[Congressional Record Volume 150, Number 2 (Wednesday, January 21, 2004)]
[House]
[Pages H82-H87]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1545
                PROVIDING HEALTH CARE FOR ILLEGAL ALIENS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Bishop of Utah). Under the Speaker's 
announced policy of January 7, 2003, the gentleman from California (Mr. 
Rohrabacher) is recognized for 60 minutes.
  Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I would like to commend my colleagues 
for that last special order, for the way that we are going to make sure 
that the young people in this country understand that drugs pose a 
threat to them is to have just this type of presentation in Congress 
and this type of discussion, serious discussion, with them as to the 
threat that drugs pose to their well-being.
  With that, however, I would like to now, in my hour, raise a 
discussion on another issue that I believe is perhaps the most serious 
threat to the well-being of the American people. I have introduced a 
bill today that will give my colleagues a stark choice. They can do 
what will help big business, but will, at the same time, do great 
damage to the American people as a whole; or they can support the 
legislation that I am proposing, which will be a big step toward 
eliminating the greatest threat to the well-being of the American 
people.
  Drugs is certainly a threat, but I will tell you that I believe the 
greatest threat to the American people as we stand here today is the 
still uncontrolled flood of illegal immigration into our society. All 
the other problems that we have, including drug use in our own country, 
are exacerbated by this uncontrolled flow of illegal immigrants into 
the United States of America. If we do not get control of this, it will 
surely destroy our country as we know it in the years ahead.
  Yes, we can absorb legal immigrants in a fairly high number. I am 
proud that we have a little more than 1 million legal immigrants coming 
into our country every year, one-half of one percent of growth or so of 
our population. Certainly we can absorb that kind of immigration flow. 
But what we have had in these last 15 years, and especially in the last 
10 years, is a massive increase in the flow of illegal immigrants into 
our country.
  Perhaps it can be traced back to the 1986 amnesty bill that passed 
through this Congress and was signed into law, unfortunately, by my 
President, President Ronald Reagan. That bill was hard-fought on this 
House floor, and I understand that my colleague, Mr. Dan Lundgren, is 
the father of that portion of the bill that insisted on amnesty for 
those illegal immigrants that were already in the country.
  Once that amnesty took place, once this legislation was passed in 
1986, the word went out throughout the whole world that if you get to 
the United States, you are going to get the benefits of the people of 
the United States, and you can outwait the American people because we 
have such good hearts that there will be another amnesty, and yet 
another. The flow of illegal immigration after 1986, instead of 
decreasing, dramatically increased. Surprise, surprise.
  No, the people who passed that need to take responsibility for their 
actions. That piece of legislation has caused great damage to us. In 
California, our schools, the education system, is under incredible 
pressure. Our criminal justice system is almost breaking down under the 
weight of illegal immigrants, with 30 and 40 percent of those who are 
held in incarceration at times being illegal immigrants. Our healthcare 
system, our emergency rooms are breaking down under the pressure and 
the strain of illegal immigrants. And that is what leads me to the 
legislation which I introduced today.
  This legislation that I introduced today flows directly from a 
confrontation that I had with the leaders of this body over whether a 
provision should have been included in the Medicare reform bill that 
provided $1 billion in order to pay for the emergency healthcare for 
illegal immigrants in those States where illegal immigration is most 
prevalent.
  I opposed that and I was not going to vote for the Medicare bill 
because of that, but the leadership in the House agreed that if I would 
vote for the Medicare bill, that I could write legislation that would, 
in some way, mitigate the damage that I felt was inherent in providing 
U.S. tax dollars officially to pay for services, health services, for 
people who have come to this country or are currently in this country 
illegally.
  I voted for the Medicare bill. I voted for it before it went to the 
Senate. When it came back from the Senate I only voted for it with this 
understanding. So today the bill that I place into the hopper is in 
direct relationship to the Medicare bill that passed through this 
House, that, yes, indeed, took care of the prescription drug needs of 
many of our seniors, but, at the same time, did include an extraneous 
provision for providing $1 billion in healthcare for illegal 
immigrants.
  With that, I would say that the hospitals and emergency rooms on our 
Nation's borders, especially those in California, are certainly now 
going broke trying to treat illegal aliens who are streaming into their 
facilities. And there is no doubt about this pressure. There is no 
doubt about the horrible impact that it is having.
  But the reasons are twofold for the pressure on these hospitals and 
emergency rooms. Illegal aliens, first of all, normally, or at least 
quite often, if not normally, we do not have the exact statistics 
because they are operating in a black area of our society, we do not 
know all of the statistics about what illegal aliens have or do not 
have, we assume they are normally working at jobs with no healthcare 
benefits. Couple that with the fact that Congress insists and the law 
now insists that hospital emergency rooms treat every patient who walks 
through those doors of their emergency room, that they must be treated 
according to law.
  America, with those two realities facing us, number one, that people 
who come here illegally generally are working at jobs without 
healthcare benefits, meaning the people who run the businesses do not 
provide them healthcare, but the taxpayers end up providing the health 
care, coupled with the fact that the emergency rooms feel that they are 
required by law to take care of anyone who walks through the door, what 
we have done is created a situation where America has now become the 
HMO to the whole world.
  We are taking care of illegal immigrants, any illegal immigrant, who 
can get to our country and get to that emergency room. Sometimes we are 
not talking about just emergency treatment, about what common sense 
would tell us is emergency treatment; we are talking about extended 
cancer treatments, we are talking about treatments for diseases that 
are congenital, we are talking about diseases that someone clearly had 
when they came to the United States. We are talking about diseases that 
require hundreds of thousands of dollars, and sometimes even up to $1 
million, in treatment.
  With this Medicare bill that we provided, $1 billion for the 
emergency healthcare for illegal immigrants, that is the first time any 
money has been spent to provide services for illegal immigrants in our 
country, so this is a watershed. This is that moment.
  In doing that, did that same bill try to fix the situation by 
enforcing our immigration laws on the border and insisting that these 
immigration laws be enforced if we provide that $1 billion? No, that 
was not in the bill. Did Congress try to fix the situation by saying 
that emergency rooms can turn away

[[Page H83]]

patients who are not in immediate danger of dying? To me that seems 
what an emergency is. An emergency is if someone is in immediate danger 
of dying, or if they are in immediate danger of something happening 
that will at that moment create a circumstance in their life or create 
something that is irreversible, a health reality in their life that is 
irreversible.
  But, no, we did not put any restrictions on the emergency care rooms 
turning away patients because they really were not in emergencies, or 
just treating a case to a small degree until those people could go back 
to their own countries and get the rest of the treatment needed to 
become well. No, none of this was included in that Medicare bill. But 
$1 billion was.
  The bill included no provisions to lower the cost of caring for 
illegal aliens by enforcing the law and deporting them. After all, if 
the taxpayers and the American people are going to end up paying for 
the healthcare of someone who has come into this country illegally, 
just ignored our laws or thumbed their noses at our laws, and now they 
are in need of some health treatment and they come to us asking us to 
take money out of our pocket, those people, if they are here illegally, 
after they are treated, at the very least, they should be deported.
  That was not in that legislation either. The bill added $1 billion of 
funding for the healthcare of illegal aliens and did not even ask the 
hospitals to identify the illegal aliens they are treating, to identify 
them so that INS could deport them or take some action against them for 
being in our country illegally.
  It did not do any of those things. What it did do is begin the 
process of shoveling tax dollars in the direction of providing 
services, officially providing services for people who are in this 
country illegally.
  I will tell you now, there is no one in this body that does not know 
and understand that a $1 billion program like this starting off, just 
opening the door, is going to end up being a $50 billion program 10 
years down the line. So it is time for us to act right now, before this 
$1 billion becomes $4 billion, which then becomes $10 billion, which 
then becomes $20 billion. It is time for us to use this moment, this 
opportunity, with the passage of the Medicare bill, to support 
legislation in the Congress that will at least be a first big step 
toward trying to see if we can get this illegal immigration issue under 
control, at least in the area of healthcare.
  What I am proposing is very simple. The legislation that I just 
dropped into the hopper is not so complicated that people cannot 
understand it. First of all, it is totally voluntary. A hospital that 
does not want to receive Federal money under the program in that 
Medicare bill does not have to participate in this. So that is the 
first principle.
  I would prefer that we make it mandatory, but this legislation is 
going way over to the other side in order to reach out and make this 
reasonable by saying if you are not going to get the Federal money for 
the illegals, if you are not going to apply for that, then what is 
required in this bill will not be required of you. But for the 
hospitals who do want that Federal funding, the bill is very easy to 
understand for these hospitals that want that Federal funding.
  The hospital needs to ask patients if they are a citizen of the 
United States. How about that? How about that? They are going to have 
to ask, when they ask all those other questions when you go into that 
emergency room, they just have to ask are you a citizen of the United 
States? If the patient says yes, no further action is required of the 
hospital in terms of verifying whether that person is a citizen.
  By the way, others can follow up on that. Others can follow up later 
to see if this person is or is not a citizen.
  But if the patient says no, and he or she is not a citizen, the 
hospital then is required to ask what country the patient is from and 
what is their immigration status. If the patient is a documented alien, 
meaning that patient is here legally and is a legal immigrant, nothing 
needs more to be done, because nothing that I am proposing and our 
outrage about illegal immigration is not in any way an attack on legal 
immigrants. People who have come to this country legally have every 
right of every other citizen, and I know a lot of people now are trying 
to blur the difference between illegals and legals. That is doing a 
great disservice to the legal immigrants in our country. Most legal 
immigrants, I might add, are outraged by illegal immigration and by the 
fact that we provide services to illegal immigrants.

                              {time}  1600

  In fact, sometimes the legal immigrants and U.S. citizens end up 
having less bestowed upon them by our government than do the illegal 
immigrants. A U.S. citizen, for example, has to pay outside tuition in 
California to go to a junior college, but an illegal immigrant does not 
have to pay outside tuition. That was something that was passed by the 
California legislature.
  If the alien is illegal, once he comes into the hospital, going back 
to this emergency room treatment, if the alien is illegal, the hospital 
must ask about the immigrant's employer and a biometric indicator, 
meaning a photo or a fingerprint, must be taken, to be determined by 
the Department of Homeland Security of whether it should be a thumb 
print or a picture; but that is what they have to do if this person who 
comes into the emergency room is an illegal immigrant and states for 
the record that he is an illegal immigrant. So we need to know who they 
are working for, and we need to know exactly what country they came 
from and get a fingerprint or a picture.
  The hospital then uploads this information into a database that is 
now being set up by the Department of Health and Human Services and, of 
course, the Department of Homeland Security. Thus the information that 
we have collected will become available to the Department of Homeland 
Security and these other government agencies for national security 
purposes and, yes, for the purposes of immigration enforcement. There 
is nothing that would suggest that that information could not be used 
to immediately begin deportation proceedings against an illegal 
immigrant who is coming into our hospitals to get thousands of dollars, 
if not tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars of 
free medical care from the taxpayers of the United States.
  Thus we have the information available that is not now available if 
my bill passes. And at that point, I would hope that our Immigration 
and Naturalization Service and this administration and the people of 
the United States begin to demand that people who are in this country 
illegally be deported, especially if they have used tens of thousands 
and millions of dollars of public services like health care while they 
are here, because what they have done is taken that money directly from 
the well-being of the American people, their host.
  This is wrong. It is wrong for us to permit our health care dollars 
that our seniors do not even get the type of coverage that we would 
like them to have, our veterans do not get the coverage we would like 
them to have; but yet we permit illegal immigrants to come into our 
emergency rooms, and without even any responsibility to be deported 
because they have come here illegally, they end up, oftentimes 
consuming, as I say, tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of 
dollars of treatment.
  This procedure of just asking are they legal or illegal and if they 
are illegal, getting this information, is not a burden on the hospital. 
It is just a couple of more questions to be asked routinely in the 
process in which they are already being asked questions before they 
treat patients. Once the hospital determines that a patient is 
undocumented, they take a simple fingerprint or a photo and then they 
just upload this information onto a government database. That is it. 
This is not a complicated process, although we are going to hear in the 
months ahead how horribly complicated it is and how people will have to 
wait there for hours to be treated and they will die by the thousands 
if they are just asked to do those two simple little tasks, along with 
the other questions that they ask people when they go into an emergency 
room.
  Well, so far, my bill, what I am talking about, is very simple for 
the hospitals to comply with. But let me note there are some other 
significant provisions of this bill. The first is, the Department of 
Homeland Security, when it gets this information, the bill does

[[Page H84]]

suggest that they should begin deportation proceedings. And as I say, 
that will only happen if we make sure, because it is already on the 
books that someone who is here illegally, there should be deportation 
proceedings, but that law is not being enforced. We add this to the law 
again, and we hope and we pray that those people who are in decision-
making positions in our government will start enforcing the law or 
change the law. But the way it is now, to permit this massive flow of 
illegal immigration into our country and the flagrant violation of the 
law that is going on, it degrades the respect for the law throughout 
our society.
  So this is only common sense, that if we know that an illegal alien 
is in the United States, especially one that is consuming resources 
that are taking health care resources away from our people, they should 
be deported; and their own country should be taking care of them.
  Secondly, and this is a provision of the bill, any employer, when 
they find out who the employer is, that is one of the questions they 
have to ask. Any employer who has not called the employment 
verification program, and again, this is going to be a nationwide 
program that will be in place in 2005, a program that will verify an 
employee's legal status, if any employer whose employee has gone into 
the emergency room and been treated and thus consumed all sorts of tens 
of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of dollars, then if we find 
out that the employer has not called the employment verification 
program when he hired this illegal in the first place, well then, that 
employer will be liable for the illegal alien's emergency room costs.
  We have businessmen who now exploit illegal aliens in order to give 
them a pittance of pay and no benefits. These employers, if they are 
not giving them benefits, they expect the taxpayers to pick up the 
health care costs. I am sorry, under this bill that is going to go back 
to the employers. The employers, if they are going to get the benefit 
of using these illegals, they are going to have to pay at least for 
their health care and not expect the U.S. citizens, their fellow U.S. 
citizens to pick up the cost, their cost of hiring this employee. So 
this is only fair.
  Employers claim that American citizens, of course, will not take the 
jobs that illegal immigrants take. But of course they will not take the 
jobs, especially if employers are not going to provide health 
insurance. If you are not providing health insurance, it is pretty hard 
to attract qualified American job seekers, and no businesses will be 
providing health care insurance for Americans if they can hire illegals 
and the taxpayers end up picking up their health care costs. This has 
been an incentive, illegal immigration has been an incentive for less 
wages and for less benefits, for the fact that a lot of employers do 
not offer health care anymore; and that can be tied directly back to 
the fact that we have a flow of millions and millions of illegals who 
are willing to work without health care benefits; and, of course, 
everybody is relying on the taxpayers just to pick up the bill. This 
lack of health insurance ends up putting the burden of an illegal 
alien's health care on the shoulders of the American taxpayer. That is 
wrong and we have to change that. This bill will change that.

  I might add that this provision will initiate an eruption of 
opposition to this bill specifically for that, because we have had big 
business in this country who has gotten used to having the taxpayers 
pick up the health care costs that they should be providing their own 
employees, and they have been able to attract employees by hiring 
illegal immigrants. It keeps down wages and keeps down benefits.
  Employers should pay the full cost for the illegal alien labor that 
they hire, including health care costs of illegal aliens that they run 
up in emergency rooms. And this is not, I would say, a huge burden on 
employers, although they are going to claim this. All we are talking 
about is that when an illegal alien or someone comes to them, whether 
it is apparent they are an illegal alien or not, comes to them for 
employment, that one of the things they do when filling out the 
paperwork for this new employee is call one phone number, one phone 
call to a Federal agency, make one check on the name of this potential 
employee, and if they do that and check and find out that this person 
is here legally, they have indemnified themselves from this liability 
and they will not have to then pay for that emergency room care. But if 
they do not even make that one phone call, why should we taxpayers pick 
up the bill? These employers obviously are trying not to verify that 
someone they are hiring is illegal, and then they are not giving them 
health care and we pick up the costs. Where does that come from? Right 
out of the same pot of money that takes care of our seniors, our own 
veterans, our own women and children in the United States of America. 
There is a limited amount of health care dollars. We should be spending 
it on our legal residents, whether they are legal immigrants and/or 
U.S. citizens.
  So, anyway, I do not see how any employer can possibly object to just 
taking one step, a very quick step, to see if their future employee is 
here legally or not.
  Third in the bill, and this is a very important factor in this bill, 
this bill does something that is important to the whole formula in that 
it limits the emergency care that a hospital is required to give. 
Because right now what we have is an illegal alien comes in, any type 
of health care that is required that is an emergency, that is deemed to 
be an emergency, we end up giving extensive health care way beyond just 
someone's life or death situation or someone's situation where their 
health status would be altered forever if a treatment is not given at 
that moment. No. We go way beyond that so often. What we suggest is the 
hospital is required to give just the care that is required to 
medically stabilize the illegal alien's condition, and it would 
stabilize them to the point that they can be deported back to their 
home country.
  Now, we have seen, as I just said, we have seen illegal aliens 
obtaining organ transplants, advanced cancer treatments. There was a 
fellow in my district from El Salvador, it must have been about 10 
years ago now, and this man had had $300,000 worth of cancer 
treatments. He was not a citizen; he was not even a legal immigrant. He 
was an illegal immigrant, and we had spent $300,000 on this man. That 
is a crime. If someone goes in and steals $100 from a grocery store, 
they are going to go to jail. Yet we permit people to illegally come 
into this country and take hundreds of thousands of dollars of 
treatment. The American taxpayer, as I say, cannot be the world's HMO. 
It is going to break us. It is already affecting the health care 
available to our own citizens in a very detrimental way.
  Again, let me repeat: the American taxpayer cannot be the world's 
HMO. An illegal alien should be transported back to his or her country 
to receive any extraordinary care. Emergency care should only be for 
the temporary emergency where life is threatened at that moment. It is 
emphatically the responsibility of the illegal alien's own country to 
care for him; it is not the responsibility of the taxpayers of the 
United States or the Treasury of the United States Government. The 
foreign countries who our illegal aliens are coming from need to take 
care of their own citizens, not export their problem to the United 
States.
  Let us note now for the record there are many, many incidences of 
people coming here specifically to get health care treatments. They 
come here and they are on a visa or something like that. That has got 
to stop, and especially if they have come here illegally and expect to 
get those same kinds of health care treatments. It is wrong. We should 
not do that, and it is hurting the well-being of our people.
  Now, we are going to hear about how mean spirited it is to enforce 
our immigration laws and how mean spirited this proposal is. This bill 
will probably just generate the most incredible opposition and people 
pulling their hair out and saying how horrible we are. The motive 
behind this bill is a positive motive, and there is nothing wrong with 
loving your family and taking care of your family and taking care of 
the citizens of the United States and those people who are here 
legally. There is nothing wrong with having that motive.

                              {time}  1615

  But our motives will be attacked as if we hate other people from 
other

[[Page H85]]

countries. And they will try to blur the difference between illegal 
immigrants and legal immigrants. No, this bill is motivated out of 
love. And certainly and there is nothing wrong with anyone taking care 
of his family rather than giving money away to the point that his own 
family's health is not being taken care of.
  And the fact is that some people are saying now, well, we cannot 
afford not to have these illegals around because we are used to cheap 
labor, as if cheap labor is something that is good for the American 
people. Well, as health care costs show, that labor really is not all 
that cheap when you include all the costs.
  Illegal immigrant labor, there are lots of costs related to it that 
we are picking up as taxpayers that the businessman does not have to 
shoulder. Big business has shown that they are not interested in paying 
American wages and giving benefits to their workers if they can get 
away with hiring illegals who will work for lower wages. What big 
business wants is a huge pool of international labor so that 
corporations can force down wages.
  Illegal immigration is having a horrible impact on all these 
government services that I am talking about, especially the health 
care. The legislation that I introduced today specifically deals with 
that. But let us note that the wages of all Americans are being 
affected and the benefits being offered to all Americans by their 
employers are being an affected by illegal immigration. American 
workers, no matter how competitive, cannot compete with Chinese slave 
labor or a Nigerian standard of living.
  Huge corporations then are using the poor and desperate of the world 
because we are not enforcing our immigration laws to force the American 
middle-class to accept poverty as a price of holding a job. Well, we 
hear time and time again, well, Americans will not work for these lowly 
paid jobs. Well, that is nonsense. There are no jobs that Americans 
will not do. There are no jobs. I can repeat that. There is no job that 
an American will not do but there are lots of jobs that Americans will 
not do at the wages that are being offered for those jobs.
  The answer to the labor shortage is not to import poor people from 
Bangladesh or to permit a flood of illegal immigrants into our country, 
but instead to raise the wages and benefits of the U.S. working people. 
We have a lot of people in this country who can work who are not going 
to work at those wages certainly because those are poverty wages. We 
have got a lot of businesses who will hire illegals now rather than 
hiring a person who is disabled and training that disabled American, 
that disabled veteran, perhaps, to do a job that can be beneficial to 
the country and he or she can earn his or her own way but the business 
will not do it. Instead they will they will hire an illegal immigrant 
who will work for half the price and does not require any special 
training because of a disability. And then if there is a disability on 
the job, the employer just waves good-bye and the taxpayers pick up all 
the costs.
  The National Research Council in 1997 did a study showing immigration 
was responsible for a 44 percent drop in the wages for our people in 
the United States who were high school dropouts. Look, I do not like 
that some of our people are high school dropouts. I am sorry some of 
our people are at that lower end of the income level. But those are the 
people who are being hurt the most by illegal immigration.
  The average immigrant has less than a high school education and so 
this makes perfect sense. It is Economics 101. If you increase the 
labor supply at that level where you have illegal immigrants coming in 
here who have less than a high school education and they are competing 
with our people who have less than a high school education, or are less 
educated people at the lower income of our country, guess what? If you 
increase the supply of that those people coming in, the wages will drop 
for those people who are already here, meaning our own people, legal 
immigrants and American citizens.
  This has meant misery in many blue collar households who actually in 
this last 15 years since this 1986 amnesty they have seen their wages 
drop and their standard of living decrease because we have been 
insisting on importing uneducated illegal immigrants, or at least 
insisting that the flood of illegal immigrants coming into our country 
not be stopped. This has hurt millions of our own people, people who 
maybe now have been working at a higher standard of living but are not 
now working at a higher standard of living because illegals have taken 
that job at a lower wage and kept the wages down.
  A good example of that is perhaps in my own case. When I was younger 
I worked as a janitor. The people who work as janitors today have 
perhaps the same income about the same level of income as I had when I 
worked as a janitor 30 years ago. I guess it might have been more than 
30 years ago now, more like 40 years ago. Well, guess what? We have had 
an enormous increase in our standard of living in the GNP in those 40 
years. Why should janitors not be making more money? Well, I will tell 
you why. Because if they would have not had a flood of illegal 
immigrants, you would have had machines and technology that would have 
been developed making that janitor much more efficient. Maybe he could 
clean 30 toilets or 100 toilets a night instead of 15 or 20. And that 
man could or woman could have been paid more money as a janitor. But 
instead what we have hired is illegals. And there has been no 
technology development that would make up for that.
  And thus we have kept the wages of janitors down, those janitors 
should be American citizens earning a wage that would permit them to 
buy their own home, or at least to live at a decent standard of living. 
Instead we have a flood of illegals in and those people are not living 
well now because they are having to compete with people who have come 
here, the poorest of the poor from everywhere. That is not fair to the 
American people who shoulder the burdens of freedom all over the world 
and shoulder the burdens of keeping our country the way it is. And they 
are hurting because of this flow of illegal immigration. The same 
National Research Council showed that the average immigrant household 
in California used $3,463 in taxpayer services. That is back in 1997.

  If you were looking for why California has such a huge deficit, that 
is, and have a deficit bigger than all other 50 states combined, 
illegal immigration is probably the answer. This taxpayer funded 
largesse includes in California health care, education, police 
services.
  And let us talk a little bit about the cost for each of these 
services. The American Hospital Association reported that its member 
facilities provided $21 billion in uncompensated health care services 
last year. Since illegal aliens accounted for 43 percent of those 
without health insurance in the country, we can assume that at least $9 
billion of that total is attributable to illegal aliens. $9 billion. 
That is what business is calling cheap labor? This is cheap labor, $9 
billion of costs added on to the American taxpayers?
  All along the border from Texas to California dozens of hospitals 
have closed their emergency rooms because they can no longer survive 
the financial hemorrhaging caused by giving free health care to 
illegals. And do not underestimate the drawing power of free care. This 
brings people across our borders. Remember Jessica Santillian, an 
illegal alien who died after receiving not one but two heart 
transplants and a lung transplant in North Carolina. The Santillian 
family paid $5,000 to be smuggled across the border to get care knowing 
that it would take years to get any type of operation at all if they 
stayed in Mexico. There are American citizens who desperately need 
organs. They are being knocked out of line by a family and by families 
who break our law.
  Then many of these families are coming here specifically to obtain a 
transplant or to obtain some sort of sophisticated health operation. 
This is a crime against our own citizens when we let that happen. It is 
not that we do not like that poor family in Mexico but we need to make 
sure that we keep the promise to our own citizens first before we 
expend our resources to those who have come here illegally from another 
country. And then, of course, the other country does not have the 
incentive to use their resources to build up their health care for 
their own people.
  What about the children of illegal aliens? The total K-12 school 
expenditure for illegal immigrants cost the

[[Page H86]]

States $7.4 billion annually. That is enough to buy a computer for 
every American student, America's junior high schools.
  Are you worried about school overcrowding? Hear anybody talk about 
overcrowding? You hear about that all the time. If the left wing 
teachers unions were not so allied with this cause of the illegal 
immigrants, we would find out exactly what is causing the crowding.
  Let me note this, and this is a very incredible statement, without 
school-age illegal immigrants, the children that we are talking about, 
the children of illegal immigrants, school enrollment would not have 
risen at all during the past decade. Let me repeat that. School 
enrollment would have remained flat if it was not for unrestricted 
illegal immigration into our country.
  So when one hears them talking about crowded schools, the answer is 
not to just spend more and more resources taking it away, again, from 
the other things that we need in our society in order to provide this 
service for illegal immigrants which then attracts even more illegal 
immigrants who care about their families and want their families to get 
this same largesse so they come here in even greater numbers.
  But by far, the most disturbing is the impact illegal immigration is 
having on crime in California. In Los Angeles, 95 percent of all 
outstanding warrants for homicide involve illegal aliens. Do you get 
that? In Los Angeles, 95 percent of all outstanding warrants for 
homicide involve illegal aliens. And up to two-thirds of all fugitive 
felony warrants are for illegal aliens. Illegal aliens commit crimes in 
the United States and then they flee the country.
  Oh, as an aside, in California we have a particular problem, some of 
those flee to Mexico. And even when the criminal alien is known and 
their whereabouts are known to Mexico, the Mexican courts refuse to 
extradite them. By far the most outrageous case was that of David 
March, a Los Angeles County sheriff who was gunned down by an illegal 
alien who fled to Mexico and then only to have Mexico refuse to 
extradite a man who had blatantly murdered a police officer in 
California.
  Almost 30 percent of Federal prisoners are now foreign born; 36 
percent of illegal alien criminals are released from Federal prison; 36 
percent of illegal alien criminals were released from Federal and 
several state prisons with no deportation review. You get this? Thirty-
six percent of those illegal aliens in our prisons and jails get out 
with no review as if they should be deported. But yet they are here 
illegally; 80 of these illegal alien criminals have been arrested for 
new crimes.
  Now, stop for just a minute and think about this: It is not just the 
cost of incarcerating illegal aliens, expensive as that is, which is 
$22,500 a year, for hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens. What is 
the cost to the American taxpayer of all of this? That $22,000, yeah, 
that is to the taxpayer, but what about their theft of property? What 
about the murders, the rapes and the assaults perpetrated by these 
criminals who come here illegally? And our government is so ineffective 
and so captive to corporate interests that we have permitted this 
massive flow of illegal immigration that is keeping down the wages of 
our people and is resulting in hardship and resulting in people 
suffering throughout our country. We do not even deport these 
criminals. When they are criminals we do not deport them when they get 
out of jail. These are not simple illegal aliens looking for a better 
life when they get out of jail, these are hardened criminals, many of 
them with ties to vicious drug gangs and violent criminal cartels and 
they are not deported? What is going on here?
  And our system, rather than allowing a swift and certain deportation, 
in many cases simply released these predators into the American 
population so they can rub elbows with our families at the movie 
theater.
  My friends, there is nothing conservative about a policy that has 
permitted this type of illegal immigration into our society with these 
horrific consequences to the American people.
  But even more worrying are the implications in our war against 
terror. Several drug cartels are getting into the illegal alien 
smuggling business. The cartels will help smuggle anyone into the 
United States who pays. These vicious organizations have no hesitation 
about smuggling terrorists into the United States. And once in the 
United States, terrorists simply disappear into the huge sea of other 
illegal aliens.

                              {time}  1630

  Do we need this cheap labor that we are talking about? Is it really 
cheap labor?
  I am telling you that the cost is too high. The price of overcrowding 
of schools, the price of collapsing emergency rooms, the rise of 
vicious crimes in our society, the holding down of the wages of our 
people, our working people, this is wrong. This is a price that we are 
paying. Our people should not be forced to pay this price simply 
because our government is not enforcing the law. But more importantly, 
is the United States willing to go the way of South America?
  What kind of country are we producing when we permit millions of 
people to flood into our country every year? What is going to happen? 
And we keep wages down for our own people. We are creating a society 
with a wealthy privileged few on top and a huge class underneath who 
are barely surviving? Why are we doing this? Why are we permitting our 
country to be restructured where we have opportunity for all and our 
systems are working that can provide health and services and education 
services to our people? Why are we doing that?
  Because America's big companies want a huge pool of cheap labor to 
drive down American labor costs to the level of China and Latin America 
and because the left wing of the Democratic Party wants to use illegal 
immigrants as a weapon for political power. That is it. The unholy 
alliance between the left wing of the Democratic Party and the big 
business wing of the Republican Party. I am sorry. That is clear.
  Those of us who represent neither of those groups should start 
getting together and making sure we solve this problem.
  These corporations that I am talking about have no stake in this 
country. Many of these great big corporations want to keep our labor. 
They go overseas the first time they can. They end up investing in 
Communist China, the world's worst human rights abuser. They are 
setting up factories in Vietnam. Then they insult our intelligence as 
well by asking us to give them an export-import bank guarantee on their 
loans so that when they set up these manufacturing companies overseas, 
the taxpayers will guarantee them. So they can set up the manufacturing 
there and use the cheap labor in order to put our people out of 
business. Our people get out of those manufacturing jobs and what 
happens? They end up competing with guess what here at home? A flood of 
illegal immigrants who are willing to do their job cheaper and they end 
up being unemployed.
  What heartache, what misery this causes so many families in the 
United States of America. We are talking about alcoholism and drug use 
and family abuse. This is caused by the type of tensions by people who 
cannot get the jobs that their fathers and mothers had years ago, and 
they cannot be expected now to ever buy a new home or a new car. They 
are always worried a tire might go out because they cannot afford to 
fix the tire.
  This is what we have relegated half of the American people to. It is 
wrong. Now do not get me wrong. I am for capitalism. I am for free 
enterprise. I am actually for free trade in a way because I believe in 
free trade between free people. I do not think our government should be 
promoting free trade and subsidizing our people going overseas to any 
country. Certainly, we should not be talking about developing the 
economies of China and other dictatorships; but I do not see anything 
wrong in trading with Australia and other free countries.
  Also, this is not capitalism that we are talking about. I am for free 
trade and I am for free enterprise, but free enterprise does not mean 
that you artificially import labor into your country to keep labor 
costs low. That is ridiculous; that is not part of the free enterprise 
system.
  The working people of this country are willing to fight and die to 
preserve the freedom of this country in order to

[[Page H87]]

be confronted with the idea that their wages are going to be kept down 
by a flood of illegals coming into our country and an unwillingness to 
enforce the immigration laws. That is absolutely wrong. That is 
absolutely wrong.
  Democracies cannot survive without an educated middle class. And 
illegal immigration is destroying the viability of the American middle 
class. Our Founding Fathers envisioned a middle class of small 
tradesmen, of farmers who would have an education and the ability to 
govern themselves and to be independent factors in our economy. In 
fact, as we have seen over and over, a huge mass of desperate and poor 
and poorly educated people will quite often turn to the siren song of 
communism under certain circumstances like that where there is no hope.
  We are creating an underclass in America, a permanent underclass of 
illegals and of our own people. These people, when they get desperate, 
they listen to the rantings and raving of communism or the bellicose 
musings of fascism. Democracy is based on a well-educated 
and prosperous middle class. It has been America's greatest strength. 
To preserve this Republic, to protect the American middle class, we 
must stop the importation of cheap labor. We must stop the fact that we 
have a massive flow of illegals into this country. We keep the wages 
down and distort the progress that would be coming to the people on the 
lower levels of our economic tier here in our country.

  Instead, the people in the lower levels of our economy are not 
rising. Their incomes are going down. Their expectations are going 
down. Their frustrations are going up. And they do not know why, but 
they do know that all the jobs are taken by people who are working for 
dirt wages and that their fathers had better jobs at better pay that 
were meaningful jobs.
  Now, where do we start to turn this around? We can start by getting 
control of the health care that we provide those who come into this 
country illegally. At the very least let us stop right now. We have 
started a program, the first time that our country is spending any 
money officially to provide a service for people who are here 
illegally. That Medicare bill provides $1 billion for illegal alien 
health care services. It will be $50 billion 10 years from now if we do 
not do anything about it.
  So let us do something about it now. Let us start turning the 
situation around now by focusing on this legislation that I drop today 
that will mitigate any bad impact of providing this billion dollars for 
emergency health care for illegals by making sure that we have these 
provisions, these provisions that will see that they are identified, 
their employers, identified, that a deportation proceeding moves 
forward if they are treated, and that the amount of treatment that they 
can receive when they are here illegally is limited to a life-
threatening situation rather than providing extensive care for diseases 
that are not a crisis at that moment. We can start turning it around 
right now.
  I would urge my colleagues to join me in this vital legislation to 
limit the health care to illegal aliens so that we can have that money 
available to the American people. I am going to be vilified for this. I 
know that. I had all sorts of press calls and everything after the 
leadership made the agreement with me to have this bill come to the 
floor. I know I am going to be vilified. I know people are going to say 
I am a mean, nasty person and that I do not care and that I am a racist 
or something like that. I am not and I have love in my heart for 
everybody.
  I know that even the people who come here illegally are wonderful 
people, 90 percent of them are wonderful people. They just want to 
increase their own standard of living, a way to treat their family 
decently. But we cannot do this for the entire world. We cannot expect 
to see our own people suffer and to try to equalize them to every poor 
person in the world, and this will bring more and more people here. And 
if we care and we have love for our families, having love for your 
family and having love for the legal immigrants and the legal U.S. 
citizens that are here, that love for those people does not mean you 
hate someone else. That means you care for your family and you will 
take care of them first. That is what care means.
  So I would ask the people who are reading this in the Congressional 
Record and my colleagues to look at this legislation. Let us turn the 
situation around now. Let us speak out. Let us make sure that we stand 
up for what America is supposed to be for. It is a land of opportunity, 
yes; but it is a land where one thing ties us together. We are 
Americans and we come from every race, every religion, every ethnic 
group. Here we are. We have come from every country in the world, and 
we have a proud immigrant heritage; and we are not shutting that off. I 
am not suggesting that we cut off the legal flow of immigrants into our 
country and we do about a million a year, which is more than all the 
rest of the world combined.
  So what we need to do is to make sure that we take the people who are 
here legally and people who are U.S. citizens and recognize who ties us 
together as a Nation. Other countries have their own religion. Other 
countries have a traditional ethnic group or a race that makes them 
what they were; but what ties Americans together is a love of liberty, 
of freedom, of justice, of people who come here to be part of this 
American Dream.
  Well, if we do not care about each other, if that spirit of caring 
does not, we do not have an ethnic tie to keep us together. We do not 
have one religion because there are people of every religious state 
here in America. That one religion does not keep us together. It is a 
love of liberty and justice and a commitment to opportunity and a 
caring for us all as all Americans as a family. We care about us.
  What is the United States? United States. It is us. And just because 
we are saying that we are going to focus on caring about us does not 
mean that you have hatred in your heart towards someone else. And 
please, please open your hearts and open your consciences. Look at this 
issue, and I think you will see this is based on positive motives. We 
have to end the massive flow of illegal immigration into this country, 
or we will hurt the people that we care about. It will hurt us. It will 
hurt the United States if we continue down this path. The quickest way 
to turn it around is to start with this legislation, and it is going to 
be tough and there is going to be a lot of name calling; but I would 
ask you to join with me and let us save America and let us leave the 
other countries so they start providing a better life for their people 
overseas, rather than just trying to use us as an escape valve so they 
can send people who are dissatisfied here.
  If we quit serving as that escape valve, they will have to have 
health care in Mexico and these other countries where they are coming 
here from overseas illegally. If we just keep taking people in, they 
will have lost their incentive.
  So I ask my colleagues to look at this legislation. I thank you for 
providing this time.

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