[Congressional Record Volume 152, Number 29 (Wednesday, March 8, 2006)]
[House]
[Pages H780-H787]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              IMMIGRATION

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Dent). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of January 4, 2005, the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. King) is 
recognized for the balance of the time remaining until midnight.

[[Page H781]]

  Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the privilege to address 
you, Mr. Speaker, and address this United States House of 
Representatives. I have a series of issues on my mind here tonight. As 
I listened to some of this discussion, I promised myself to discipline 
myself and speak to the subject matter I came to the floor to address, 
and that, Mr. Speaker, is the issue of immigration.
  First, I would say that we have a history of immigration in this 
country that certainly goes back to the very beginnings of the 
colonization of the 13 American original colonies.
  America certainly is a nation that has benefited greatly from 
immigration, so that is why the Founding Fathers and the ratifiers of 
our Constitution put into this Constitution the directions to the 
United States Congress, Mr. Speaker, that we establish immigration 
policy. That immigration policy is the responsibility, the 
constitutional duty and the province of the United States Congress, and 
throughout the decades, and now centuries of immigration, that policy 
has been established by Congress, and we, for the most part, have 
adhered to those amounts and values that were reflected.
  As I look back across those two centuries, I think there was a time 
in the early part of the 20th Century when there was a significant and 
massive amount of immigration that came in, much of it through Ellis 
Island, there was a real effort to settle a land that did not have a 
lot of population in it.
  The region I represent in Western Iowa is one of those areas, as most 
of America is, I will say west of the East Coast. In fact, the 
population peaked out in my home county in the year 1912, much of it 
because of immigration. Since that time, it held steady for quite a 
while and has actually reduced in my agriculture county because we 
found ways to get the same amount of work done with less people because 
we have machines now to do a lot of that farm work that wasn't being 
done any way except by hand.
  So immigration has been certainly the only way that this continent 
could have been settled. As I look around the United States, that is 
the case for most of us.
  Mr. Speaker, I should back up to about 1924. That was a watershed 
year for immigration. That was the year in the aftermath of World War 
I, after the huge numbers of immigration had poured into the country, 
after my ancestors arrived here in a legal fashion, I would point out.
  In 1924, Congress made a decision that they wanted to slow 
immigration down significantly. They wanted to do so so there would be 
an opportunity to have a time period where there could be an 
assimilation into this American culture. There was a concern that the 
picture of America would be different if the immigration kept 
continuing to refuel the cultural values that came from mostly Europe 
in those days, Mr. Speaker.
  Our predecessors in this Congress understood that there is a limit to 
how much immigration a nation can prudently accept. They understood 
that there is something called a unique American culture, an overall 
civilizational culture here, that is the sum total of the values of all 
the sub-cultures that come into America.
  They understood that we needed to have come on values, and one of 
those common values was a common language. They understood that we 
needed to have a common sense of history, a sense that we were pulling 
together, all pulling that same wagon together, not riding in it, but 
pulling together toward a common destiny. Those things that bind a 
nation together, our commonalities, common sense of history, a common 
sense of similar religions for the most part, a common language, 
English the official language, an opportunity to chase one's dreams, an 
opportunity to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. And part of this 
American dream is to leave this world a better place for the succeeding 
generations and for each generation to have more opportunities than the 
preceding generation had.
  That has been a true fact, I believe, for every generation of 
Americans. Each generation has had more opportunity, and it is because 
this American work ethic, this culture that we have, has always striven 
to provide for more opportunities for the next generation.
  So in 1924, they dramatically shrunk down the legal immigration 
coming into this country and they stalled immigration throughout that 
period on from 1924, on through the Second World War, on through the 
1950s, up until about 1964 when they passed an immigration act that 
began to open up immigration in a larger way here in the United States. 
That was perhaps a 40 year hiatus from significant immigration numbers, 
and that was the period of time by which actually two parts of two 
generations were assimilated into America and there became a 
distinction here in this country, very much commonality.
  We lost our sense of what was the country that our ancestors came 
from, we lost our sense of ethnicity, and we absorbed this American 
ethnicity with this great dream we are all created in God's image and 
there is not a distinction between his creation, and we could all come 
here and thrive and prosper together and all under one flag.
  Well, so in 1964, perhaps 1965, when immigration laws were changed, 
it began to open this up, and it was opened up in a way that they 
didn't realize at the time I don't think the kind of numbers that would 
be coming, but it began to set a new set of parameters.
  Chain migration was one of those, where a person could immigrate into 
the United States and then begin to be able to bring their family 
members in. Later on there was legislation that was passed that 
provided for a visa lottery so that there would be 50,000 people that 
would come into the United States by just entering their name in a 
lottery, and if their name was drawn from the lottery, they would come 
to the United States.
  Those kind of policies began to come into play, and as that went 
along, immigration accelerated then from 1965 on up until 1986 when 
there was an amnesty program that was passed by Congress and signed by 
the President. This truly was an amnesty program. It was about 3 
million illegals in America at the time that were given a lawful 
permanent resident status and a chance to become citizens of the United 
States.
  I have met some of the people that came here illegally that presented 
themselves under the amnesty plan and became citizens of the United 
States, and I don't quarrel with the contribution they have made to 
this country, Mr. Speaker, but I do quarrel with the idea that we could 
present amnesty to people and expect them to respect the rule of law. 
If they came here by breaking the law and then we gave them a break on 
the law and eliminated the penalties that they were facing for breaking 
our laws, why should we be surprised if they don't respect the rest of 
the laws here in the United States of America?
  So, from 1986 on, there was a contempt for the law, and the pledge 
though in 1986 was we will give amnesty to those perhaps 3 million 
people that are here in this country illegally because we really don't 
know how to deal with them otherwise, and then we are going to make 
sure that we enforce employer sanctions.
  That was when I as an employer received my I-9 forms, and any 
employee application that I had, I had to take their identification 
down, their Social Security number, get the data introduced on an I-9 
form, put that on file, and that was my protection in a way, but my 
responsibility as an employer to ensure that I was doing due diligence 
to hire lawful residents here in the United States, people who were 
legal to be here in the United States and could work here legally in 
the United States. I followed that with due diligence for years and 
years, anticipating then the INS would knock on my door some day, go 
through my files, check my employees and verify that I had been doing 
that due diligence and hiring legals.
  Of course, the INS never showed up in my small operation. They showed 
up in a few of the larger operations back in 1986, 1987 and through the 
early nineties. But as the years went by, there was less and less 
enforcement at the employer level, fewer and fewer employer sanctions. 
And I wasn't very happy during the Clinton years as I saw a lack of 
will to enforce our immigration laws.
  So we come to the year 2000, the election of our current Commander-
in-Chief. And as I watched the enforcement, and I have noticed that 
within

[[Page H782]]

the last couple of years there haven't been a half a dozen employers 
that have been sanctioned for hiring illegals, that is how far we can 
have come with this rule of law. We sent the message to people that 
came into the United States illegally that there was a reward for 
breaking our laws, there was amnesty at the end, there was a path to 
citizenship, which many of them did receive.

                              {time}  2310

  And then the trade-off was that there would be enforcement. And that 
would make it harder, that would shut off the jobs magnet, and, of 
course, then it would take the incentive away for people to come across 
the border to come into the United States illegally. That was the idea 
on how we were going to slow down border crossings, especially on our 
southern border.
  But when the employer sanctions wound down, slowed down through the 
Clinton years and came to essentially a stop in the last couple of 
years, at least from all practical purposes came to a stop, that 
message echoes down below our southern border.
  In fact, that message was going below our southern border well before 
it was clear that there are no employer sanctions. I happen to know 
that there was at least one corporation within the region that I 
represent who put up billboards in Mexico to recruit Mexican citizens 
to come to the United States illegally, to come to work for this 
particular company. There were other companies that did the same thing.
  So the message goes down clear into southern Mexico, here is a path 
for you, come on up, we will set up your transportation, we will 
recruit you down here, we will bring you into the United States, we 
will put you to work, and we can put you to work under whatever Social 
Security you might submit, because, after all, there would not be any 
employer sanctions, there would not be an INS raid that would come in 
and pick people up and deport them back to their home country, which is 
what the law says.
  That is what has happened with the immigration picture here in the 
United States over that century called the 20th century and beginning 
into this new century that we are in, this 21st century. And we have 
evolved into a situation now where people in America understand we do 
not control our border. We do not enforce our laws. We do not stop 
illegal traffic in a significant way coming across our border, and once 
they get into the United States they are essentially home free. They 
can go to work for about any company that is willing to hire them, and 
we will not see now ICE show up, the Immigration Customs Enforcement 
people show up, to enforce employer sanctions or to do a round-up and 
do a deportation.
  And so businesses, being what they are, capital is always rational, 
Mr. Speaker, and so it will follow this path of least resistance. And 
you need a series of components to run a successful business anywhere, 
and certainly that is true in the United States of America. And some of 
those components are raw materials, facilities. You need capital, and, 
of course, you need administrative ability and know-how. You need a 
product or service that you are going to sell and a marketing ability 
and all of those things that go with it.
  But you also need labor. And generally the highest cost to any 
business, single cost, is the cost of labor. And so business, being 
astute, will reach out to fill that gap in the cheapest way they 
possibly can. The most effective way for the dollars they will invest, 
I should say, because if they can get good, high-quality labor and pay 
a little more money for it, they will go that route, because that is 
rational, as capital, we know, is rational.
  So business has set about bringing in cheap labor, especially across 
our southern border, putting them to work essentially with impunity, 
without fear of sanctions.
  And this process as it began, it accelerated. Well, it was not a new 
process, especially along our southern border where we have a large 
amount of producers that raise specialty crops. It takes a fair amount 
of stoop labor and hand labor to raise those specialty crops. It took 
more 20 years ago than it does today, because machinery and technology 
has replaced some of that labor.
  But that problem along the southern border was often the kind of 
situation where it was fairly localized. I do not excuse it. I do not 
agree with it. In fact, I disagree with it. But it did not bother the 
rest of the United States very much because that human traffic would 
come across the border and go to work and go back south of the border 
to live.
  It was cheaper to live south of the border, and the money could be 
made north of the border. As that flowed back and forth, there was not 
a lot of public outcry until such time as the penetration of that 
illegal labor began to come up into the heartland of America and spread 
out to our coasts, along the Atlantic and the Pacific coasts, and on up 
into the Upper Midwest and Chicago, New York, the Northeast part of the 
United States. But in Iowa also we received a significant number of 
illegal workers.
  And so as that happened, America began to understand what was going 
on in our southern border. But business was taking care of themselves 
by going to the well for cheap labor, because they could make profit 
with cheap, illegal labor.
  Now, there is a thing in business called supply and demand. I mean, 
Adam Smith articulated it better than anyone and earlier than anyone in 
1776 in his book Wealth of Nations. But I will submit, Mr. Speaker, 
that labor is a commodity like oil or gold or corn or beans, where I 
came from, and the value of that labor is determined by supply and 
demand in the marketplace. If there is a large supply of cheap labor, 
labor that is willing to work well under the going market for the 
existing labor, that cheap labor is going to underbid those workers, 
displace those workers, and businesses are certainly going to make that 
hire, and cash the profit. That is what they are in business to do is 
to return investment to their shareholders.
  So they did not need to ever come up with other alternatives to labor 
because they had the easy supply of cheap labor just south of the 
border. So business did the rational thing. It was capital, after all, 
driving the decision. Capital is always rational.
  The United States had that option, because we have a 2,000-mile 
border on our southern border, and wages are significantly cheaper down 
there. But just, Mr. Speaker, take, if you will, if the United States 
were a Nation unto itself, a continent that were sitting out in an 
ocean, perhaps like Australia is, if we did not have a border that was 
adjacent to a country that could supply cheap labor, if we did not have 
an ability to just open that border and let that labor pour in and find 
its way through the marketplace as this illegal labor has, what might 
we have done as we saw that we had a need for this and a demand for 
more labor?
  And I would submit, Mr. Speaker, that we would have done a number of 
other things if illegal labor were not an option. And perhaps we would 
have recruited from other countries, and gone to this Congress and 
asked this Congress under its authority granted in the Constitution to 
open up legal immigration into the United States. We might have reached 
out and recruited people to come here, people that had assets, that had 
skills, that were trained, that were trainable, people that could best 
and the most quickly assimilate into this society and this economy.
  We probably would have raised the numbers of legal immigrants if we 
had not had the border open for the illegals to fill that demand. That 
would have been one alternative--to go to more legal labor, in a 
prudent, manageable style that we could regulate.
  Another alternative, and it would happen more than it has, would be 
to develop technology to replace the labor. I happened to see a show on 
television the other day about how they have replaced the hand labor 
picking tomatoes with machines and, through selective genetics, 
produced a tomato that has a tougher skin on it that can now be handled 
by machines. And many of the tomatoes in America are now picked by 
machine. It has cut down dramatically on the amount of labor that is 
necessary.
  That is one kind of technology that has come forward. And the 
technology that used to be, the hand harvesting of sugar beets, is now 
done by machine. And the list of those items that we

[[Page H783]]

used to think were all hand labor has dramatically changed.
  A lot of the grapes in America are now picked by machine rather than 
picked by hand. If we had not had access to the labor, we would have 
produced more machines, developed more technology. In fact, as there is 
pressure on labor today, there is more technology that is being 
developed.
  And another thing that was always evident, Mr. Speaker, in the ag 
communities in the world, it has always been the case, you know, to 
some degree it has been the case in my particular life, with my 
aspiration in the construction business where I spent my life, families 
tended to raise the labor that they needed. They had large families on 
farms because they needed the people to do the work. That was an 
alternative. It was a rational decision to have quite a few children.
  That has stopped. And I should not say stopped, but it has 
dramatically reduced. And families before that would have had 5 or 6 or 
8 or 9 or 10, or some of the households I have been in that have 12 or 
14 or 15 children, the next generation has 1 or 2 or 3 children. And 
those children are trained and educated to move off the farm, go get a 
college education, take that diploma and cash it in for the biggest 
paycheck they can get anywhere in the country or even in the world, and 
not come back to the farm except to visit.
  That is the message that has been sent out, Mr. Speaker, and I would 
ask, what are we doing in this country for the young man or the young 
woman who wants to finish their high school education and not go to 
college, they do not see themselves as a student, they just want to go 
to work, they want to go to work in the plant, the manufacturing plant, 
or they want to go to work in the food processing plant, or whatever 
the industry happens to be that is close to home? What if they just 
want to grow up and go to work, punch the time clock, do their 40 or 50 
or even 60 hours a week, take their paycheck, hang up their hard hat 
and go home and raise their family, buy a house, and build their 
future?
  Those young people in America do not have that chance anymore, Mr. 
Speaker. They do not have that chance because illegal labor has 
underbid those kind of low-skilled jobs that used to be respectable 
jobs that used to pay a reasonable wage, and used to pay reasonable 
benefits. But there are young Americans that do not want to go on to a 
higher education. Are we operating under the presumption that everyone 
should be a college graduate?

                              {time}  2320

  I applaud education, a good man or a good woman with an education is 
better than one without as far as revenue of their life work is 
concerned, but, still, they do not all want to go to school, Mr. 
Speaker. So we have taken that away from them. We have allowed that to 
be taken away from them by the underbidding of cheap illegal labor.
  That is what business has done. They have done the rational thing 
because we have not enforced our laws.
  Now, on the political side. There is the other benefit that is there. 
Why does not Congress have the will to step in and ensure that our 
immigration laws are enforced?
  I will submit that there are significant numbers of Members in this 
Congress that are here because they represent a significant supply of 
illegals that are residents within their district. When we do the 
census every 10 years, as we did in the year 2000, we do not count U.S. 
citizens for redistricting purposes for these 435 congressional 
districts. We count human beings that happen to be residents in the 
United States and then we draw the district lines around that, about 
600,000 people within each one of those district lines.
  When people go to the polls to vote on whether they will send me back 
to this Congress, Mr. Speaker, it will take a minimum of 120,000 votes 
for me to be returned back to this Congress, and that is because that 
is perhaps one more vote than half that will be cast. About 240,000 
votes will be cast in the Fifth Congressional District of Iowa. But 
there are at least two congressional districts in California that it 
will only take 30,000 votes to win a seat in Congress and come here and 
represent the people of those districts. And the reason is because our 
census counts people, not citizens. Noncitizens do not vote, at least 
they should not vote. The law says they cannot vote. And so because of 
the massive numbers of illegals that are residents in those regions, 
they have representation here in Congress whether they vote or not.
  Their Member of Congress is elected from that region, certainly 
influenced by the public opinions in that region, and sent to this 
Congress on a mere 30,000 votes when those of us who represent 
predominantly citizens in our district are required to earn four times 
that many votes. So one can say that an illegal in America has at least 
as much representation in Congress as a U.S. citizen does.
  I think, Mr. Speaker, that is wrong; and I think we need to amend the 
Constitution so that in our census, we can count the people. We should 
know how many residents that are in America. That is the intent of our 
Constitution. But for redistricting purposes, our Founding Fathers did 
not envision that we would be giving representation to people who are 
here illegally. And so that is the political benefit that comes from 
illegal labor.
  Additionally, there is also on the liberal side of the aisle, there 
is a strong push to legalize and give a path to citizenship to people 
that are here illegally because they see the political benefit to 
having more numbers, more votes, more political influence here. I have 
a real strong bias in favor of citizens of the United States of America 
and I am a great cheerleader for legal immigrants. And I submit that 
they are the people that deserve the representation in our country and 
that those that are here illegally do not deserve representation in 
this country and they are not fully protected by the rights of 
citizenship as some would submit in this Chamber, Mr. Speaker.
  There is a business demand for cheap labor, Mr. Speaker. There are 
the political benefits. Then people will argue that we cannot replace 
this labor supply. We cannot get along without this illegal labor. They 
will not say illegal labor. They always confuse the term of legal 
immigrant with illegal immigrant. Immigrant to them is a generic term 
that covers everyone, and I will tell you that when I am talking about 
illegal, that is the people who have come in here illegally. Real legal 
immigrants, I do not know anyone that opposes legal immigration. I 
certainly do not. It has been good for the United States of America. It 
is something we must manage.
  But for 3 years that I have been in this Congress, we have talked 
about 11 million illegals in the United States of America, 11 million. 
If you go back and look at the numbers and look at the proportion that 
is employed, the workforce is about 6.3 million of the 11 million 
illegals. These are numbers that have been bantered about here for at 
least 3 years. Well, that 6.3 million workforce represents 4 percent of 
the labor force, 2.2 percent of the gross domestic product or, excuse 
me, of the overall wages of the many dollars, I think it is trillions 
of dollars of wages that are earned altogether in America. It is 2.2 
percent of that that goes to the illegal workforce.
  So if by some miracle, illegal labor did not go to work tomorrow 
morning and that was stopped for an extended period of time, we would 
have to find 4 people out of 10 to fill those roles but the 
productivity is down to perhaps half of that. So maybe we do need 
someone to fill those roles. We noticed the difference, but it is only 
2.2 percent of the overall earned wages.
  So it is something that if I have a crew, a work crew of 100 people 
and I am going to lose two of them tomorrow morning, you can bet we 
will keep things running. We will keep your operation going. We will 
keep our production up there. We will notice a difference but we will 
find a way to adapt.
  People say, well, you cannot replace those illegal workers, that 6.3 
million. I would submit, Mr. Speaker, that today there are 7.5 million 
on the unemployed rolls. Those people are being paid not to work today, 
7.5 million. There is another 5.2 million who are looking for work, who 
have exhausted their unemployment benefits but they will answer the 
polling questions and say, I want a job. I am still looking for work.
  So you add that up and that is 12.7 million. Then you add to that the 
young people between the ages of 16 and 19 that presumably would be 
looking for at least perhaps some part-time

[[Page H784]]

work and some that would like to go into full-time work. There are 9.3 
million in that group between the ages of 16 and 19. They are not in 
the workforce in any way whatsoever, not even on a part-time basis. 
They may be going to school. They may be full-time students, but many 
of them could be brought into the workforce and at least work part 
time. They can flip some burgers or cook some steaks or mow some lawns 
or fix some roofs or go out and do some harvest out here in the time 
that we really need the labor.
  Additionally, between the ages of 65 and 69 there are 4.5 million 
Americans and some of them presumably would go to work if we did not 
penalize them for earning too much money once they start to collect 
their Social Security check.
  Additionally, Mr. Speaker, between the ages of 20 and 64, that age 
group that is really the workforce age group of America, there are 
another 51 million Americans that are not in the workforce and they are 
not listed on the unemployment roles and they are not part of that 5.2 
million that are looking for work. This 51 million Americans, they may 
be retired because they are wealthy. They may be homemakers. They may 
be working in the black market somewhere doing some cash trade so they 
do not show up in the workforce. But there is a potential for 51 
million Americans between the ages of 20 and 64.
  So this all adds up, Mr. Speaker, to 77.5 million Americans that are 
not currently in the workforce. There are a universe of people that 
could be gone to hire them to do these jobs that people say that 
Americans will not do. So I took the 6.3 million illegal workforce, 
divided it into the 77.5 million Americans that are not working and 
that comes out to 12.3 times.
  There are 12.3 people in America that are not working for every 
illegal in America that is working. So if you just hired one out of 
those 12.3 and put them to work you could solve this problem. I cannot 
believe that business is not smart enough to figure this out. They are 
smart enough to figure it out but they are taking the easy option, the 
cheap option, the option that avoids liability, the option that really, 
again, it is rationale to higher illegals because they will go to work 
cheaper for one thing, Mr. Speaker. They do not file unemployment 
claims. They do not file workers' comp claims. You do not really have 
to have a lot of health insurance for somebody that is here illegally. 
You do not have to put together their retirement plan. You do not have 
to worry about an illegal worker getting mad at you and filing a 
lawsuit that might shut your company down.
  You add up all of those burdens that become part of the risk and 
responsibility of hiring legal people to work here in the United States 
and then you add to that that you can hire the illegals cheaper, but 
let's just say you can't. Let's just say that you will put $10 an hour 
out on the table and you will higher an illegal for $10 an hour or you 
will offer $10 an hour to a legal person. Now, the legal person might 
be working right alongside the illegal and they might be getting gross 
wages $10 an hour each. But the legal one, even if they are a single 
dependent, they have to claim themselves as a dependent, and then there 
will be withholding for their Federal income tax, and their State 
income tax, and their payroll tax including Social Security, Medicare 
and Medicaid.

                              {time}  2330

  That comes out of their check. The illegal almost invariably, and I 
have stacks and stacks of check stubs in my filing cabinet that show me 
this, claim the maximum number of dependents. So there is no 
withholding for Federal or for State. They give up their payroll tax to 
Social Security and Medicare the .0765 side of the thing, 7.65 percent 
of their payroll, but there is no withholding for Federal and for State 
if they claim the maximum number of dependents.
  So what it amounts to is, if you are an illegal worker working for 
$10 an hour and make that decision to claim the maximum number of 
dependents, whether you have them or not, the withholding different is 
about $1.54 an hour. What American citizen wants to go out and work 
alongside someone who is here illegally? The American citizen is making 
$10 an hour, and the person who is here illegally is making $10 an 
hour, and you see the take-home pay. You work next to somebody. You 
often see that, and you realize that guy is taking home $1.54 more than 
I am. Why would they stay there in a job like that? Why would there not 
be resentment when the employer on this other side of the equation sees 
once he pays that $10 an hour, he is done with that?
  It is kind of like piecemeal work. It is like custom work. It is not 
like you really have a full-time employee that carries all those 
responsibilities with it. You just pay the hourly rate, and when the 
shop closes that night, you are done until the next day. There is not a 
lingering liability that goes on like there is with a legal employee.
  I have dealt with those things on my side, and believe me, I have 
great respect for all employers. But I wrote out payroll checks for 
over 1,400-and-some consecutive weeks. We did it all legally, and we 
competed against people who did not often. It is unjust for us to put 
employers in this country, who want to do it right, and competition up 
against those who refuse to do it right, but a lot of it is our public 
policy.
  So, Mr. Speaker, we passed some legislation here before Christmas, 
enforcement legislation, on the floor of this Congress, and it does a 
number of things, including tighten up our borders.
  It requires employers to use the employment verification program, so 
I call it the instant check program. When they hire someone, they will 
have to enter the Social Security number, date of birth, place of 
birth, perhaps the mother's maiden name, a series of different 
indicators. That information then goes out on the Internet, out to the 
Department of Homeland Security database, and also, it goes to the ICE 
database, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, those two databases. 
It will verify if that information that is entered into that computer 
identifies a person legal to work in the United States.
  I have this program entered into my computer, and I have run a whole 
series of different tries on it. The longest delay I have had is 6 
seconds. That is not so long when you think about how long it takes to 
fill out the paperwork to hire someone and the effort you have to put 
in it.
  That bill requires that the employment verification system be used by 
all employers. That will be helpful, Mr. Speaker, if we can enforce 
anything, but I am not optimistic that this administration will 
enforce. So I have introduced legislation called New IDEA legislation, 
the New Illegal Deduction Elimination Act. IDEA is the Illegal 
Deduction Elimination Act. It brings the IRS into this.
  The Internal Revenue Service has demonstrated a desire to enforce the 
laws that they are entrusted with. They want to enforce that we all pay 
our income tax, and they seem to be entirely willing to levy interest 
and penalties against underpaid taxes. So New IDEA would give the IRS 
the authority to take the Social Security numbers that are introduced 
on the 941 employee withholding forms, enter those into the instant 
check program, the employment verification program, and if the employer 
knew or should have known they were hiring an illegal, it allows the 
IRS to disallow the wages and benefits that were paid to illegals as a 
business expense. The IRS makes that decision. That $10 an hour that 
was an expensed item goes over into the plus side, into the profit 
column, and presuming that the business is profitable, perhaps a 
corporation would be in a 34 percent corporate income tax bracket. If 
that is the case, then the $10 an hour expensed item, that becomes now 
a profit item. It gets the 34 percent tax levied against it and also 
interest and penalties. This totals up to about $6 an hour on top of 
the $10 an hour.
  The net result of New IDEA, H.R. 3095, Mr. Speaker, becomes a $16 an 
hour liability for this illegal employee. Now, I will not tell you that 
you can hire then a $16 illegal because we have all of those things we 
talked about, health insurance, workers comp, unemployment and 
retirement benefits and all that contingent liability that comes with 
that, but perhaps a person can take a job that is legal here for maybe 
$12 an hour, and that levels the playing

[[Page H785]]

field so that lawful permanent residents in the United States and 
especially citizens of the United States then can have some 
opportunities instead of being undercut and underpriced by cheap, 
illegal labor.

  That is the idea of New IDEA, the New Illegal Deduction Elimination 
Act, H.R. 3095, and it will generate billions of dollars for the United 
States Treasury until employers figure out that it will be enforced by 
the IRS.
  You might, Mr. Speaker, contemplate that it would be unjust for us to 
go in and levy that kind of a penalty on employers if we did not give 
them some kind of safe harbor if they use the instant check program. 
New IDEA does give safe harbor to employers if they use the instant 
check program and they used it in good faith, then that gives them safe 
harbor. So the IRS then cannot levy interest and penalties against the 
employer if they happen to hire someone that is illegal and maybe the 
instant check could potentially have a mistake in it.
  So we set this up with the right kind of structure. We bring in the 
IRS to do a good task, to help enforce our immigration laws. We direct 
the IRS then to make those kind of reports to Immigration and Customs 
Enforcement so that once there is a determination made that an employer 
was, I will say, willfully hiring illegals, then Immigration and 
Customs Enforcement can come in and levy employer sanctions under those 
cases.
  So the risk could be significantly greater than another $6 an hour on 
top of your $10 an hour, but what it does is it puts enforcement in 
place where enforcement did not exist before. It brings a new agency in 
that has demonstrated a willingness to enforce Federal law. It changes 
this dynamic. It shuts down the magnet so that this magnet that is 
bringing people into the United States for the jobs, it shuts down the 
jobs magnet, Mr. Speaker. That is what New IDEA does, and you couple 
that with building a fence and more employer sanctions, those are 
encouraged. They are required to use the basic pilot instant check 
program. These things all go together to shut down the jobs magnet.
  Another thing that we need to do and we can do so statutorily, not 
requiring a constitutional amendment, is to pass a law here in the 
United States Congress to put an end to anchor babies, birthright 
citizenship. That was not envisioned either in our Constitution. It is 
a practice. It is kind of a bad habit that we have gotten into, and so 
it is not guaranteed in the Constitution that a person born in the 
United States can be granted or shall be granted automatic United 
States citizenship. It is a practice that we have take on and it has 
gotten out of hand.
  So we need to shut down the jobs magnet. We need to end birthright 
citizenship. We need to build a fence because not only is it a way to 
control the flow of humanity, which in the last year we have had 
perhaps 4 million illegals come across our southern border. I can tell 
you how many we stopped. We stopped 1,159,000, thanks to an effective 
border patrol, and I say effective given the manpower that they have, 
faced with the manpower that they are faced with. That is a fairly 
astonishing accomplishment to pick up 1,159,000, but we only 
adjudicated 1,640 to go back to their home country.
  The rest of them, some of them, perhaps 155,000 OTMs, other than 
Mexicans, were released because we did not have a deportation agreement 
with their home countries. So they just disappeared into America's 
society.
  Then on top of that, the rest of them were released on the promise 
that they would return to their home countries. Will you go back to 
your home country? Yeah, I will go. Okay, fine. Nobody took them down 
to the turnstile and saw to it that they went through and were put in 
airplanes and flew back into Mexico City and put them on a bus and took 
them to their hometown and did so because it was further for them to 
come back here to the United States.

                              {time}  2340

  You know, I think that is a questionable policy, and I do not know if 
it is very effective on the dollar, but we did some of those things. 
And yet the Border Patrol has testified that they stop perhaps one-
fourth, or, maybe on a good day, a third of the illegal entrants. So 
that will take that 1,159,000 that came in and it takes that number up 
to about 4 million. So 2 to 3 million, if you do your math, that came 
into the United States unobstructed, and reasonably thinking that most 
will stay here. And yet for 3 years we have been saying 11 million 
illegals. But in 3 years we could have accumulated another 11 million 
illegals. And if the number was right 3 years ago, today maybe it is 22 
million illegals rather than 11 million illegals. And maybe this 
workforce is a little bigger than 6.3 million. Maybe it is 12 million. 
Maybe you have to hire 2 out of every 12 that are not working in 
America to fill that gap.
  But many have said they are doing work that Americans won't do, and 
that concerned me. I heard a story that if you need your roof fixed in 
Dallas and it is 105 degrees, no American will go up and fix that roof. 
Well, Mr. Speaker, I would submit that myself, this Member of Congress, 
and my crews have worked in an environment that from the heat index 
temperature on up to 126 degrees, and from a wind chill index 
temperature down to 60 below, and we have done that for days at a time. 
So that is 186 degrees, and it feels like temperature range. And 
certainly at 126 it doesn't feel a lot hotter than that on that roof in 
Dallas. But I asked myself, what would be the hottest, dirtiest, most 
difficult, most dangerous job there is anywhere in the world?
  I conducted a little informal poll and came back with a consensus 
that rooting terrorists out of Fallujah probably is the hottest, most 
difficult, the dirtiest, most dangerous job anywhere in the world. And 
we have soldiers and marines that have been doing that, Mr. Speaker. 
And if it is noncombat pay, it pays them $6.80 an hour, and with combat 
pay it comes to $8.09 an hour. Plus benefits, I admit, Mr. Speaker. 
That is $8.09 an hour for a soldier to put his life on the line when it 
is 130 degrees, with bullets flying and RPGs going through the air. 
That is what is going on with brave American patriots.
  If they will do that kind of work for that kind of money, then I 
believe that the difference is this work that is here in this country, 
that people claim Americans will not do, has simply just been bid down 
or it pays too little. And I have watched entire crews, almost entire 
crews of, I will say, 1,300 in a packing plant that were only about 8 
Hispanics 10 years ago go to 81 percent today. And it is not because 
all of a sudden those people that were there 10 years ago picked up and 
left. They have been displaced one at a time. The wages and benefits 
stayed low, and so the illegal labor came in and replaced the labor of 
the people who had built their lives and their dreams around that plant 
and around that job.
  So there is work, and Americans will do all of this work. And I 
always argue that if you want to see it on the other side, if marines 
rooting terrorists out of Fallujah for $8.09 an hour doesn't move your 
heart, Mr. Speaker, then I would say this: that I could hire Bill 
Clinton tomorrow to mow my lawn if I just paid him enough money. That 
is the other side of the equation.
  In between those two extremes are all kinds of solutions. There are 
the 77 million nonworking Americans and there are ways to recruit them 
and to motivate them. We can have bigger families and we can use more 
technology and open up illegal immigration. But the rule of law must be 
maintained, and it must be restored if we are going to have respect for 
the laws in this country.
  A question that is never asked, or seldom asked and never answered by 
the proponents of open borders, Mr. Speaker, is the question: Is there 
such a thing as too much immigration? That is the number one most 
obvious question of all. If you are going to enter into this discussion 
and this debate and you are going to seek to establish an immigration 
policy and be a part of that debate and put your vote up, you ought to 
have an opinion on whether there is such a thing as too much 
immigration.
  Some will go off on tangents and not answer that question. If you 
pull them back from their tangents and just insist, is there such a 
thing as too much immigration, in the end they have to admit that if 
there isn't such a thing, then they have to argue, well, okay, we can 
have 6 billion people here in the United States. Everyone wants to come 
to America, for good reason. So if there

[[Page H786]]

is not such a thing as too much immigration into the United States, 
legal or illegal, then everybody in the world might well want to come 
here, and 6 billion people living in these 50 States of America and 
depopulating the rest of the world, I do not think that is the formula 
we want to look at.
  So someplace between this 283 million that we have and the 6 billion 
that are out there to be recruited might be the right kind of number. 
Maybe the number is even perhaps less than the 283 million. I don't 
think so, but it should be part of our discussion.
  So there is such a thing as too much immigration. We can establish 
that clearly, unless they are willing to take the position that 6 
billion people would be an appropriate number for Americans. So if 
there is such a thing as too much immigration, then the next question 
is, well, how much is too much? And what are the reasons by which we 
would come to a conclusion?
  I would argue, Mr. Speaker, that we need to bring people into this 
country who can assimilate into this society, who can contribute to 
this economy, and people who hopefully have an education and perhaps 
some capital. We need to look at the industries that are there and have 
these debates about H1 and H2B visas so we can supply the demand that 
is there.
  But I am hearing people whine when I say we need to enforce our 
immigration laws, and it is because they are afraid they are going to 
lose their gardener or they are going to lose their housekeeper. I 
talked to an individual the other day that drove up to the illegal 
immigrant distribution center, where some of the communities have built 
a building so they can gather the day laborers there. He pulled his car 
up and he said, I need someone to work for the day. He had 100 people 
around him. Then he said, I have got $10 an hour, and they all walked 
away. He had to get out of his car and say I have $15; now I have $20. 
He found one that would work for $20 an hour for a short day.
  I would submit that that is not a national security issue if you 
can't hire someone to pull the weeds out of your garden. If you cannot 
go out there or hire someone to do that, go rent a condo and sell the 
house to someone who can figure that out. This economy will sort this 
out. Supply and demand is always taking care of this. People used to 
migrate to go to work. They migrated out of Oklahoma to go to 
California. The Okies picked grapes out there.
  I read a story about a 6-by-6 area in Milwaukee, 36 square blocks, 
where they used to have heads of households all working in the 
breweries. They came there in the 1930s from the South. And on that 
day, and this has been some years ago that I read this article, but on 
that day there wasn't a single working head of household because those 
jobs had disappeared in the breweries in Milwaukee. But nobody thought 
that that labor force might want to migrate somewhere where there was a 
job, because the safety net that is there has become a hammock. That is 
why we have 7.5 million on unemployment and that is why there is 
another 5.2 million that are looking. And many of those are good 
people. But if we provide a safety net there, it is easier to set back 
on that, rest a little on the hammock instead of having to get out 
there and go to work.
  So if there is such a thing as too much immigration, then how much is 
too much? And I would submit, Mr. Speaker, that we are working at an 
effective rate right now. We will see differences in numbers, but the 
legal numbers are about a million a year. That is a lot of people. I 
think we can assimilate a million a year. But at some point we need to 
make sure that they have an opportunity for education; that they can 
learn the language.
  We are printing ballots in more than 22 different languages just in 
Los Angeles County alone. We are in the process of reauthorizing the 
Voting Rights Act and people are arguing that even after all these 
generations people need a ballot handed to them in the language they 
are comfortable with. And I would argue that if you are born here in 
the United States or are a naturalized citizen, you should have had 
enough access to the English language to be able to read the ballot and 
cast a vote.
  The only way that you can argue that a person that is legal to vote 
in the United States, that means a United States citizen, doesn't have 
a command of the English language, it wouldn't be if they were a 
naturalized citizen because they have to demonstrate proficiency in 
English to be a citizen, so they would have had to have been born here 
in the United States, had birthright citizenship, lived in an enclave, 
and didn't learn enough English to be able to know President, Vice 
President, Congressman, State senator, or State representative. Now, 
how long would it take to learn that? And if you couldn't learn that 
enough to vote, how could you understand the current events and the 
culture well enough to make an informed decision?
  So I think that we are going down this wrong path with catering to 
people. We need to bring people together under one umbrella. A common 
language is the single most powerful unifying force that there has ever 
been throughout history. God knew that at the Tower of Babble. We have 
known it many, many times.
  There was an emperor in about 245 B.C. in China. And I will never get 
the pronunciation right in Chinese, Mr. Speaker, but I call him Qin Shi 
Huang Di. He was the first emperor of China, and that part I know I 
have right. But he looked around and realized there were all these 
different tribal regions within China. They had a common culture, they 
wore similar clothes, ate similar food, a lot of similar habits, but 
they couldn't communicate with each other because they didn't speak the 
same language.

                              {time}  2350

  He set about to unify the Chinese people for the next 10,000 years, 
and that was a quote from him, by hiring scribes to draft the Chinese 
language. They did that, and that language has bonded those people 
together for a fourth of that time. That is how powerful language is as 
a unifying force.
  I will submit that we have a debate ahead of us, and it is going to 
be an intense debate. Immigration is a very, very complicated and 
convoluted subject. There are people whose oxen are going to be gored. 
There are people who walk away from the rule of law, and they say, What 
are we going to do? We have businesses that are dependent on illegal 
labor so you need to legalize this labor.
  I heard that last Friday in testimony in a trip out West. I heard a 
witness testify that they had set up their business near the border 
based on the premise they could bring illegal labor to do that work. 
Now they have what I call an attrition rate of 9 percent a week, and we 
should legalize that, that is their request. We should legalize 
because, after all, the business cannot get along without illegal 
labor.
  If they premised their business on illegal labor, it does not tug at 
my heartstrings so much because I have great reverence for the rule of 
law, the order that is here in the United States of America, for this 
Constitution that I carry next to my heart every day, to the continuity 
of our history, to our responsibility to this sacred covenant that 
really is our Constitution, this responsibility, the legacy that is 
left us by our Founding Fathers, this rule of law, this greater 
American civilization, the one that welcomes people in a legal way and 
gives everyone here an opportunity to pull themselves up by their 
bootstraps and succeed.
  And often, newly arriving immigrants surpass their peers, those born 
here in the United States that maybe take some of this for granted. A 
lot of the vitality in America comes from immigration, but the idea 
that America is a Nation of immigrants and therefore we cannot have a 
rational immigration policy is an idea that is built upon a fallacy.
  I asked the question in an immigration hearing of a series of 
witnesses: Is the United States a Nation of immigrants? And the answer 
was yes from all witnesses. Then please submit to me, since you are 
here as an expert, name a nation that is not a nation of immigrants? No 
one could answer that question because all nations are nations of 
immigrants. All nations have benefited from the flow of human traffic.
  When people come to go to work, temporary worker, guest worker 
programs, there is no model in the history of humanity where there has 
been a

[[Page H787]]

successful temporary worker program. When people are brought into a 
country to work, they put down roots. It is human nature. They raise a 
family and buy houses. They should do that. If we bring people into 
this country, however we might do that, and whether I lose this debate 
on the rational side of this or not, we ought to ensure that they do 
have an opportunity to become full-fledged American citizens and not 
create a second-class category of citizens here in the United States. 
That will build resentment. People who come here and live and work 
here, and do so legally, should have a path to citizenship. It should 
be an earned citizenship. They should respect and revere our laws and 
our history, but a second-class level of citizenship will be a wedge 
between us. It will pit people here in America against each other.
  And a guest worker, temporary worker program sets up a lower class of 
residence, quasi-legal workers, but that does not guarantee that there 
will not be competing groups of illegal workers that are underbidding 
the guest workers. With guest workers, you have to make sure they are 
not putting too much pressure on the services, such as health care and 
education. If you do all of that, it raises the price of labor. They 
are going to want more money anyway because now they are legal and they 
have some options.
  The people who come in to underbid that will be another wave of 
illegal workers, and that other wave will drive the price down even 
further.
  So we must control our borders and insist that there is respect for 
our laws. We must look down range to the future and what America is 
going to look like in a generation or two. We must maintain our 
cultural continuity, respect the rule of law and make a prudent 
decision here, not one that is based upon the idea of we do not have 
any alternatives. We have many alternatives. We have 77.5 million 
nonworking Americans. We have technology that we could develop. We 
could increase our birth rate, open up legal immigration for the skills 
that we need, and those are just some of the solutions that I can come 
up with. But, in fact, business is so creative, they can think of many, 
many more.
  With that, Mr. Speaker, I would express my appreciation for the 
privilege to address you and this United States House of 
Representatives.

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