[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 76 (Wednesday, May 21, 2003)]
[House]
[Pages H4513-H4517]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                        IMMIGRATION AND AMNESTY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 7, 2003, the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Tancredo) is 
recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
  Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. Speaker, I rise tonight to discuss a topic not 
unfamiliar to those who know that I have a passion for and an interest 
in the issue of immigration and immigration reform. Tonight, I wanted 
to specifically refer to a proposal that has made its way forward and 
that has a number of interesting aspects.
  As you know, Mr. Speaker, over the last couple of years anyway, there 
have been attempts on the floor of the House here where many people 
have tried to advance the cause and idea of amnesty for people who are 
living here in the United States illegally. It is something we have 
done before, something we did in the mid-1980s, and it has proven to be 
disastrous from a variety of standpoints.
  You may recall that as a result of amnesty for millions of people 
living here illegally, millions more people came illegally. Of course, 
this is only logical. It is not surprising whatsoever that if you tell 
someone that they can enter the United States without going through the 
legal process, without going through the expense and waiting in line, 
and that if they do that they will be rewarded for that activity; that 
we will provide you with all of the benefits of those people who did 
wait in line, well, then, of course, people will not wait in line. It 
is pretty logical.
  Nobody really, I think, is too surprised by the fact that when I do 
travel to the border and I talk to the border patrol, they always say, 
I hope you guys up there will stop using the word ``amnesty.'' Because 
every time you even utter the word, the flood I am trying to stop down 
here, with the sieve that you have given me, turns into a tidal wave. 
And, of course, it would always do so.
  Now, we have been successful, those of us who have been opposed to 
the continuation, or an expansion, of this concept of amnesty, 
expansion of what is bureaucratically and legalistically referred to as 
245(i), those opposed to 245(i) expansion have been successful in 
stopping it from actually occurring. It came through the House here, 
and it did pass the House by one vote but failed in the Senate. 
Actually, it failed because Senator Byrd put a hold on the bill and it 
did not come up.
  There is little sentiment in the Congress of the United States for 
this concept. The President has pushed it, but there is little 
sentiment for it here. And, frankly, I doubt that there is going to be 
a major effort to push it again through this Congress. There may be, 
but I think that we would be able to stop it.
  So what has happened as a result of the fact that those people who 
want open borders, those people who want to reward people for having 
come into the United States illegally? I mean, what do they do next, I 
guess is the question. Well, what they do next is to try to attain the 
same goal only in a different venue. Instead of coming through the 
Congress with a bill to create an amnesty for people who are living 
here illegally and rewarding people for violating our law, a new 
strategy has been hit upon.
  Now, this strategy is a strategy that has been employed by other 
governments, but in this case specifically, the government of Mexico, 
and maybe I should say other coconspirators in the United States, 
people who are in league with them, who believe that we should abandon 
our borders and provide no barrier whatsoever to the movement of 
people, ideas, goods and services. But the Mexican Government has 
decided to use something to achieve the same goal that they could not 
achieve by coming through the Congress, and that is the use of a card, 
an ID. It is referred to as the matricula consular.
  The matricula consular is an identification card that is given to 
nationals of any country by their own government. It is not unique to 
Mexico, and Mexico has actually been using them for a long, long, long 
time. What has changed in the last year and a half or so is that Mexico 
has decided to go big time into this particular kind of endeavor, that 
is to say, to distribute as many of these Mexican identification cards 
as possible to Mexican nationals living in the United States.
  Now, again, my colleagues might say, well, so what? What has that got 
to do with amnesty? Well, here is the deal. Everyone realizes, everyone 
realizes, that there is only one purpose for this card. There is really 
only one reason why someone would need this card in the United States, 
and that is if you are here illegally. It is a passport for illegal 
aliens. We know there are between 13 and 20 million people living in 
this country illegally, the vast majority being Mexican nationals. So 
the Mexican Government has already distributed, by their own count, 
about 1.4 million of these ID cards in the United States.
  Now, as I say, they have the right to do that. No one is suggesting 
that Mexico cannot give an ID card to their nationals living anywhere. 
But what is peculiar about this whole thing is that they then went to 
their consular offices throughout the United States and they said, your 
job, if you are a Mexican consular official, is to go out into the 
States for which you have some responsibility and begin to lobby those 
States and begin to lobby the cities, the counties, the police 
departments to get those entities to accept this card from anyone who 
presents it for a valid form of identification.
  And this has been enormously successful. They have been successful in

[[Page H4514]]

getting police departments all over the country to say yes to this 
idea, to accept the matricula card. They have been successful in 
getting States to go along with it. California is in the process of 
actually passing legislation to force their cities and counties to 
accept this ID, an ID that is given by a foreign government to a 
foreign national living here illegally.
  It immediately sets up a lot of questions, of course. The first one 
that would come to mind is how many immigration systems are we running 
in the United States? There is one that supposedly we have some 
responsibility for here and we say who can come and who can go. Now, we 
know that people ignore it quite routinely; but, nonetheless, we have a 
whole system of immigration law that we are supposed to be enforcing. 
Then there is another system of immigration law that is developing out 
there, in this case the States are employing it, and counties and 
police departments. They are doing it on their own.
  These States and local agencies are saying, well, we do not care if 
you are here illegally, we are going to give you our passport. We are 
going to accept this card from you and say that that is your passport 
for anything you want to obtain in the United States, for anything that 
a legal resident may be able to obtain: a driver's license, certain 
other benefits. And, in fact, beyond that, they are asking for cities 
and counties to extend social service benefits to people who carry this 
card, and police departments are to adhere to this card.
  Now, let me just tell you what that sets up. We arrested someone in 
Colorado not too long ago that had seven matricula consular cards with 
their face on it, but with seven different names. There is absolutely 
nothing, absolutely nothing, that we can rely on to suggest that these 
cards are in fact valid forms of ID. For $28 and a photocopy of your 
Mexican birth certificate, which of course can be created quite easily 
on a computer, you can go to the Mexican consulate, and it does not 
matter what you say your name is, it does not matter what you look 
like, it could be a person that looks completely anglo, it just does 
not matter, and you go in and say who you are, you present this birth 
certificate, and for $28 you will get yourself a new identity.
  So it is not just people who are living in the United States 
illegally who are benefited by this; but it is also, of course, people 
who are felons. They may be legal United States residents, but they 
have a desire to change their identity. This is a great way to do it, 
and people are doing it in great numbers.
  Now, this has started another set of discussions going, and 
specifically there are parts of the Federal Government that are 
interested in trying to address this issue, namely Homeland Defense. 
Because not too long ago, in California, a Federal office building in 
San Francisco began to accept the matricula consular as a valid form of 
ID for someone wanting to gain entrance to the Federal building.

                              {time}  1930

  This was done as a result of the insistence of the gentlewoman from 
California (Ms. Pelosi), and there were a number of repercussions to 
this, I should say. In fact, there was such an outcry and enough people 
concerned that a Federal building in the United States was allowing 
entrance into that building by someone who presented an identification 
card that our government did not give them, a foreign government did.
  So GSA, which is the government landlord, decided to put this whole 
thing on hold while they did a study of the whole concept of using the 
matricula for ID purposes, and a working group started. It was really 
housed originally in the Department of Homeland Security, and they were 
charged with the development of a draft proposal. They completed that 
not too long ago.
  I happen to have been able to see a copy of that proposal. It was 
interesting in that it talked about the very dangerous repercussions to 
allowing Federal government agencies to accept the matricula consular 
as a form of identification because, of course, you cannot just 
regulate this to one country. You cannot just say you will only accept 
the matricula consular from Mexico. Right now, there are five other 
countries that are using this form of identification for their illegals 
living in the United States, one of them Poland.
  This is something many countries are looking at. If a country is not 
looking at it, a lot of terrorists are looking at it, a lot of people 
who are figuring out a way to become part of the American mainstream, 
to get into American society. They are looking for a passport into 
American society, something that allows them to open bank accounts, get 
a driver's license, your library card, and anything else that a regular 
citizen of this country would be able to do.
  So terrorists have a strong incentive to see how this thing unfolds. 
So at certain points in time we could certainly see governments of a 
lot of foreign countries providing these matricula consular to their 
nationals who in turn would use them in the United States because the 
law says the government accepts them, and the law in your particular 
city or State says you can do so.
  Banks became very involved with this whole thing and started 
encouraging people to open accounts in their bank. Wells Fargo Bank and 
Citibank, Bank America, all of these banks saw a huge potential there, 
a niche market. They call them the unbanked. What they mean is the 
illegal alien living in the United States and looking to open an 
account. I do not blame the banks for seeing this as a true profit 
center. They are completely able to do that.
  But what is interesting is not too long ago we passed something 
called the PATRIOT Act here, and we made it difficult, supposedly, for 
people to do things and supposedly difficult for banks to do things 
that would allow people to use bogus accounts to transfer money because 
we recognize that is something that terrorist organizations do. So the 
banks, even without any sort of legal imprimatur, if you will, to allow 
them to do this, went ahead and started accepting the matricula 
consular to open accounts.
  Well, the Treasury Department last week promulgated rules in response 
to the PATRIOT Act. Now this is the great irony here. The PATRIOT Act 
demanded that the banks do something to make it more secure, to make 
the whole process more secure when people open an account so we really 
know who these people are and we can track the money flow if we have 
to. That is the part of the PATRIOT Act that banks were responding to.
  So what did they do? The Treasury Department, recognizing that this 
was happening in the banking industry and that banks were making 
millions of dollars off of the ``unbanked'' community, the Treasury of 
the United States, in response to the PATRIOT Act, promulgated rules 
saying, in fact, that banks could accept the matricula consular. This 
is amazing, and it is I think something that we should all be concerned 
about. I think that certainly we are going to try to bring this to the 
attention of the House in a short time by filing a request for a 
resolution, a joint resolution to stop the implementation of these 
regulations.
  Remember, Mr. Speaker, what we are talking about here is something 
that is being used to avoid the law. We passed a law in this Congress 
saying that the only way that you can come into this country is through 
a certain process and that if you do not do that you are in violation 
of the law. But how hypocritical is it to then say, however, if you get 
here, we are going to ignore the fact that you chose this particular 
route and we are going to give you access to every single amenity that 
this country has to offer, including the right to vote which is being 
pressed.
  There are cities not too far from where we are tonight in Maryland 
and in Connecticut, along the East Coast especially, that call 
themselves sanctuary cities, and they allow people to vote in elections 
even if these people are not citizens of the United States. Even if 
they are not even legal aliens, they allow them to vote if they can 
show residency. If they can show them a utility bill, they can vote.
  What the end result of all of this is, if we give people the ability 
to obtain all of the benefits of citizenship without ever being a 
citizen, then of course the whole concept of citizenship is 
meaningless. That is the end result of

[[Page H4515]]

things like this matricula consular activity or movement. We have to 
deal with it. We may not think that is important, and it becomes 
esoteric for some. You say matricula consular, and they do not care. It 
is a strange concept. We are just going to let somebody else deal with.
  Luckily, some States are dealing with it: Colorado, Iowa, Tennessee, 
and Arizona have all introduced laws to abolish or to stop their State 
and/or any entity in their State from accepting the matricula consular. 
That is, of course, what I believe this government should do.
  I hope that we will follow carefully this issue, and I hope that we 
will support either my bill or the bill of the gentleman from 
California (Mr. Gallegly). Either one of these two bills are designed 
to put a stop to this movement, at least at the Federal level, and I 
hope we can do that.

  We endanger homeland security by allowing these cards to be accepted. 
We establish a precedent that says, even if you violate our laws, we 
will not do anything to you. You can come here and have all of the 
benefits. What a slap in the face that is to every other citizen who 
has done it the right way, everyone who has waited in line, paid the 
price both emotionally and monetarily, to get to the United States. 
What a slap in the face it is to them to say it does not matter. All 
you have to do is jump the line, come in and you will be rewarded the 
exact same way that someone who did it the right way is rewarded.
  So this is an attack on our sovereignty. This is an attack on 
citizenship itself, and it certainly sets up a very dangerous situation 
in these very trying days.
  We went recently to Code Orange, and that means that we are even more 
fearful of an attack by a terrorist organization. We are taking more 
steps to try to prevent it.
  What is fascinating to me is everything we do is designed to stop 
someone from committing an act, committing a terrorist act once they 
get here, but very little is designed to stop them from getting here to 
begin with. Hence, our open border policy invites terrorists into the 
country, and then we scurry around trying to stop them. We say we are 
not going to defend our own borders. We suggest that in doing something 
like making a secure border that there would be repercussions, that 
there would be political and cultural repercussions to it. Other 
countries, Mexico in particular, would not like it if we put military 
on our border to defend against people coming in here illegally, so we 
do not do it.
  What a bizarre concept that we will let other countries and vocal 
minorities inside our own country stop us from defending our own 
people. The one responsibility we have in this Nation, the one 
responsibility we have in this House is to protect the people and the 
property of the United States of America, and we shirk that 
responsibility because we are afraid of those political ramifications.
  Well, there will be other ramifications to open borders: successful 
terrorist attacks. Those are ramifications of open borders. People will 
die in this country as a result of that kind of behavior on our part. 
Our almost guilt-driven sort of compulsion to move this concept called 
multi-culturalism to where it permeates every aspect of our culture and 
society, we must make sure that we do nothing, say nothing that would 
make anyone else upset with us, any other country or culture. We have 
to be so careful about that that we disregard our own security 
measures. That is what we are really trying to deal with here, is what 
it means to be an American and what it means to defend the concept of 
being an American.
  There are so many aspects of this particular problem and issue. There 
are political and economic and social ramifications of open border 
policies, and I touched a little bit on what I consider to be the 
national security implications of open borders, but there are many 
others. One that I wanted to talk about a little tonight is the 
economic impact of massive immigration of low-skilled, low-wage people, 
both legal and illegal immigration.
  For many years, the old adage dealt with the fact that massive 
immigration translated into economic opportunity and economic power and 
growth. It turns out, study after study is now showing us, like so many 
other things that we believed to be true at one time or another, that 
is a myth. Massive immigration of low-skilled, low-wage people does not 
in fact create wealth, except for a few.
  Specifically, those people who actually hire low-skilled, low-wage 
people and pay them low wages, it does provide for them a certain 
degree of profit. But for the rest of us, for the taxpayers of the 
country, massive immigration of low-wage, low-skilled workers creates a 
cost, a cost for housing, a cost for roads, hospitals, infrastructure 
costs which come about as a result of population growth. There is 
absolutely no way that the number of people coming here and taking 
those jobs, a lot of which of course are paid for sort of under the 
table in cash and we do not see any sort of cash revenues, but even 
those who come here and file fake Social Security numbers or get a tax 
identification number from the Internal Revenue Service and pay some 
taxes end up being a significant cost to the United States.
  First of all, they pay little or no income taxes.
  Secondly, they consume a great deal in terms of infrastructure costs.
  Now there is another aspect. You have to admit, it is kind of a 
clever strategy.

                              {time}  1945

  There is a provision of our law called Earned Income Tax Credit that 
says if you do not make enough money during the course of a year, we 
will in turn give you extra dollars back to sort of make up for that 
low-wage kind of poverty cycle in which you may be stuck. This has 
already been identified by GAO and other studies as being one of the 
most fraud-ridden government programs. Billions of dollars every year 
are sent out to people who falsify documents in order to obtain their 
Earned Income Tax Credit.
  It is not just American citizens who have figured this out and 
figured out a way to scam the taxpayers of the United States. It has 
become a big business for people who are here illegally.
  Not too long ago, I had the opportunity to be observing the situation 
on the border in Arizona. We went through an area where there were a 
number of these things called pickup sites. Pickup sites are places in 
which illegal immigrants gather for the purpose of being picked up like 
these folks, the unfortunate folks in Victoria, Texas. They were picked 
up at a certain location by a big truck, in this case a semi, and 
driven into the interior of the United States.
  These pickup sites, these places where all these folks gather, are 
all around the American Southwest. They become trash heaps after a 
while because, after a while, literally thousands of people will 
actually gather there. They throw everything around. They throw their 
trash and their water bottles and everything else out there.
  We were walking through one of these pickup sites not too far from 
Douglas, Arizona. I looked down, and I saw this, actually this copy of 
an IRS tax return document enclosed, it says. I picked it up, because 
this was an odd thing to be there in the trash pile in a place where 
only illegal aliens gather.
  This particular form is an Earned Income Tax Credit form that was 
filed by Mr. and Mrs. Delgado, Mr. Delgado who is here apparently 
illegally. As I say, this is a place, a site for people who are here 
illegally. Mr. Delgado claimed that he paid $64.12 in total Federal 
income tax, and he claimed $3,581 in Earned Income Tax Credit.
  We know this is happening. We also know, as a matter of fact, that 
the IRS is so interested in making sure that even if you are here 
illegally that you benefit by your status that if you have used a fake 
Social Security number to get the job you have because you are here 
illegally and file an income tax form with a request for an Earned 
Income Tax Credit, the IRS will actually send you back a letter that 
says, your Social Security number is inaccurate. So, therefore, we have 
assigned you a tax identification number, and here is your check. Here 
is your Earned Income Tax Credit.
  It is a great scam. As I say, millions of American citizens take 
advantage of the lax enforcement procedures attendant to Earned Income 
Tax Credit, and so do illegal aliens by the thousands,

[[Page H4516]]

maybe by the hundreds of thousands. We are really not sure, but it is 
certainly something that we know happens and happens a lot.
  So when we talk about the costs of illegal immigration into the 
United States, we have to really and truly consider the fact that these 
costs are more than just the jobs that are taken.
  Let us talk about the jobs issue for just a moment. We passed a bill 
in the House. It has gone to the Senate. It is going to come back to us 
in the form of a conference report, perhaps. There is a great deal of 
attention being paid to this particular piece of legislation. It 
started out and it was referred to as a tax cut bill. I still think of 
it as that, but we now talk about it as a jobs creation package, 
because the purpose of it is to stimulate the economy, to provide more 
dollars for employers to hire more people, to invest in their own plant 
and equipment. And I believe it will.
  I certainly supported the legislation. It is interesting to me to 
note that various economists come in and tell us how many jobs will be 
created by the different levels of tax cuts that we propose. It is 
several hundred thousand for this one, 100 and some thousand jobs for 
this one. I always think to myself, there are between 13 and 20 million 
jobs we could create instantaneously for American citizens, and that 
is, of course, we could deport people who are living here illegally, 
which is exactly what we should do.
  That is what should happen to someone who is here illegally. They 
should be deported. Anyone who hires someone who is here illegally 
should be fined. There is a law that says you cannot hire people who 
are here illegally. We all know that it goes on constantly, and we all 
know for the most part everybody sort of turns a blind eye to it.
  It is fascinating that we spend an enormous amount of time, energy 
and resources in the discussion of exactly how many jobs we need to 
create by tax cuts, and again I am all for it, but we ignore the fact 
that there are millions of Americans who are looking for work and they 
are looking for work in places where the jobs have been taken by people 
who are here illegally.
  I hear all the time about people who are here taking jobs that only 
they would take, that no other American would take, that no citizen 
would take. Maybe those jobs really exist. Maybe all of the American 
citizens out of work from whom I hear, by the way, are people who 
really would not go do the hard labor that is done by illegal 
immigrants.
  I suggest that it is not true. I suggest, and there is plenty of 
anecdotal evidence to lead me to the conclusion that, in fact, 
Americans are ready, willing and quite able to take the jobs that are 
being held, low-skilled, low-wage worker jobs that are being held by 
illegals.
  As evidence of that, I can remember an article that appeared in the 
Rocky Mountain News, oh, several months ago now. It was about a 
restaurant in Denver called the Luna Restaurant. It is a Mexican 
restaurant. I have had occasion to visit and had a great meal there a 
couple of times. The article in the paper, interestingly, was about an 
ad that had been placed by the restaurant in the paper, an ad for a 
waiter, a $3-an-hour waiter, the type of job that we are always told no 
American would do. The reason that that ad turned into a story in the 
paper is because the Luna Restaurant received 600 applicants in one day 
for that job. Maybe, it is possible, of course, that all 600 people who 
applied were illegal aliens and that every American citizen who looked 
at that ad said, no, that is below me. I'm not going to apply for that 
job.

  It is really not within the realm of possibility. I really do not 
think it happened, Mr. Speaker. I really believe that a lot of the 
people who applied for that job were American citizens, lived here all 
their lives or came here legally and I think should have had the first 
shot at that job, frankly.
  But let us say that there is that need out there for low-skilled, 
low-wage workers and that need cannot be supplied by American citizens, 
that we have all become too spoiled.
  Let us go to the next level of unemployment that we face in this 
country. It is called the high-tech industry. We all know, especially 
Members from California recognize fully well the enormous change that 
has occurred in that industry, the shake-out in the industry, if you 
will, the number of firms that have gone under and the many, many 
thousands and thousands, in fact, millions of people who have been 
thrown out of work in that industry. Several live in my neighborhood. 
Thousands live in my district.
  We run a program in this country, an immigration program referred to 
as H1B. H1B immigrants are different in many respects than other people 
we let into the country legally in that we say that these folks have 
skills that are so unique that we will give a certain amount, in this 
case 150,000 a year, of these particular H1B visas because these are 
given to people with certain skills, high-tech skills that we again, 
quote, can't find Americans that would qualify.
  We have had this program operating for, oh, 5 or 6 years, I think, 
longer than that; and every year we have been bringing in 100-, 150,000 
of these folks. They do not go home. They are supposed to go home when 
their job ends or after a certain period of time, but they do not go 
home. The INS tells us that they have absolutely no idea how many are 
still here but probably close to 90 percent of everybody who ever came. 
So we have well over 1 million people in the United States today who 
have come here with an H1B visa. That is a visa that allows them to 
displace an American worker.
  Because even though the law is supposed to prevent someone from 
coming in here and replacing an American worker and paying this 
newcomer less money than the American would be paid, it happens all the 
time. Everybody knows it. Everybody knows that the employer will look 
for that individual, and these people have skills. They are competent 
for the most part. I am not saying they are not. So the employer gets 
somebody that they can get to work for less, and the American worker 
gets the unemployment line.
  What is happening to the H1B visa? Are we going to abolish it? Not on 
your life. I certainly have a bill that would significantly reduce the 
numbers. I have no great hope that that bill will be heard or ever come 
to the floor. Why not, I guess I would ask? I do ask that question. Why 
not? What is there about our economy today, how many people are out 
there looking for a job who have all the skills necessary to be placed 
in that high-tech industry but, of course, their job has been taken by 
someone who is not an American citizen with an H1B visa? They are, some 
of them, here legally. Many of them have, of course, overstayed their 
visa and are now here illegally but they are still employed and still 
taking jobs away from American workers. Yet no one discusses that issue 
when we talk about jobs creation. I just wonder why.
  I really know why. I just rhetorically wonder why we do not talk 
about it. There is an economic price to pay for massive immigration 
into the country.
  I hope in the near future that we will get the courage in this body 
to actually engage in a debate, a full-blown debate on this concept of 
open borders. I would love to have a bill before us that says you have 
two choices, America. You either abolish the borders, take down the 
ports of entry, take back the Border Patrol and abandon it, let people 
do what libertarians in both this House and even in the administration 
want, and that is to have the free flow of goods and services and 
people without being impeded by borders.
  That is one picture that people have. It is bizarre to me, but it is 
a picture that people have about what the world should look like in 
this century, a world without borders. I would very much like to have a 
debate as to whether or not that is the world we wish to live in, that 
is the future of this country, or a country that secures its borders by 
every means possible. Those are the two choices we really have. Because 
anything in between that leads us to where we are today. It leads us to 
a situation where you call something illegal, people can actually be 
arrested for violating the law, they seldom are, but they could be, but 
we all know that we do not really enforce the law that much, so we 
entice a lot of people to come into the United States illegally.
  It is partially our fault. It is this government's fault that things 
like the incident in Victoria, Texas, occurred. Nineteen people die in 
the back of a trailer, one small child. Of course, hundreds of people 
are dead in the deserts

[[Page H4517]]

of America, in the Southwest. Hundreds of people die every year coming 
into this country. They do not do so quite as dramatically. We do not 
find them all in one place. We find bodies scattered throughout the 
Southwest and deserts, but this is what happens.
  Also, on our side, people, of course, die in the defense of those 
borders.

                              {time}  2000

  Park rangers die. Border patrolmen die. This is a dangerous place to 
be. And yet we entice this movement of people by making it very or 
relatively easy to come into the country, yet still illegal. So people 
pay coyotes, people who bring them into the country; and they will pay 
them $1,000 or $1,500 to coming into the United States, and the coyotes 
will then oftentimes take advantage of the people. They are oftentimes 
robbed of their life's savings, the people coming across. The women are 
raped. They are thrown into the desert and they die.
  It is a horrible situation on the border, and today we passed an 
amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 
2004 that allowed the President of the United States, in fact, 
encouraged the President of the United States to place troops on the 
border. We passed that bill here before and it has always failed over 
on the Senate side. We will see what happens this year. But I suggest 
that that is exactly what we have to have in order to prevent the kinds 
of things that we see on the border, both to protect our own people, 
border patrol, the Forest Service personnel, park rangers, to protect 
them and also to protect and stop people from coming into this country 
illegally and, in fact, protecting them from some very bad things that 
could happen to them. So it is a lax border policy that encourages 
people to come and events like Victoria, Texas, to occur.
  The other thing is that the Nation itself has to make a decision as 
to exactly what it wants to do, what kind of a policy it wants to have, 
whether or not we truly, as I say, want borders or we do not. Because 
if we make the decision that we want borders, then there are a whole 
bunch of other decisions that follow after that. How are we going to 
defend them? Are we going to make them secure? What are we going to do 
to people who violate our borders by coming in illegally? These are all 
very difficult questions, but they are questions this Nation has to 
begin to deal with because there are major implications to massive 
immigration combined with this cult of multiculturalism that permeates 
our society. It is a very dangerous combination. Massive immigration 
and the cult of multiculturalism. The country needs to make that kind 
of decision. It has to engage in that kind of debate.
  It would be great, I think, if a Presidential candidate would enter 
into that debate, would bring it to the focus and the attention of the 
Nation and make people, all people running for office at every level, 
talk about how they feel about this issue, whether or not secure 
borders mean anything, whether or not massive immigration is an 
acceptable activity today, and whether or not we are going to have 
porous borders especially in light of the terrorist threat that exists 
in this country.
  Let them explain to their constituency why open borders is a good 
idea. Let them explain why massive immigration even just in terms of 
the numbers anymore is justified. Let us talk about what is the need of 
this country. Is it for millions of low-skilled, low-wage workers every 
year? Is that what we need? If it is, okay, that is the kind of 
immigration policy we establish. We say, here is how many people can 
come into the country. Here are the skills that we need, that our 
country needs to make us a better country, to make the people living 
here have a better quality of life. That is what a rational immigration 
policy is.
  Or, as I say, abandon the border. Forget the whole charade that we 
call immigration and immigration law because when we operate the kind 
of system that we are operating now, all we do is put people in harm's 
way. All we do is put our border patrol people and the people trying to 
come across that border illegally into very dangerous situations; but 
in fact we do not accomplish any of the goals that should be 
established for immigration. So if we do not believe in it, if we think 
that this is not a legitimate goal for the United States, if it is not 
a legitimate function of the government to say who comes and who goes, 
then just abandon the border. Defend that to the population. Go out to 
their constituents and explain to them this is their concept of 
America, an America where borders are no longer relevant, they are 
anachronisms and new maps should be drawn up that erase the borders. Go 
ahead and explain that because that is exactly where we are headed. We 
are heading there in a de facto way, not in a legal sense; but that is 
exactly where we are heading.
  And as I say, Mr. Speaker, I believe there are major implications to 
that, and they deserve to be debated. And maybe I am 180 degrees off 
center here. Maybe I am completely wrong about my concerns with regard 
to open borders. But at least does it not deserve an honest debate in a 
very public forum and at the highest levels? Is it not an appropriate 
thing for Presidential candidates to discuss?
  I would love to see, really, a very thorough discussion among the 
candidates running for both the Democratic primary and I wish the 
President of the United States would discuss it to a greater extent 
than he does. I would like to know exactly where all of these 
candidates stand, and so would people of this country, so would 
Americans like to know where their representatives stand on this issue. 
Today it is not all that clear because we can sort of take a powder on 
this by saying we have got this immigration policy and we will let them 
do their job but knowing full well that it is a total abject failure 
and that it is the worst of all possible worlds. It is a place into 
which we have put people who are, as I say, in great danger, and yet 
they actually are defending something we do not believe to be of great 
value, and, that is, the border.
  I went down to Ajo, Arizona, not too long ago to attend a funeral, a 
funeral for a gentleman by the name of Kris Eggle. Kris Eggle was 28 
years old. He was a park ranger. He was killed not too far from Ajo. He 
was killed by two illegal aliens who had come into the United States as 
part of a drug deal that went bad in Mexico. They had killed four 
people there. They came across the border. They confronted Mr. Eggle 
and killed him. And I went there with Mr. Eggle's father, and we stood 
at the very spot where Kris was killed, and this had been the fourth 
time that the father had visited that particular location. And that was 
hard even for me, and I cannot imagine how difficult it was for Mr. 
Eggle. But he does it, he said, and he will continue to go there to 
draw attention to the plight of the border, to draw attention to the 
fact that we have people like his son down there in great jeopardy but 
truly without the intent of having them defend our borders or else we 
would do what is necessary to protect them and the border. But we are 
fearful of it because there are political obstacles, political and 
cultural as Governor Ridge told us. When we asked him why we did not 
put troops on the border, he said there are political and cultural 
problems there. That is true. There are no two ways about it. It is an 
honest statement, an honest reflection. But I would suggest that it is 
not a good enough reason for not defending our own borders.
  There are other very significant implications to massive immigration 
combined with the cult of multiculturalism, and I can save them for 
another evening. But I do want to encourage all of us, Mr. Speaker, to 
become acquainted with this matricula consular, this card that is being 
handed out. I want us to become acquainted with it because it is 
something that could be used to achieve the goal that we were able to 
block here sometime ago, and that is creating amnesty for everybody in 
this country illegally. It could be used eventually essentially to 
destroy the whole concept of citizenship. That is what it is designed 
to do, and it will do if we allow it to. So although I know the issue 
is somewhat esoteric and people become a little glazed over when we 
talk about things like matricula consular, it is nonetheless important, 
important for us to understand, important for our constituents to 
understand. So, therefore, I will continue to raise that issue as long 
as it is necessary.




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