediately be improved for a long-term basis. Mr. Ridge, the new head of the Homeland Security Agency understands this. I think he has a good grasp on it. But the key element here is that we can dramatically and must dramatically improve that security.

   I think it is a mistake to rapidly go out and hire as Federal employees tens of thousands of people and put them on the Federal payroll. I think the Federal Government has a very important role in the tightening of airport security by issuing and overseeing the regulations, but I think it would be a big mistake creating a brand-new bureaucracy. These bureaucracies are very, very difficult to manage, very, very inflexible, and usually not very productive. We cannot afford to have an agency, an agency-bungling, so to speak, of airport security. It has to be improved and improved in a dramatic fashion. Point number one.

   Then point number two. The borders. It is now, in my opinion, absolutely correct, not politically incorrect but absolutely correct, to talk about what we have to do to tighten the borders of this country and who we ought to have in this country as guests and who we should not have as guests. And when the guest stays too long, we, this country, ought to be there to say it is time to go home; it is time to go back across the border from which you came because your invitation has expired. You have been around just a little too long.

   Right now, as I demonstrated with some of the numbers and statistics that I gave in earlier comments, this is not controlled at all in our country. We have tens of thousands, tens of thousands of people who are in this country on expired student visas . And do not let the university system and the college system come to the defense of these expired visas . And do not let the college or university system come and say, well, these student visas are absolutely essential for this purpose or that purpose. We need a balance.

   Now, a lot of these schools and universities get money, a high tuition charge for those people; but the fact is we have to bring it back in tune. I am not saying stop student visas , but I am saying we have to control them and enforce them; otherwise they are meaningless, and they provide a threat to the security of this Nation.

   Finally, the third point that I covered this evening, and I will reiterate it as long as I am a Congressman in the United States Congress, is that this Nation must proceed, as the administration has urged us to do, as President Bush has told us to do, this Congress and this Government must proceed with a missile defensive system for the borders of this country and for the borders of our allies. Failure to do so would be, in my opinion, the most horrible dereliction of duty in the history of the United States Congress. That is how strongly I feel about that.

   We have an absolute obligation, a responsibility to protect the security of this Nation by providing a defensive missile system. Keep in mind how many countries throughout this world are building offensive, offensive, attack systems. We know now after September 11 that the United States will very likely be at the top of the target list for many, many years to come. So we, colleagues, have an obligation to understand that reality and to defend against that reality.

   A missile defensive system should be the first and the highest priority on that list in regards to the missile offensive system of these other countries. We need to defend against it. We have fair warning and we have a little period of time to do it and we ought to do it.

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