[Congressional Record Volume 152, Number 32 (Tuesday, March 14, 2006)]
[House]
[Pages H956-H963]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                      IMMIGRATION REFORM IS NEEDED

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mrs. Drake). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of January 4, 2005, the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. King) is 
recognized for 60 minutes.
  Mr. KING. Madam Speaker, I would first like to start out by saying 
that I appreciate the opportunity to listen to the delegation, 
particularly the representatives from Louisiana and gentlewomen from 
Texas and California, their remarks on how bad it is down there in the 
gulf coast.
  Madam Speaker, I have made three trips down there myself, two of them 
on my own and another with a transportation CODEL. And the first one 
was the September 10 through September 12 when New Orleans was 70 
percent underwater.
  The second one was October 4 where we saw most of the coastline, all 
of the way through Biloxi and all of the way

[[Page H957]]

to Alabama. And the third one was the middle part of January, where I 
went down alone and I wanted to be able to go where my instincts took 
me and ask questions and get a feel for what is going on down there.
  And it is at least as bad as was described on the floor here tonight. 
It is not possible to understand the scope of the damage and the 
disaster that is there. I have 3,000 pictures, and can I run those 
through and look at them. They only bring back the memories that helped 
me better understand how bad it is down there still today.
  And the parts of the community that still do not have water, that do 
not have electricity, the devastation down in Plaquemines Kerr, all of 
the way down to the outlet of the Mississippi was the worst, and that 
is the part I think that has been reported the least.
  I want to say that I appreciate the tone of the people that have 
testified on the floor here tonight. And this is a very difficult 
question for this Nation. And the degree of certainty that has not been 
offered to the people that have their homes that have been devastated, 
you know I visited a home of an individual who had received his 
insurance check, he had paid for his house, it was a 2-year-old small 
brick house, and had a drive-in slab for his car.
  He had stripped it out down to the 2-by-4s. He was ready to go. He 
had the money. He had the materials, he had the contractor lined up. 
But he could not get a building permit to move forward to get it done.
  FEMA said we will move you in a trailer house and park it beside your 
house, but we cannot quite get the red tape out of the way.
  The uncertainty of the Corps of Engineers, and to not know that New 
Orleans is going to be protected to the level that it was prior to the 
storm by June 1, which I think they will make it, maybe the quality of 
that work, some of that could be in question, I think they will make 
that.
  But what about the next level? When you go to invest capital, and 
that capital might be invested for 30 years or more, than I think there 
needs to be a degree of certainty as to whether there is going to be 
protection for a category 4, 4.5 if there is one, a 5 so that people 
can make their only financial judgments.
  We appropriated out of this Congress before Christmas funding for the 
Corps of Engineers to produce a category 5 study. And that is the right 
path to go down to some degree, but it is only going to give us one 
option, that is category 5. It is 24 months to produce the study.
  And so 24 months of indecision, added upon these months of agony, I 
think, add to the pain of the people that are trying to work their way 
out of this. I have empathy. I have sympathy. I have initiated my own 
trips down there for that reason.
  I have been a victim of the floods in 1993 in Iowa, and I did not 
realize how much that had scarred me until I saw what happened to the 
people down there.
  And yet the other side of this is, we do not know, we do not know 
where FEMA has spent the money or we do not know where they would spend 
the money. I do think they need to come to this Congress with an 
accounting of it and with a plan.
  And the worst tragedy is not to have the plan to lay out in front of 
the people. And I would say that I think the coastline, east and west 
of New Orleans, will probably get themselves rebuilt with the structure 
that is there and the funding and the insurance that is there.
  But I do not think New Orleans can come out of this without some 
better solution. I have pointed out that I think hard times invariably 
produce strong leaders. There was Winston Churchill, Rudy Giuliani. 
This scenario, for one reason or another, has not produced a strong 
leader that helps add clarity to this plan.
  I am hopeful that there will be a strong leader emerge. If that can 
happen, it would help us all to be able to follow a path and get behind 
this. I do not think that there is a political struggle here. I do not 
think it is a partisan struggle.
  My sense is that there is a sense of fiscal responsibility on the one 
side of this argument, and a sense of frustration that we have not been 
delivered the accounting or where the funding has been spent nor the 
plans on where it would go.

                              {time}  2200

  I know that when they came to us for the $50 billion FEMA funding, in 
that was altogether 300,000 trailers, which now we have a clearer view, 
I think, of how much of a debacle that was; 270,000 of them were back 
ordered. There was $650 million in that funding that was for mitigation 
of future disasters.
  So some of this jumped the gun, and it has not served the people well 
that are suffering down there. I hope we can find a way through this. 
It saddens me to listen to you all tonight. This message needed to come 
out here before this Congress.
  I just wanted to let you know that my ears heard it, and I think that 
there were thousands of Americans that heard it. And I hope that we can 
find a way to bring some solution there; and it will be a long time, I 
think we all know that. This is the worst natural disaster for this 
country ever to face in loss of lives, in loss of treasure, and the 
degree of difficulty in reconstructing the region, and in the planning 
difficulty, and how to put levees back in place, how to give people 
some sense of certainty.
  And then on top of that the difficulty in finding reliable 
engineering on the settlement rates that are going on, some of them 
below sea level, some of them above sea level that are there. I 
struggled for months to get my hands on some. I think now I have maybe 
all that is available in the world in my office. One rolled-up, nice-
looking document.
  I want to let you know that I will pay attention with you on this, 
and I will be working for a plan and for a solution. We may or may not 
agree as this process goes forward, but I wanted to express my 
heartfelt sympathy for the people in the gulf coast of America. I 
appreciate you staying on the floor to hear that message because I mean 
it from my heart, Mr. Melacon and all of us to you.
  So however we move forward on this, hopefully the first thing and the 
most important thing I would think would be to get a core plan out here 
in front of the American people so they can start to plan. If we cannot 
get resources to them, at least they can move ahead on their own if 
they know what they can count on for protection from a flood.
  We have to have a New Orleans. Thomas Jefferson saw the vision in 
that. If he had not bought anything except that southern part of 
Louisiana for the money he paid for the entire Louisiana Purchase, it 
would have been a good deal. Part of where I live is part of that 
purchase as well, but that port down there is essential to America. It 
must be viable again. I thank you for your words. I came to talk about 
another subject matter, but I appreciate the privilege to say a few 
words about it, and I thank you for your contribution here tonight.
  Madam Speaker, I came to the floor to talk about another subject 
matter, and that is the subject matter that America is talking about in 
virtually every stop I make across the Midwest and other parts across 
the country, that is the subject matter of illegal immigration.
  I would point out that most everyone I meet is supportive of legal 
immigration. I am one who is supportive of legal immigration. I have 
argued many times that we need to design an immigration policy that is 
for the enhancement of the economic, the social, and the cultural well-
being of the United States of America. It needs to be a plan that is 
somewhat selfish, if you will: one that is designed to grow our 
economy; one that is designed to develop our society; one that is 
designed to help us continue to be the beacon of liberty for the world. 
That has been the charge that has fallen upon this Congress. In fact, 
it is the constitutional charge that the Founding Fathers wrote into 
our Constitution. That design and that plan have fluctuated over the 
years, but we have always corrected and when we have overdone things, 
we have always corrected.
  So today we are faced with this debate, and it is a debate that is 
profound and it is complicated. As I listen to this debate across the 
Midwest especially, but around here, inside the beltway, in Washington, 
D.C., Madam Speaker, and around the country, I

[[Page H958]]

hear two things, two things on different sides. One of them is that 
business cannot get along without illegal labor and that if we pull 
that illegal labor out of the marketplace that our economy would 
collapse. And the other side of that equation is that because we are 
all sons and daughters of immigrants, therefore we should not deny 
access to America to anyone because, after all, we either came here as 
immigrants ourselves or we descended from immigrants. That actually 
includes the Native Americans who, according to anthropologists, came 
over here about 12,000 years ago across the Bering Strait. So they were 
the first to arrive, but immigrants the same.
  As I pose some of those questions in hearings, as I listen to the 
testimony, one of the questions, Madam Speaker, I posed was to the 
witnesses: Name a nation that was not built by immigration. And I add 
no one on the panel could answer that question as to any nation that 
had not been built by immigrants. In fact, all nations in the world 
have been built by immigration. There is no police in the world where 
there is an indigenous people that just sprouted up there and lived 
there and they did not leave and no one else came. We have all been the 
beneficiaries of fresh blood that comes in from new regions, new 
ethnicities with new advancements to their culture, new vigor that 
comes from the fresh blood of immigration. That has taken place in the 
United States of America in a more effective way than any place in the 
world.
  We have done a better job of assimilation than any other place in the 
world. But any nation you want to look at, including Iraq, which many 
will say is the cradle of civilization, but there has still been 
immigration that has flowed back and forth there for millennia.
  If you look at Europe, we know the history of the Normans and the 
Celts that came across that part of the world and they vied for who was 
going to be the rulers in that region. As the Huns came down from the 
north and the Romans came in from the southeast, they mixed their 
culture, and today we have some of that vigor. We have the legacy of 
that. The same here for the United States of America, only we did it 
under unique circumstances, Madam Speaker. We did it under these 
circumstances where this entire continent, in fact, the Native 
Americans did not view land as an ownership. And so because of that, 
the land had not been fought over, had not been struggled over. There 
had not been wars that were fought over the land itself. Yes, some of 
the hunting grounds, but not the lands itself.
  As opposed to Europe, Madam Speaker, where for centuries the 
ownership of land, occupying the land, was a reason for war. So they 
had fought over that land and the very deep-seated grudges were rooted 
in that land. But as we received the beneficiaries of Western 
Civilization, they came over here to the United States for their 
different reasons, for freedom to worship, freedom of religion, freedom 
of press, freedom of speech, free of enterprise, Madam Speaker, and the 
opportunity to invest some capital or some sweat equity or both and be 
able to pull themselves up by their boot straps and succeed and go 
clear to the top of the heap, an environment of low or no taxation and 
low or no regulation. But the benefit of this country was that we had 
an entire continent to settle, and it needed people to live on it, 
Madam Speaker.

  So the new circumstance turned out to be good people, hardworking, 
God-fearing, aggressive people to settle this land, could homestead 
much of this land. And the legacy of the grudge, the blood that was on 
the land they left did not get imprinted here on the land in the United 
States of America. So we were able to under that kind of environment, 
where there were not grudge matches over the ownership of the land, 
bring people from different walks of life, from different 
nationalities, different ethnicities, different languages, different 
religions and bring them together on this land called America where 
they assimilated with each other on a common value system, began to 
understand and learn a common history that bound them together. They 
learned a common language called English that tied them together. They 
had a religion that was predominantly Christianity. They had Judeo-
Christian values that bound them together and they had a sense of 
destiny. They had a clarion call for manifest destiny. And they settled 
this continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific in a very, very short 
period of time.
  But that was a legacy of the circumstances of history, the hand of 
providence, the values that they brought with them, Madam Speaker, 
unique in the world. And so we have this unique privilege and this 
unique opportunity in the United States of America. We have a sacred 
covenant with our Founding Fathers that we must preserve and protect 
and defend. We have an obligation to look down-range, to look beyond 
the horizon and ask questions of all of us.
  What has America been? What is America today? And what is America to 
be tomorrow, next year, next decade, next generation, next half a 
century, next century?
  Madam Speaker, I do not hear a lot of that discussion in this 
immigration discussion that we have. I hear short-term discussions that 
have to do with I need to have these people come in here, the illegals, 
because we count them in the census and therefore we apportion 
congressional districts. They have a representation in Congress, and 
they do, Madam Speaker. In fact, there will be nine to 11 congressional 
seats in America that exist because the illegals that live in that 
district are counted right the same as an American citizen. And at 
least two of those seats in a State that I can think of, it only takes 
30,000 votes to win a seat in Congress.
  My district, the Fifth District of Iowa, takes 120,000 votes to win a 
seat in Congress because we have very few illegals in my district. So 
the people who come to the polls are about 240,000 strong out of 
600,000 people altogether. That would be the registered voters. But in 
a couple of seats out west, there are only 60,000 registered voters to 
come to the polls because the rest of them are either not registered or 
they are here in the United States illegally and they cannot vote.
  So 30,000 votes wins the seat in Congress that has the same voice, 
the same vote that my 120,000 people that come to the polls to vote 
have. That is wrong, Madam Speaker. The people who are citizens of the 
United States deserve representation here. They do not deserve to have 
their representation diluted by counting people who came into this 
country illegally. But that is the political power of illegal 
immigration that is aligned mostly with the left.
  So they have a powerful political motive to support massive supplies 
of illegals to come into this country in the first place because they 
guarantee congressional seats in Congress, nine, 10 or 11 of them, 
depending on whose study you want to follow.
  In the second place because they believe that if they keep the 
pressure up there will be a path to citizenship so that those people do 
get to vote. It changes the political dynamic in America. That is the 
urge on the left. That is their motivation to not stand by the rule of 
law, to not defend our borders, to not enforce domestically the 
violation of immigration laws, Madam Speaker.
  On the other side of this equation are the companies that are 
profiting from illegal labor. Now, they will argue and they have argued 
relentlessly and vociferously that we cannot be deporting 11 million 
illegals. I would argue that, yes, I think we could if we had the will 
to do so if we could find the means and the way to do so. I do not 
suggest that we do that, but I reject the idea that we could not do 
that.
  I would argue that they came here on their own. They could go back on 
their own. And we need to get people to go back to their home country, 
get in the line to come into the United States legally, not illegally.
  To give an example of what happens when you reward people for 
breaking the law, I recall a protestor that had signs out at an event 
that I attended some months ago, and those signs said, ``I was an 
illegal immigrant. Now I am a United States citizen. Steve King is a'' 
pick your adjective that you might want to describe me as, Madam 
Speaker. But it struck me that this individual was proud that he had 
come into the country as an illegal alien, but he was given amnesty in 
1986 in one of the two times that my beloved President Ronald Reagan 
let me down.

[[Page H959]]

  So the reward for breaking the laws of the United States was United 
States citizenship. And then he has contempt for the law and argues 
that we ought not enforce our immigration laws today. He was a 
beneficiary of not enforcing them in 1986. Now he is a United States 
citizen. Now he is exercising his rights of citizenship to protest the 
idea that I would stand up to defend the rule of law. Of course he has 
contempt for the rule of law. The rule of law did not restrain him from 
breaking it to come into the United States. And he was rewarded by 
citizenship for breaking the laws of the United States.
  One of the foundations, one of the basic tenets of being an American, 
our American values, is respect for the rule of law, Madam Speaker. And 
if we bring in millions of people who have contempt for the rule of 
law, we will find ourselves devolved into a downward spiral of the kind 
of corruption that we see south of the border. There is contempt of the 
rule of law there. You have to pay off the police force. You cannot 
protect the rights of property. There is a reason that their economy 
has not grown like our economy has grown. And that reason is many of 
the things that we know: the rule of law; respect for the law; a kind 
of a culture that polices itself.
  When we wonder whether it is actually the Mexican military, Madam 
Speaker, or whether it is paramilitary dressed like the Mexican 
military or active duty Mexican military who are hired out to the drug 
cartels that are escorting convoys of drugs across the Rio Grande into 
the United States, it does not matter a lot to me. A country that can 
have that kind of thing going on has contempt for the rule of law, 
their own laws, and absolutely has a policy that runs directly against 
the laws of the United States of America.
  Fifty-eight percent of Mexicans believe they have a right to come to 
the United States, 58 percent. How can that be in a nation that hears 
this media? Our television blasts down in there. Our radio blasts down 
in there. Don't they hear this message continuously that Congress is 
now fed up, that we passed immigration laws?

                              {time}  2215

  I guarantee you, Madam Speaker, they do because somewhere between 
25,000 and 40,000 of them were here in this city last week protesting 
the fact that we want to enforce our borders.
  Now, think of this. The Nation State, United States of America, 
Nation State, one of many, one of several hundred Nation States in the 
world, if there was ever an institution that demonstrated its 
resilience and its success over the last century, the 20th century, it 
is a Nation State, and a Nation cannot be Nation unless it has borders. 
You cannot declare there be borders unless you enforce them.
  The reason we have borders is, one, for national security, national 
security, so foreign armies do not come in, so that contraband does not 
come in like illegal drugs, guns, weapons, weapons of mass destruction. 
It could be chemical weapons. It could be biological or nuclear. It 
could be a dirty nuclear device. A Nation has to have borders and 
enforce their borders to protect their national security, for one 
thing.
  To control the flow of commerce for another so that our commercial 
treaties that we have from one Nation to another are honored and 
respected and any duties that might be owed at the border get paid, 
going both ways, another reason to have a border. You have to define 
that location with a bright line, Madam Speaker, because a border 
defines the line distinctions between the law of two Nations. We have a 
law that says you do not come into the United States in violation of 
our law. You have to have lawful presence to be here, but the contempt 
that is demonstrated on our southern border encourages more than 4 
million to come across the border in a single year.
  In the last reporting year, 1,159,000 illegals were stopped by the 
border patrol in the southern border. That is 1,159,000. Of those 
1,159,000, there were probably another 3 million that made it in that 
did not get stopped, but of 1,159,000, only 1,640 were adjudicated for 
deportation. That is not a very good percentage, and the rest were 
released on, one might say, their own recognizance, but I would say 
they are released on their promise to return to their home country, I 
promise I will go to my home country, please let me go, Mr. Border 
Patrol, and they are released.
  About 155,000 of them were other than Mexicans, OTMs, and these were 
those that we did not have the right kind of a treaty arrangement to be 
able to deport them to their home country. So now we have a lot of 
Congress that is upset about that. I cannot draw a distinction between 
whether they were other than Mexicans or whether they were Mexicans. 
They all fit into the same category to me. They broke the law to come 
into the United States. We need to enforce the law.
  Why can we not do immediate deportation? Why can we not we just issue 
the order that says you came into the country illegally, we will take 
you down to the turnstile and you go back where you came from; if you 
come back here again, we have got your fingerprints now; we will lock 
you up; now then we will send you back. That is a simple solution.
  But we need to put a fence along our southern border, Madam Speaker, 
and I called for that fence on August 22. We passed legislation that 
would build a fence here 3 months, 3 weeks and 3 days, 114 days, later 
and that would be 700 miles of the 2,000. I supported that. I thought 
Duncan Hunter did good work on it. He wrote up a very good plan to 
build a reasonable fence. I would connect it the whole way, and even 
with a 10-foot chain link fence, with wire on top, it would be about 
$680 million to build it the whole way.
  I would want to delineate and define and identify our border, and I 
would hang signs on the south side of them in Spanish that say, you 
cannot come here through this fence. You need to go sign up, go sign up 
and then wait your turn, and you can come to the United States if there 
is room for you in the amount of legal immigration that we are going to 
allow.
  We cannot guarantee that everybody that wants to come to America can 
come here. In fact, if we opened up our border, Madam Speaker, and 
allowed everyone to come here that wants to come here, I would imagine 
there would be somewhere around 6 billion in the United States. Sooner 
or later, if we ended up 3 or 4 billion, maybe by that point it would 
be so crowded that folks would decide they do not want to.
  But at what point does it sink the lifeboat called the United States 
of America? At what point when we are taking people on and bringing 
them in and telling ourselves that we are the relief valve for poverty 
in the world and we are doing good things for these million or 2 
million or 3 or 4 million people that come in here every year, and that 
makes our heart feel good, but while that is going on, there are 
another 10 or 12 million that are born, that are not going to have that 
opportunity to come here. There are another 4.6 billion people on the 
planet that have a lower standard of living than the average citizen in 
Mexico.
  So it is not possible for us to alleviate poverty by opening up our 
borders. Maybe we can alleviate any kind of guilt that is there. Madam 
Speaker, I feel none. It is a great blessing to be born in the United 
States. It is a tremendous privilege to be able to come here as a 
lawful resident and be able to earn citizenship that is here. I see 
that from people who are Americans by choice, and the depth of their 
patriotism and their commitment to this country is strong. I appreciate 
that and they bring their talents with them, and it adds to the 
vitality and they love freedom. Many of them love freedom as much, or 
more, than native born Americans do because they have known something 
other than that freedom.
  But we cannot be the relief valve for the poverty in the world. We 
can export our values, but if we think we are going down take on all 
the poor people in the world: Bring me your tired, your poor, or your 
hungry, the wretched refuse of your teaming shores, that cannot go on 
because this lifeboat will sink. And then where do people migrate to 
then?
  So I would ask as you are involved in this debate, and as Americans 
across the world are, I would ask them to pose the question, when 
somebody steps up and says I think we ought to have open borders and a 
guest worker plan and a temporary worker plan, I would ask them this 
question: Is there such a thing as too much immigration? Simple, number 
one, easy question. If they

[[Page H960]]

will not be willing to answer, because they know that if they answer 
the question the way they would like to answer it, which is, no, there 
is not too much, then they have to answer the question if 6 billion 
Americans are too many. When you ask that question you say, well, that 
is a few too many, or about 5 billion or 4 billion or 3 billion, or 2 
billion, that is all too many.
  They have to begin to settle on an answer of what should the 
population of the United States be. Is there such a thing as too much 
immigration? If so, how much? Why would there be too many people living 
in the United States? If it came to 1 billion people here like there 
are in China and India and the answer to that is that, yes, we could 
sustain that kind of population. It would be crowded, packed and put 
pressure on our infrastructure. We would not have enough roads, schools 
and hospitals. Our parks would be packed in full, and we would have to 
shut some of them down. We would not have enough clean water. We would 
have trouble handling the sewer. We could make those adjustments if we 
had the people, but there is not a reason to open the doors to take on 
that load and change the character of America that dramatically.

  So there is such a thing, Madam Speaker, as too much immigration, and 
too much immigration from a single country changes the culture and 
character of America.
  I am not here the say whether that is good or bad, but I am here to 
suggest, Madam Speaker, that we need to have a national debate on that. 
We need to have a national debate to discuss what is the character of 
America, what has made us strong, where do we derive our strength.
  I do not hear that discussion here in this Congress. I do not hear it 
around the hallways of the offices that are around here, and I do not 
hear it a lot back in Iowa either, but I would submit that the strength 
of America comes from three main pillars.
  Those three main pillars are free enterprise capitalism. We have had 
the freedom and the opportunity and the structure and the rule of law 
to let us invest our dollars in our sweat equity to do the best we can 
to earn our way through this life. If you rise to the top of the heap 
and you are worth $50 billion and you are Bill Gates, hurray for you. 
America cheers that kind of success because we know when someone makes 
it to the top of the ladder, they have also helped many others up to 
the top of the ladder with them, and that kind of success spills out 
amongst us all. A rising tide lifts all boats. The tide of Bill Gates 
and Microsoft and $50 billion and an individual's wealth has risen all 
boats and we all live better because of that and that creativity is 
awarded here in the United States because we have a rule of law. We 
have free enterprise capitalism. So the first pillar is free enterprise 
capitalism.
  The second pillar of the strength of America's economy is Western 
civilization. We could go into a discussion about the struggle of the 
west versus the east right now, and Western civilization being 
challenged by radicalism, but I think, for the time being, I will take 
us to the benefits of Western civilization, Madam Speaker. I will 
suggest that the origins of Western civilization are rooted in the 
Greek, the Greek thought, 2000, 3000 years before the time of Christ 
when they sat around and took great pride in being able to reason, to 
be rational, to be able to set up a theorem and be able to track that 
and be able to prove to the level of the science that they had things 
that they could believe in that were factual. Once they could establish 
those facts, they could move on to other facts that were based on real 
truth.
  Now, we are in this age where there is an argument that there is no 
such thing as truth, but I will argue that there are many things that 
are true, and it is the math and sciences, the physics, the chemistry, 
the geometry. Physics, chemistry and geometry, math, those sciences, 
those things, exact sciences, the things that you could count upon and 
use to calculate the engineering design to build a bridge over a river, 
for example, that is some of the foundations that grew from Western 
civilization.
  We saw the Romans develop their engineering in a magnificent way, and 
they were part of Western civilization, and they demonstrated how you 
could take science and reason and be able to do wonderful engineering 
designs, many of which exists to this day in Rome. That is, the Greeks, 
in particular, and the Romans successes are the foundation of the 
Western civilization, and as that thought, that age of reason flowed 
its way up through Europe and found itself in the age of enlightenment 
in France, in particular, in the late 1600s and in the 1700s, that age 
of enlightenment that brought forth the industrial revolution, those 
values of Western civilization, the beginnings of the industrial 
revolution found their way to the new world, found their way to the 
North American continent.
  Where? We had free enterprise capitalism now married up with an 
industrial revolution that was the Western civilization, the success of 
Greek thought, Roman thought, age of enlightenment in Western Europe 
that came over here and tied up together with this almost free 
enterprise opportunity where there was almost no taxation and no 
regulation, but there was a protection of the rule of law. There was a 
return on capital. The return on that capital, coupled with the science 
and the technology, brought about this robust economy here in the 
United States.
  That robust economy would, I think, have turned this Nation into a 
voracious, imperialistic Nation that would have been seeking to conquer 
the world and that conquest and occupation of the world would have been 
the natural result of that appetite, of almost perfect environment for 
free enterprise and almost perfect receptacle for Western civilization, 
those two pillars, free enterprise, Western civilization.
  But the third pillar came along to mitigate this, tie this together 
and give it a moral foundation. That is our Judeo-Christian values. 
Those are the values that are part of our culture, that tell this 
Nation of Americans that you have a duty that goes beyond yourself. We 
have a duty to the world, we have a duty to posterity and duty to God 
to establish a moral foundation. That moral foundation has been our 
restraint, our restraint that causes us to help other people up the 
ladder and reach out and promote this freedom and this liberty so that 
the rest of the world will have that opportunity to benefit from the 
technology, the industrial revolution, the free enterprise capitalism, 
the descendants of and now the leaders of Western civilization.
  But it was our Judeo-Christian values that tempered that aggressive 
appetite and made us a moral Nation. That is the core that has made 
America great. That is a debate that we have to have and the values 
that we need to preserve, and if we will preserve those values and if 
we can infuse those values into people that come here to take advantage 
of these opportunities, and if we are knowledgeable about what has made 
this Nation great and if we are humble about this blessing that we have 
and if we take this responsibility seriously, so that we know that when 
new people come here their opportunity for assimilation becomes also a 
way for them to be incorporated into these American values, these 
values that I have articulated of free enterprise capitalism, Western 
civilization, Judeo-Christian values, all tied together, that drive us 
toward a destiny to be the leader of the world, not just the leader of 
the free world.
  We used to say United States of America is the leader of the free 
world. No, we are the leader of the world. Our Nation is the world's 
only future power. Being the world's only future power is an awesome 
responsibility, Madam Speaker, but also shaping this Nation is an 
awesome responsibility.
  So the question becomes, is there such a thing as too much 
immigration? Yes. If so, why? It overburdens us, as I said, our 
infrastructure, the highways, our sewers, our roads, but also, it 
changes the shape and the character and the culture of America. We 
should be always nurturing this character and culture to be pro-free 
enterprise, pro-Western civilization, pro-Judeo-Christian values, and 
you might notice, Madam Speaker, none of those values I have given 
necessarily run contrary to the largest population that comes into the 
country both legally and illegally, but we need to articulate this and 
bring people under our wing so they can be assimilated as Americans.
  Then to ask the question of those who are for open borders, what will

[[Page H961]]

America look like in 10 years, 25 years, 50 years, 100 years?

                              {time}  2230

  What is their vision for America? What do they believe are the 
circumstances and the consequences of essentially unlimited 
immigration? And their answer will be: This Nation can't get along 
without the immigrants because, after all, it was built on immigrants. 
And we can't get along without the labor that is there. Business will 
collapse.
  Madam Speaker, I would submit business won't collapse. Four percent 
of our labor force is illegal labor. They do 2.2 percent of the work. 
They turn out 2.2 percent of the work; 4.0 percent of the labor force. 
And they earn about $75 or $76 billion in wages, and they send between 
$20 billion and $30 billion of those wages back south of the border to 
their home countries.
  Now, that puts a burden on our health care, our education services, 
and our welfare services. And you would argue, no, they do not access 
welfare if they are not here legally. True. But their children do. So 
it comes out to be, for the average illegal family, about $2,700 that 
an illegal family is a burden on the taxpayers. Most of that is to 
provide education and health care and those things.
  If they were legalized in a guest worker or temporary worker plan, 
then that burden on the taxpayer would go up because they would utilize 
those services more. The calculation by the Pew Foundation is about 
$7,700 per family, if my memory serves me correctly. So it would be not 
quite triple the cost of having an illegal family here to legalize 
them.
  But it is not a net gain to our economy by that measure. In fact, it 
is a burden on the taxpayer, Madam Speaker. And so I would go further 
and submit that of the 11 million, and now perhaps 12 million people, 
it has been charted that the workforce that exists is 6.3 million, some 
will say 6.5 million of the 11 million, and that group, and I will use 
the 6.3 million, is the workforce. That is the workforce that would 
need to be replaced if they were all doing essential work.
  I would submit that if they are mowing lawns, if they are trimming 
trees, if they are doing servant work around houses, people that might 
be able to mow their own lawn, trim their own trees, maybe make their 
own bed or do their own vacuuming, that that is not essential work. 
Some of that is not essential. Some is. But for the sake of argument, 
let us just say there are 6.3 million people here illegally working 
doing essential work. And if they all went home over a period of time, 
it wouldn't happen all at once but over a period of time, then maybe we 
would need to replace that workforce.
  How might we do that, Madam Speaker? I would submit that one of the 
ways we could do that would be to go into the unemployment rolls. On 
any day there are 7.5 million unemployed, and we are paying them not to 
work. There are another 5.2 million out there that have exhausted their 
unemployment benefits that will answer the polling and the survey 
saying I am looking for work. I want a job. So 7.5 million, plus 5.2 
million. That is 12.7.
  In addition to that, between the ages of 16 and 19, the teenagers, 
there are 9.3 million teenagers that are not in the workforce. Not even 
part-time. Presumably some of them would like to go to work and earn 
some money for their college education or perhaps some spending money 
or to pay for their car, even on a part-time basis. So there are 9.3 
million of those. And between the ages of 65 and 69, people that are in 
retirement age, and some of them presumably in pretty good health, as 
our health is nowadays at that age, there are 4.5 million people in 
that age group.
  Now, I add up a little more, I started looking, and this is all from 
the U.S. Department of Labor statistics that are available on their Web 
page, but between the ages of 20 and 64, and including those ages, 
there are 51 million people that are not in the workforce. We only have 
a workforce in America of 140 million people, and we have about 283 
million by our census from the year 2000. That has grown some, but 140 
million people working out of at least 280 million. So perhaps less 
than half of America is actually working today, and the other half 
could, some of them, presumably, could go to work.
  But of the lists that I have given, the unemployed, those looking for 
work, those 16 to 19 years old, those between the ages of 65 and 69, 
and those between the ages over 20 and 64 that are not in the 
workforce, there are 51 million of them between the ages of 20 and 64 
not in the workforce. They might be retired, independently wealthy, 
they might be working for cash, or they could be drug dealers, Madam 
Speaker. They could be doing anything, but they are not in the 
workforce. So I add these people up to find out how big of a pool there 
is to hire from. And that pool totals up today, by those statistics, at 
77.5 million people in America that would be a pool that one could 
potentially hire from to go harvest the onions or the grapes or fix the 
roof or vacuum the floors or make the bed or cut the grass or trim the 
trees or pull the weeds or whatever the situation may call for. 
Whatever job it is that some say Americans won't do.
  We would only have to hire from those Americans one out of 12 of 
those sitting around idle and put them to work to replace those who are 
here illegally. One out of twelve. Is that too much of a burden on 
America for the rule of law, to hire one out of 12 of the idle among 
us, to put them to work?
  But, I forgot, Madam Speaker, there is work out here that Americans 
won't do. I remember a particular high-profile leader made a statement 
here a couple of months ago that was, if it is 105 degrees in Dallas 
and you need a roof fixed, you aren't going to find an American to do 
that job. So I went back to my staff and I asked them, What would be 
the dirtiest, most difficult, most dangerous job that there is to do 
anywhere in the world?
  We surveyed around through the jobs and the different countries and 
came to the conclusion that rooting the terrorists out of the hovels in 
Fallujah would be the dirtiest, most difficult, the most dangerous, and 
the hottest job there is anywhere in the world. With 130 degrees, you 
put on a flak jacket, go in there and risk your life to root the 
terrorists out of Fallujah. Well, the lowest ranking marine would be 
collecting about $8.09 an hour. That is if he was there on a 40-hour 
week. And you can bet he is turning in more than 40 hours in that 
combat environment, Madam Speaker. But $8.09 an hour to do that kind of 
work.
  And they are proud of their work. And they deserve every accolade we 
can give them and all the honor from here in this Congress and from the 
American people. They have demonstrated that they will do that work for 
that kind of pay plus the honor that comes with the sacrifice. And the 
memories that we will have and the memories that their families will 
have and the appreciation and the gratitude this country will have 
cannot be measured in dollars. And they would be the first to tell you 
that. But it gives you an example of the kind of work that is being 
down out there for low pay.
  I have spent my life in the construction business, and I have hired 
all kinds of people to do all kinds of work. I never hired anybody to 
do work I would not do. In fact, I never found work I would not do. If 
it needed doing, I would jump in there and do it alongside the people I 
hired. But I could find people to do necessary work, and sometimes I 
had to pay them an adequate rate for that necessary work.
  But paying someone $6 or $7 an hour to harvest a crop and arguing 
that that is a good going rate, or $8 or $9 an hour and saying I am 
paying $8.50 an hour for people to harvest my onions, but I can't get 
anybody to come do it for that kind of money. Well, okay, that doesn't 
mean there isn't available labor. It means the going rate is higher 
than that.
  I spent some time working on the pipeline when I was a young man, 
when I was about 19 years old. They would pull in on a job, might be 
Kansas, in fact, this one was, and they would start hiring people and 
the wage would go. And it paid a good wage and it paid expenses and 
mileage. And we had people come from all over the country with their 
welding rigs and their campers. And in no time at all, there would be a 
little town that would build up out there on the prairie, and it would 
be right there by what we called the bone yard, where we dispatched our 
trucks and our equipment and we went out and began building that 
pipeline across the State of Kansas.

[[Page H962]]

  They built a little city there because there was enough money to 
attract workers from all over America. They brought their equipment and 
they brought their trailers and they came and set up a campsite and 
went to work. And that is not the only place that that has happened. 
That is just an example that I happen to live by. And the reason we 
came from places like Iowa and Utah to places like Kansas was because 
the pay was good. For me it was $2.10 an hour, so that was enough to 
get me all the way down to Kansas to do that work at that time.

                              {time}  2240

  Today it is a different wage scale, but the incentive is the same. I 
have heard arguments that our onion and blueberry industries would 
collapse, and nobody would be there to harvest the grapes or the 
cucumbers or the zucchini. I would not lament if the zucchini were 
never harvested. However, unlike the first President Bush, I do like 
broccoli.
  However, the markets that are there have been established by supply 
and demand, and the labor is established by supply and demand. The 
argument that there is not labor there to do the work, I would submit 
that there are many businesses that are raising specialty crops that 
have established their business on the premise of hiring illegal labor 
to do the work. When it became more difficult for illegal labor to get 
there to do the work, now they come to the government and say, legalize 
them.
  They have become addicted to illegal labor, the addiction of the 
heroin of illegal labor, and now they want the methadone of the 
legalization of a guest worker or temporary worker plan. There is no 
such thing as a temporary worker plan in the history of the world. No 
successful plan, I would submit. I would say that I can think of one 
temporary worker plan, and that was when Moses led the Israelites out 
of Egypt. That is an example of a failed temporary worker plan. I find 
no example of a successful temporary worker plan.
  I sat in on hearings and I listened to a witness testify that their 
agriculture processing operation was near the border and they had a 
weekly turnover of 9 percent of their employee workforce which was a 
substantial size workforce. So it was difficult to recruit new people 
because they had trouble coming across the border to go to work every 
day, sometimes for the week I imagine. And it was the fault of Uncle 
Sam because we have tightened up our border enforcement, which I am 
somewhat surprised to hear.
  I would submit the business plan was based on an illegal premise, the 
plan of setting up a business near the border so it would be easily 
accessible by illegal workers, to bring people in because they would 
work cheaper and you could send them back to their home country and not 
have to worry about, and I do not know in this particular case, but 
from a general perspective one could take this assumption, and not have 
to worry about health insurance, workers comp, litigation, retirement 
benefits, the kind of things that are the burdens attached to any 
employer here in the United States who hires legal people.
  There is a benefit to hiring illegals. They work cheaper. You can 
hire them when you need them, send them away when you don't need them. 
They do not have a contingent liability that goes with them. They are 
not filing a lawsuit against you.
  One of the things they do also is they claim a maximum number of 
dependents. At say $10 an hour, to pick a round number, claiming the 
maximum number of dependents, there would be no withholding for Federal 
income tax. And in Iowa, there would be no State income tax 
withholding, especially for the States that do have income tax. An 
illegal would forfeit their payroll tax, the 7.65 portion for Social 
Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
  When that is said and done, compared to an American citizen, the 
illegal would take $1.54 more an hour than your legal American citizen. 
How long is an American citizen going to put up with that, taking home 
less pay, knowing that the person next to them is not paying taxes 
except for the mandatory withholding of the 7.65 percent that goes to 
Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
  So I asked the American people: What do you think of this? What would 
the real survey results be, and I sent out a mailing of 10,000 
questionnaires to the Fifth Congressional District of Iowa, randomly 
selected households from different areas of the 32 counties that I 
represent. I asked a series of 20 some questions on immigration. The 
most operative question, the most instructive question asked on a scale 
of 1 to 10, with 10 being the most intensive, how intensively do you 
agree with this statement: We should eliminate all illegal immigration 
and reduce legal immigration.
  Now, I am not calling for reducing legal, I would freeze it where it 
is, but that was the question. On a scale of 1 to 10, 82 percent wrote 
down 10. Some of them I think held their pen like a dagger when they 
wrote their numbers and comments on the side. They were intense.
  Madam Speaker, 82 percent said eliminate illegal, reduce legal, and 
they were emphatic. If you added up to the 6s, 7s, 8s and 9s to the 
10s, 97 percent said eliminate illegal immigration and reduce legal. 
That is the America that respects the rule of law and knows that if we 
do not have rule of law, control of our border, if Congress does not 
have the will to enforce these laws, how can they advocate that there 
is going to be something like a guest worker or temporary worker 
program. They cannot legitimately do that. The American people know 
better. They know this administration has not demonstrated a will to 
enforce the laws of the United States of America.
  And if we put more laws on the books, as we have sought to do here on 
the floor of Congress and sent over to the Senate, if those laws are 
signed into law by the President, that does not mean that a single one 
of them will be enforced by this administration. In fact, in the last 2 
years, I cannot count you a half dozen businesses that have been 
sanctioned for hiring illegals. Yet I can point to a business that had 
34,000 no-match Social Security numbers, and the withholding of those 
went into the suspended earnings file. Over 34,000 for a single 
company, they got the letters from the Social Security Administration. 
They know they are hiring illegals as a matter of practice.
  I have put together a piece of legislation that seeks to remedy this. 
It is called the New IDEA bill. New, there are not hardly any new ideas 
in any legislative process, and this Congress is no different, but I 
believe this is a new idea. It is called the New Illegal Deduction 
Elimination Act.
  I looked around and tried to identify what government agency is doing 
their job, what government agency is enforcing, what agency has the 
will to enforce the laws that they are charged to enforce and protect 
and to bring penalty and interest and do their collection. We know who 
that is, it is the Internal Revenue Service, not the IRS, not the 
current ICE, but the Internal Revenue Service.
  So I thought how can I use the IRS to enforce immigration law. I 
drafted up some legislation and it does this: New IDEA, Illegal 
Deduction Elimination Act, removes the Federal deductibility for wages 
and benefits that are paid to illegals. It allows for an employer to go 
on the basic pilot program on the Internet, instant check I call it, 
entered the Social Security number and some other data. That search 
mechanism goes out to the database of the Department of Homeland 
Security, NCIC, and comes back and it will tell you if that identifies, 
the information entered identifies someone who is legal to work in the 
United States.
  If an employer uses the instant check program, they get a safe harbor 
protection from the New IDEA. But if they do not use instant check or 
if they use it and ignore the results, they know or should have known 
they are hiring an illegal, and the IRS, in the course of their normal 
audits, would come in and remove that deductibility.
  So presumably, let us go back to the $10 an hour employee. That $10 
an hour employee would have been a $10 deduction for the employer from 
their income side. It would go over to the schedule C side of their 
income tax. But when the IRS looked at that and determined the $10 that 
you paid went to an illegal, the company knew or should have known it 
was an illegal, they remove that from the schedule C and it goes back 
over into the gross receipts and presumably becomes profit.
  If this is a company, corporate income tax perhaps in the 34 percent

[[Page H963]]

bracket, then their elimination of that $10 deduction from their income 
becomes income and the interest and the penalty and the tax on that 
accrues to about $6 an hour. So your $10-an-hour employee when the IRS 
is done with their audit becomes about a $16-an-hour employee. That 
makes it a circumstance by which a legal American can perhaps compete. 
A $16-an-hour illegal does not look quite so good any more compared to 
the $12 an hour legal.
  Those kinds of rational decisions will be made by the millions across 
this country when we pass New IDEA, when the President signs New IDEA 
into law. It will dry up the jobs magnet. We need to shut down this 
jobs magnet because that is what is attracting the illegals into 
America. Shut off the jobs magnet, eliminate birthright citizenship, 
and seal up the border. If we could do those three things, what we 
would see happening is fewer people would be coming into the United 
States. Two of the biggest reasons to come here would be gone: 
Birthright citizenship and jobs. The jobs dry up.

                              {time}  2250

  And then the human traffic that is 4 million strong; this human 
haystack that pours across our border begins traveling back in the 
other direction and starts to head back south again. That will happen 
by the millions. I don't think it empties out 11 or 12 million. In 
fact, I think there are perhaps 20 or more million in this country that 
are illegal. But I think it maybe takes 30 to 40 percent of those that 
will go back south again. I know that there are quite a few that were 
working off the books that aren't even being deducted. They are working 
cheap enough that the employer decides, I am not going to do the book 
work on them; it is too much trouble. I am just simply going to hand 
them cash and pay them off.
  But I also know that there are perhaps 50 percent or more that are on 
the books that are sending in these no-match Social Security numbers 
that go in the earning suspense file like the 34,000 for the single 
company.
  We pass New IDEA, that changes some of that. That sends the traffic 
back to the south, shuts off the jobs magnet in many of these 
companies; and American citizens have a chance to go to work again, 
people that are lawfully present here in the United States, the green 
cardholders. Those that are trying to earn their citizenship the right 
way have an opportunity.
  And what do we say, Madam Speaker, to the young people in America 
that decide they don't want to go to college and become a doctor or a 
lawyer or a scientist or somebody that is an MBA from Harvard? What do 
we say to those people that say, I have had 13 years of school, 
kindergarten, K-12. I have had it. I want to go to work. I want to work 
with my hands. I want to develop my skills. I want to start earning a 
paycheck and bring it home, and I want to do something different with 
my life. This is the pace that I want. Those people have all been cut 
out of this.
  I got a letter from a lady the other day. She and her husband had 
been involved in the construction business all their lives. They have 
been pushed out now. There is no opportunity for them. They are 
essentially jobless because illegal labor has undercut their wages to 
the point where they can't get a job anymore.
  One Easter I was in a motel visiting my in-laws, and I happened to 
have a conversation there in between mass with a couple of people that 
were of Mexican descent. They were U.S. citizens. They happened to be 
working up in Nebraska. I said, Why are you here? And it is Easter and 
you are away from your families. And they said, well, we can't go to 
work down on the southern border because there are so many illegals 
down there that you can hire four of them for every one of us, so we 
have to come here to Nebraska. And one of them was going to the 
Philippines the next week. But they were traveling and sending their 
money back to their families in southern Texas because the 
proliferation of illegal labor shut them out of the job market in their 
own neighborhood, Madam Speaker. This goes on, over and over again.
  But I beseech the United States Senate to cease discussion, 
deliberation, bringing language out of the Judiciary Committee that 
provides for guest worker-temporary worker. It is a flawed plan. There 
has never been a successful guest worker-temporary worker plan ever in 
the history of the world. The arrogance or the idea that you could 
configure one in committee and sit back and draw one up because you 
know what's best for America, without a model. And then what would 
happen is that comes over here from the Senate after you water down the 
enforcement that we sent over there, and you send us your temporary 
worker plan, which America knows can't work, and it comes to the floor 
of this Congress and for political reasons, nearly every one on that 
side of the aisle will vote for it, Madam Speaker.
  And for whatever reasons, misguided reasons, I think, political 
reasons, because business wants cheap labor, some of the people on this 
side of the aisle will vote for it too and this will go, if it goes to 
the President, he will sign a temporary worker plan. It will be an 
amnesty plan, Madam Speaker. I have seen nothing that anyone has 
drafted up that is anything but an amnesty plan.
  The American people know amnesty. They will understand amnesty, and 
they will let out a hue and cry and a scream that will be heard for 
generations if we fail them now; if we fail to provide enforcement at 
our border to build a fence, to seal that border and send a message 
that this is a sovereign line between two countries; if we fail to 
sanction employers; if we fail to pass New IDEA; if we fail to put 
policies in place that cause people to migrate back to their home 
countries.
  But if we can succeed in enforcement, we can also promote American 
values, Madam Speaker. In those countries that need help and the people 
who are coming here are the solutions for the countries that they are 
leaving. If they would go back to their home countries and build their 
countries and enforce the changes that are necessary for the reforms, 
the world is a better place. Their country is more prosperous, their 
children will have opportunities. And that is the legacy that can echo 
around the world. It can't succeed under guest worker-temporary worker.
  We have an obligation and a duty to our Founding Fathers, to our 
constituents, to Americans, to God to preserve and protect this great 
country and to shape an immigration policy that is designed to enhance 
the economic, the social, and the cultural well-being of the United 
States of America.

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