[Congressional Record Volume 152, Number 52 (Thursday, May 4, 2006)]
[House]
[Pages H2163-H2171]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




 THE EFFECTS OF MULTICULTURALISM AND ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION ON OUR NATION

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 4, 2005, the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. King) is recognized for 
60 minutes.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the privilege to come to 
the

[[Page H2164]]

floor of this Congress, as always, an opportunity to say a few words to 
you and a few words to the American people at the same time.
  We have completed a fair amount of our work here in this Congress 
this week, and some folks are on their way home and some are on their 
way to other points around the globe to get better informed about some 
of the locations so that we can do a better job of doing our jobs here. 
We will, many of us, gather information over the weekend, come back and 
speak up. And you will hear next week, Mr. Speaker, the voices from all 
across this Nation as it was envisioned by our Founding Fathers, that 
we represent the people from our districts, we listen to them.
  They did not envision that we would be going home as many weekends as 
we do because they had not had the advent of air travel when they 
constructed this Constitution and envisioned this great deliberative 
body that we have the profound blessing to serve in.
  But they did envision that we would be the ear that would listen to 
the people. And we owe them our best judgment. We owe them our due 
diligence. We owe them 100 percent of our responsibility to listen, 
learn, think, reason, rationalize, and establish the framework of a 
belief system, that the issues and the opinions of the people in our 
districts would ask for us to reflect of their character as well, and 
then bring the specifics here to this Congress and, with due diligence, 
try to shape a policy that can be agreed upon here by a majority vote, 
most of the time a majority vote in this Chamber, although sometimes we 
do have a suspension calendar that takes a two-thirds majority to pass.
  This Nation, Mr. Speaker, is involved in a very intense national 
debate on what some will say is the issue of immigration, but those 
people are really trying to obfuscate the issue because the issue 
really is illegal immigration.
  I have not heard debate in this Congress, Mr. Speaker, about legal 
immigration. In fact, we seem to be universal in our support of legal 
immigrants who come here to the United States. They do it the right 
way. They follow the legal channels, those people that want to come 
here for a better life, and understand that the welcome mat that has 
always been rolled out here in America is rolled out for legal 
immigrants today. We encourage them to come, and we encourage them to 
engage in American life and to throw themselves into it with all their 
heart and all their soul and to assimilate into this American way of 
being. And the more quickly it can happen, the more effective they can 
be. The more quickly they learn the English language, the more quickly 
and effectively they can access this economy and be a more productive 
member of this economy and this society, Mr. Speaker. And that is the 
way it has been since the beginning of this Nation, as people came here 
searching for their dream.
  Some came as indentured servants. I think it would be my great, 
great, great, great, great grandfather, if I track it correctly. Five 
greats, Mr. Speaker, who came over here as an indentured servant in 
1759. And he owed, I believe, 7 years of work in the stables that he 
had signed up to work in to pay for his passage and the privilege to be 
here on this continent, not really as an American at that point but as 
a subject of the British Crown. And not that many years later after 
that 1759 or perhaps it was 1757 year date, the United States of 
America issued the Declaration of Independence, and we at that point 
became a free Nation and he became a free person. Raised 17 children 
here. They started out in Baltimore, Maryland, and they grew and 
scattered out across this country all the way across America. And their 
legacy is there today: hard work, integrity, Christian values, and a 
sense of family and decency.
  He was part of the original foundation of this great American culture 
that we have. The great American culture that has this belief that, 
yes, we believe in the foundational principles of our Constitution and 
the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that are in 
our Declaration, and we believe that those rights do come from God and 
they are in our Declaration of Independence. That is the guarantee as 
they pass through our Declaration. We have a sacred covenant with our 
Founding Fathers, who essentially codified those rights that are 
granted to us from God, put it in the Declaration, and transferred 
those rights over to the Constitution of the United States and set a 
standard for the world that had never been matched before, Mr. Speaker.
  And so those standards began on the Mayflower. They began with the 
earliest settlers here in America. And the shape and the character of 
America took place, and they created in those years the beginnings of 
this great American culture, this great American civilization.
  And I sometimes go before high school groups and middle school groups 
and I will ask them the question: Do you believe that the United States 
of America is the unchallenged greatest nation in the world?
  Very few of them raise their hands and say, yes, I believe that, 
because they have been conditioned to believe that all cultures are 
equal, that there is a multiculturalism belief and a diversity belief 
that you do not set yourself up above anyone else.
  And I will argue, Mr. Speaker, that we are not in the business of 
downgrading anyone or being critical of anyone. We are in the business 
of trying to upgrade ourselves. And if we are going to upgrade 
ourselves as an American civilization, then we have got to realize who 
we are, we have got to realize how we came about being these people we 
are, and we have got to then take a look at where do we stand on this 
spectrum of the different civilizations and cultures in the world, not 
just contemporarily around the globe, Mr. Speaker, but also throughout 
history. Where do we stand as a culture and are we a people that have 
risen to a point where we are the unchallenged greatest nation in the 
world?
  We are the world's only superpower, and I think that is inarguable. 
But what about our character? What about our culture? What about our 
civilization? What has made us great?
  And that question came to me, and it came to me about 10 years as I 
was serving in the Iowa senate and I happened to be reading through the 
Iowa code, and in there, there is a chapter on education. I read 
through that chapter, and I would not recommend just reading through 
any State code or the Federal code, for that matter. It is like reading 
the phone book of New York City. But I was doing that, and I came 
across a chapter on education. And in there it said each child in Iowa 
shall receive a nonsexist, multicultural, global education. Well, that 
all sounds really good. It sounds good to the ear today, and it sounded 
good to most ears back then in about 1997 when I first raised this 
issue.
  But as I read that, it occurred to me that we had put into the law in 
the State of Iowa that we were going to teach political correctness to 
all of our children that went to our accredited schools in the State. 
That included our public schools and our accredited parochial schools, 
or religious schools, that each child shall receive a nonsexist, 
multicultural, global education.

                              {time}  1615

  Now, I am not advocating that we teach a non-global, non-
multicultural sexist education. I am arguing that there is another 
viewpoint here not being exposed to our children. And it came to me 
last night as I sat at a table with five college students and began to 
discuss some of these issues with them. The ideas that I think are 
endemic in our civilization and culture, the ideas that made us great 
seem to be foreign to them.
  The value system, not that they are not good people, they are good 
people and I really like this generation, but their education isn't 
grounded in the same things that my education was grounded in.
  So as I looked at that section in that chapter of education in the 
code, multicultural, non-sexist global education, it occurred to me we 
didn't need to be impelling and compelling that to be taught to our 
children.
  So what would I like them to be taught? I took out a bill draft form 
and I struck a line through there to strike out the ``multicultural 
non-sexist'' global, because I didn't want that to be a mandate. I 
wanted room there to teach other things as well. You can't teach 
multiculturalism and teach this American civilization in a way you 
understand them both if you are going to exclude one.

[[Page H2165]]

  So I wanted to find a way that we could teach that perspective that 
was more objective than the one that was proscribed in the Iowa code. 
So I drafted a piece of legislation that today I call ``The God and 
Country Bill.'' And it says like this: Each child in Iowa, we strike 
that language out, each child in Iowa shall be taught that the United 
States of America, of which Iowa is a vital constituent part, is the 
unchallenged, greatest Nation in the world, and that we derive our 
strength from Christianity, free enterprise capitalism, and Western 
Civilization.
  Now, Mr. Speaker, that might sound like an arrogant statement for a 
State code to have in it, but I put those words out there for a reason. 
I wanted to challenge people to come with maybe a competing idea. 
Instead, I filed the bill and they didn't come with a competing idea, 
they came with name calling. So I sat there at my desk and I wrote down 
each one of the names that they called me and typed them up and 
laminated them and put them in my desk, and I have those names to this 
day. And they are all printable names, but none of them are 
constructive and I won't put them into this Congressional Record.
  But I would just state I will stand on that statement. I would maybe 
expand the statement that our first value is our Christian values, I 
might say our Judeo-Christian values, and that doesn't exclude the 
contributions of other religions, but what it does say is this is the 
predominant philosophy that shaped the American culture, is our Judeo-
Christian values, the foundation of our beliefs that are in the Bible, 
in the Old and in the New Testament, and our belief that when we commit 
a sin against mankind, we should confess that sin and repent and ask 
forgiveness. That is part of our culture.
  If we wrong our neighbor, what is the best thing to do? What if one 
of our children was playing baseball in the backyard and they hit the 
ball through the neighbor's window? We would send them over there and 
say, you need to go over there and confess that you broke the window, 
and you need to also ask forgiveness, and you have got to repent. So 
you say I broke your window, and repent, you say I am sorry. Then you 
say can I make it right with you. Will you forgive me.
  That is a Christian value, Mr. Speaker. That is as clear an example 
as we can have of a Christian value. It is the core of the character of 
the American people today, and many of the things we do. We know what 
is right. What is right is in our culture. We don't always do what is 
right, but we know what is right. That foundation, the free enterprise 
capitalism foundation and the Western Civilization foundation.
  But to explain this and to explain what kind of a nation we are and 
how we came about being this great Nation we are comes back to these 
core values of Judeo-Christianity, free enterprise capitalism, Western 
Civilization.
  I would argue it this way, Mr. Speaker, that in the beginning of 
Western Civilization, you had during the Greek period of time, when 
they had the Age of Reason, and during the Age of Reason the Greeks 
took great pride in being able to rationalize their way through. They 
set up the hypothesis. They set up the theorem. They set up a means to 
be rational in a deductive reasoning approach so that they could begin 
to establish science and begin to establish technology. The Greeks took 
great pride in that.
  They sat around and reasoned. Some of them sat around in their cloaks 
and reasoned all day long, and the philosophy that grew from that was 
the foundation of Western Civilization.
  So civilization began to make progress because they weren't any 
longer just a group of people that were moving because they had an 
emotion that drove them or an irrational emotional button that was 
pushed. That was part of the Greek civilization, too.
  And a little aside on this, Mr. Speaker, is that the Greeks did have 
as pure a form of democracy as the world had seen, at least at that 
time, and our Founding Fathers rejected that form of pure democracy. 
Because what they saw was in the Greek city states, where every man of 
age could vote, they gathered together in the coliseum, or in the city 
hall you might say today, and they debated the great issues over the 
day. And some of the great orators had the ability to sway massive 
numbers of people. And if they were so compelling in their oration that 
they could move people perhaps in a direction that wasn't good for the 
city state, of, say, Sparta, for example, or Athens, and so the people 
in those communities understood that they didn't always do the thing 
that was right because they were sometimes led by emotion.
  So the Greeks being, in the Age of Reason, so rational, that they 
identified the folks that led them wrongly by emotion rather than 
rightly by reason and those people were identified as demagogues. And a 
demagogue who was leading a city state down the wrong path was 
occasionally put up for a vote, for a black ball. And if any of you 
have been involved in Greek life on campus, that black ball still 
exists today on campus. And if that demagogue received three black 
balls from three members of the community, they said we need you to 
leave, he would be banished from the city state for 7 years, couldn't 
come back, couldn't be there to give any great oratorical speeches, 
couldn't get them to charge like lemmings into the sea and do things 
that were irrational, not in the great Age of Reason of the beginnings 
of Western Civilization in the Greek city states. That is one of the 
little side notes that happens.
  But the rationale that came from Western Civilization, the deductive 
reasoning that came from Western Civilization, grew from a real 
commitment to be logical, to be rational, and to also always build for 
an a greater good.
  This Western Civilization then that flowed and grew out of Greece 
began to travel through the known world at that period of time, and it 
migrated its way over into Western Europe and arrived there at the Age 
of Enlightenment.

  The Age of Enlightenment then, and I have to give the French some 
credit because they seem to be the center of the Age of Enlightenment, 
that is when technology took hold, building upon Western Civilization, 
on the Western Civilization foundation of the Age of Reason, was built 
the Age of Enlightenment. And that Age of Enlightenment was the 
foundation for the industrial era.
  As the industrial era grew, so did the population over in the 13 
original colonies here in the United States on this soil that we stand 
on today, Mr. Speaker.
  We are the beneficiaries on this continent of two great movements in 
history, the Western Civilization and the Age of Enlightenment. Those 
two things coupled together, the Western Civilization that flowed 
through the Age of Enlightenment, the leg of this three-legged stool, 
found its way here on the new world, North American continent, where we 
had unfettered free enterprise capitalism, where you could come over 
here and invest a dollar, invest your sweat equity, you could have an 
idea, you could take a chance, you could go out and blaze a trail into 
the wilderness, and if you wanted to trade for furs or cut some timber 
or start a farm or trade with Native Americans or maybe get a job, as 
George Washington did, surveying some of this land, all of those 
opportunities were open in this new world.
  And there wasn't a limitation on the potential, there was no 
restriction, there was no class system that restrained us. This land 
had, aside from the Native Americans, that did not really fight over 
the land, but believed that land ownership for the most part wasn't 
their province, the land had not been fought over as a piece of 
property like a commodity like Europe had been. So the legacy of that 
friction and resentment didn't exist either.
  But what did exist here in this land that we stand on and in the 13 
original colonies and then growing to the West in manifest destiny was 
a belief in Western Civilization, deductive reasoning, the Age of 
Enlightenment, free enterprise capitalism, many times no taxation, many 
times no regulation, unfettered free enterprise.
  What a dynamic team to have, Mr. Speaker, Western Civilization 
coupled with the Age of Enlightenment at the beginning of the 
industrial age, coupled with this unfettered free enterprise capitalism 
with low taxes and low regulations, in fact no taxes and no regulation 
in many cases. Binded together, it was the most dynamic economy that 
the world had ever seen.
  And the vision of manifest destiny began to blaze the trails out 
across the

[[Page H2166]]

west and settled this continent clear to the Pacific Ocean. As this 
country grew and we believed in manifest destiny and reached out, this 
dynamic organism of the United States of America would have become, in 
my opinion, one of the most aggressive, unrestrained, imperialistic 
nations ever in the history of the world if we weren't constrained by 
our Judeo-Christian values.
  But the Judeo-Christian values functioned as a governor on us, a 
governor like on an engine that keeps it from racing too fast, running 
too many RPMs and blowing the engine up eventually. This governor was 
our moral values, our faith.
  And this Nation that was founded on the faith, the Judeo-Christian 
and mostly the Christian faith, believed that we had a moral obligation 
to our fellow man. It believed that we needed to help ourselves up the 
ladder and help others up the ladder with us, the idea to reach out and 
lend a hand and teach a man to fish and each one of us to stand on our 
own two feet and reach out and help the others. A means to reach across 
to, in this case it would be to the aisle, reach across to your 
neighbor and offer them a helping hand, but demand from them the things 
that they could provide, their responsibilities for work, their 
responsibilities to contribute to this society.
  We had some socialist experiments on this continent too and they 
didn't do too well. Some of those socialist experiments, in fact, all 
of them at one point or another, reached their end because in the end, 
we realized here in smaller experiments rather than going to large 
experiments like the Soviet Union or Communist China, that the sum 
total of the strength of a nation is, at least in part, the individual 
productivity of all of its people added up one person at a time. All of 
the productivity of us all together represents the strength of a 
nation, and people produce better and more productively if they are 
doing that for themselves.
  And the people in this country are the most generous people anywhere 
on the globe, because they work hard, they earn what they have, but 
they are glad to share it with people in need. That is also our 
religious foundation, our Christian faith, our Judeo-Christian values 
that tie that altogether.
  So I hope, Mr. Speaker, that I have described how this worked, this 
unfettered free enterprise capitalism that grew from Western 
Civilization in the science and the technology and the Age of 
Enlightenment and the industrial revolution era with this voracious 
appetite to grow and produce and explore manifest destiny, but 
controlled by the most powerful and profound moral values that come to 
any civilization in the history of the world, our Judeo-Christian 
faith, rooted in the Bible, reflected in our Declaration of 
Independence, and those values that show up in the Constitution, even 
though they aren't specifically listed within the Constitution.
  So, this great Nation that we are a part of, this legacy, this 
history, needs to be taught to our young people. And the American 
people have to think about who we are. How did we get here? What are we 
formed from? What are we shaped from?
  I have described some of that, Mr. Speaker, in the God and country 
bill, Judeo-Christian values, free enterprise capitalism, Western 
Civilization. This combination, coupled on this land, a land that 
didn't have a legacy of bloodshed for the land, joined together with 
these wonderful natural resources from sea to shining sea, that is 
America.
  When I see the Statue of Liberty, I know it has been a beacon for 
people across the world. And as they see that statue and the image that 
is there, you will not find a country anywhere on the globe where you 
don't have significant numbers of people who want to come here, want to 
live here, want to make their future here in the United States. And 
that image is this image of freedom, this image of opportunity, that 
has existed for more than 200 years, and it continues to exist in 
different forms.
  But sometimes we lose track of who we are. Sometimes we lose track of 
how we got here. We have an ongoing debate in this country continually 
of what is giving us strength, what has made us strong.
  I, Mr. Speaker, have tried to define that so that it is an 
understandable analysis. Others will say well, no, we really aren't the 
greatest Nation in the world. We really have a lot of things we ought 
to apologize for, because we have been violent and we have sent our 
military around the world and we should feel guilty about that because 
we did it for selfish purposes. And then that is when the debate 
begins.
  But I don't think we have anything to apologize for. Wherever we have 
gone in the world, we have left a peaceful legacy and we have left a 
positive legacy and we have been proud enough of who we are that we 
left a way of life there that has been beneficial to the people who 
have been visited by our soldiers and our Marine Corps.

                              {time}  1630

  And one of those examples would be in the Philippines. I recall a 
speech that was given here in Washington, D.C. a couple of years ago by 
the President of the Philippines, President Arroyo. And I do not think 
she knew that she was speaking to at least one Member of Congress in 
that scenario.
  But she said to the group that was gathered in the hotel here in 
Washington, D.C., she said, thank you America. Thank you for sending 
the Marine Corps to the Philippines in 1898. Thank you for liberating 
us.
  Thank you for teaching us your way of life. Thank you for sending the 
priests over there to teach us your religion. Thank you for sending 
10,000 American teachers over to the Philippines to teach us all of the 
academics that you did, to teach us your way of life, and to teach us 
the English language.
  Thank you for the English language, because today we speak English in 
the Philippines, as a result of the Spanish-American War, 1898, and 
today they have 1.6 million Filipinos who go anywhere in the world that 
they choose to go, they can get a job there, they can work there, and 
they send their money back to the Philippines, creating a significant 
portion of the gross domestic product.
  Another example would be, last night I had the great privilege to sit 
down and have dinner with a group, a delegation from the Japanese 
legislature. We have an exchange program that has gone on here, and 
this is my fourth year to have the privilege to sit down with them.
  It is interesting to me that I sat down for the first time I met 
Minister Ono here in this city. And at the time he was the Minister of 
Defense for Japan.
  My father spent 2\1/2\ years in the South Pacific and came back home 
from there weighing 115 pounds; not on a very good ration, is the way 
he put it. It was quite interesting to me that I had the privilege more 
than 60 years later to sit down and have dinner with the Minister of 
Defense for Japan.
  If there was a hatchet there to be buried, it has been buried a long 
time ago. And there was a hatchet to be buried. And we are joined 
together now not as allies for strategic purposes, which we are, but we 
are trading partners and we are friends. And, yes, we have our 
disagreements, and so do brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers 
and fathers and sons and mothers and daughters.
  We have our disagreements, but we are trading partners and we are 
friends; we are good for each other's economy. They have a way of life. 
They have a constitutional system in Japan, and their result in the 
aftermath of World War II has been that they have become a modern 
nation with high productivity. They moved into the modern world.
  They are a developed nation today; and no one questions a developed 
nation, because they have had a good work ethic, they have had a good 
constitution to work under, and they have a strong belief system, and 
much of this was structured by General MacArthur after World War II. 
Another American legacy.
  I also point out, Mr. Speaker, that if you look around the world, and 
ask yourself, where has the English language traveled? And we can see 
nations, I mentioned a couple of them, and you might look also into 
India where the English language is prevalent there. You can look 
across in places in Europe where you sit down at the roundtable in 
Brussels where now 25 nations of the European Union sit.
  The language of debate and discussion at the roundtable, and I have 
engaged in that debate and discussion, is

[[Page H2167]]

English. And the documents that are printed by the European Union are 
predominately English, although there are some exceptions. I think the 
French language usage there has gone from 57 percent down to about 7 
percent of the documents now are in French.
  But if you look at the history of the English-speaking peoples, as 
Winston Churchill did when he wrote his epic novel, ``The History of 
the English Speaking Peoples,'' as you read that document, it occurs to 
me, and I do not think he quite says it in the book, but the 
documentation does as you sum it up, as you read through, wherever the 
English language has gone, and it has been either Americans or the 
British people that have taken it around the world, but wherever the 
English language has been planted, there you will find freedom.
  Without exception, I cannot come up with a single nation that speaks 
English then but does not have freedom, that does not have a 
representative form of government. And I think that the English 
language has become a precursor to freedom. In fact, I think that there 
is not really, some people will say you cannot understand the Bible 
unless you can understand it in Hebrew or you can understand it in 
Latin, or you can understand it in Greek, because there are different 
definitions and connotations that come from different languages.
  I will say that I speculate that it might be difficult, in fact it 
could be impossible to thoroughly understand freedom if you do not 
understand the English language, because English is the language of 
freedom. It is the language that has taken freedom throughout the 
world.
  It is the language that has identified these principles that we hold 
so dear in this Chamber, Mr. Speaker. And it is essential to this 
country that we bind ourselves together with one common language.
  Also when I look around the globe, and I did this test some years 
ago, I went to an almanac and looked up the flags of all of the nations 
in the world. And identified all of the nations. Then I went to the 
``World Book Encyclopedia,'' which is what I had available to me, and I 
looked up every one of those nations, because the ``World Book'' will 
give a list, but it will show what the official language is of each 
country; you have to look them up one at a time.
  I looked up every country in the world. And I wrote down the 
language, or sometimes languages, the official languages of these 
countries. And of every country in the world, there by that analysis, 
every single nation had an official language and probably to this day 
does under that analysis.
  Until I got to the United States of America. We do not have an 
official language here in the United States; we have a common language, 
English, but we do not have an official language.
  But the rest of the world has understood this. The rest of the world 
has understood that the most powerful unifying force known to humanity 
throughout all of history is a common language, a common language that 
binds everyone together, a language that allows everyone to communicate 
together quickly and efficiently and precisely without 
miscommunication, without misunderstanding.
  And if it happens your language is Spanish or if it happens to be 
Swahili, or if it happens to be French or German or whatever it might 
be, if that language is the language of your country, that is the 
language that ties you together.
  And we have understood that here. And we promoted assimilation for 
that reason. And we have encouraged the learning of the English 
language. And the printing of the documents here has been, other than 
interpretations that run to other countries and for other reasons, has 
been in English. We have committed to that in this country, as a 
practice but not as a matter of law.
  And I wonder why not. I wonder why it would be that all of the other 
nations in the world understand that the most powerful unifying force 
of any civilization is a common language, a common form of 
communications currency. I used to carry a euro around in my pocket, 
Mr. Speaker, a 5 euro bill.
  Because that is a way to define how they thought they were going to 
pull together the European Union, print a currency. Well, if you can 
print a currency and everybody has to do business in that currency, you 
pull your center together because you identify by the currency that is 
coming out of your billfold.
  And that is the direction that they have been working to go in the 
European Union is to establish the United States of Europe. They have 
had some setbacks of late. But yet that idea of tying people together 
on that common currency was a unifying philosophy.
  It did not matter that today with computers you can do the exchange 
rate instantaneously; you can set up the automatic exchange with your 
credit card and never have to pay attention to the difference. What 
mattered was to have that currency, to be able to look at that, to be 
able to pass that on to the person you are doing business with, and 
that identifies you as someone from the European Union, whether you are 
from the Chec Republic or from Ireland or Italy or the Isle of Malta or 
whatever it might be.
  They recognize that, and they tie themselves together in their debate 
with English as their debate language. But another example would be the 
Israelis. And they established their nation in 1948, and the U.N. 
endorsed them, and they fought a war to establish their freedom in 
1948.
  Their anniversary just came up this week; I believe it was Monday if 
I am not mistaken. And there, by 1948, and 1954, they concluded they 
needed to establish an official language of Israel. And so they 
deliberated, had their debates. They could have chosen English, they 
could have chosen Russian, they could have chosen German, they could 
have chosen French, they could have chosen Italian. They had people in 
that country that spoke all of the languages that we know of or that I 
know of at least that I can quote to you from this floor, Mr. Speaker.
  But they came together and resurrected a language that had not been 
used as a conversational language or a business language, but only a 
language of prayer, for the last 2,000 years. They chose Hebrew as the 
official language of Israel.
  And I asked the ambassador from Israel, why did do you that? What 
brought you to this conclusion? And he said to me, we looked at the 
United States. And in 1954 we saw the successful model that you were of 
having a common language that tied you all together, English being that 
common language. And we learned from that wonderful assimilation 
success that was established very well in the United States of America.
  And we adopted Hebrew as our official language. But they had to 
resurrect the language, and they had to get it in print, and they had 
to start to use it, and they actually had to teach themselves how to 
use Hebrew in conversation and in business aside from the use of Hebrew 
in prayer.
  And it has been a successful experiment. And as I meet with people 
over in Israel and ask them questions about how it works, when they 
bring in new immigrants from foreign countries, they bring them in to 
kind of an apartment complex camp that is there, and they teach them 
Hebrew.
  If they are young enough and if they are literate in their own 
language, in 6 months they will have enough Hebrew that they can say, 
good job, now you are ready to go out into the world and make your 
living here in Israel.

  And they send them out. If they come from a country where they are 
illiterate in their home language, they do not read or write in their 
home language, then they have great difficulty teaching them Hebrew. So 
they will teach them to read and write in their own language and then 
transfer them over into Hebrew.
  That takes about 18 months. If you are 45 or 50 years old, you get 18 
months to learn Hebrew, and you are out into the world, go ahead and 
make a go of it. People do that. They are successful. And it has been 
extraordinarily successful to tie the Israeli people together.
  If you remember the raid on Entebbe, when things needed to happen 
fast and you needed to identify a fellow countryman, even if it is in 
the dark, if you yelled to somebody to get down in Hebrew, they are 
going to hit the deck, and it is likely going to save their life; and I 
believe it did under the circumstances.

[[Page H2168]]

  So Israel learned from the United States' lesson. All of the other 
countries in the world had an official language. Israel chose one. They 
chose Hebrew. We have English here. If it happened to be some other 
language, I would be for that other language being our official 
language.
  I received some disagreements from the Catholic Church in that we did 
not need to move forward with establishing an official language in the 
United States. And so I went ahead to my ``World Book Encyclopedia.'' 
And I looked up the Vatican. And I found out in the Vatican that there 
are two official languages there, Latin and Italian.
  They seem to get along just fine with official languages in the 
Vatican. And we can get along better with an official language here in 
the United States.
  I would submit that that is part of our debate, Mr. Speaker, and I 
believe that we should bring that forward and establish English as the 
official language of the United States of America to uncomplicate our 
future, to pull us together as a people, to reduce the divisions 
between us, to put incentives in place for people to learn English so 
that they have an opportunity to succeed in this society, and to send 
the message to the world that we are one people with one cause and one 
history, bound together by a common history, by a common experience, 
bound together by a common official language, that official language of 
English.
  One of the reasons that we have not been able to accomplish this as a 
matter of policy here in this Congress is, in my belief, Mr. Speaker, 
that there has been this division that I mentioned in the early part of 
this discussion, the division that grows from multiculturalism and 
diversity, that grows from the idea that we cannot set our culture our 
civilization up above anyone else's.
  Well, as I look around the world, there are societies that are in far 
worse condition than we are in. Why is everyone looking at us for help, 
for some type of salvation? Could it be that we have some dynamics here 
within this culture and this civilization that really do set us above 
and beyond? It does not mean we have to walk around with our noses in 
the air. It does not mean that we have to be the ugly American.
  In fact, we have a greater responsibility and a greater duty to reach 
out to the rest of the world and try to teach them to fish and try to 
share with them our values, a rule of law, our Judeo-Christian values, 
that work ethic that we have, the way that we pull together and respect 
this rule of law, the foundation of our Constitution and the rights, 
the freedoms, the freedom of speech, religion, press, assembly.
  The right to keep and bear arms in this country, and that right is 
such an essential right, it seems to be the only place in the world 
where it is sacrosanct. It must be and it must remain so.
  Those values that bind us together to make us great as a people are 
the values that we can export to the rest of the world. We need to be 
proud of who we are in order to do that.
  And if I look at the operations going on over in Iraq, and I see the 
configuration that has been recommended to them by the State 
Department, and I question whether we had confidence in who we are when 
we encouraged the Iraqis to establish the voting districts that they 
have there in Iraq. And so what we have are representatives there who 
are defined as representatives who are Kurds, representatives who are 
Shiias, representatives who are Sunnis, then there is a 25 percent 
requirement that 25 percent of all the candidates elected shall be 
female.
  And so putting that configuration in there and not allowing just 
regions to be defined without regard to religion or ethnicity, or sex 
for that matter, and not allowing them to be defined that way sets up 
representatives. And they know that there are only six categories, if 
you are represented in the newly seated parliament of Iraq. I am 
grateful that we finally watched the Iraqis choose a prime minister.
  And I am looking forward to Prime Minister Talabani pulling together 
that government and naming his cabinet. But they know that they 
represent, they are either a Kurd, a Kurdish female, a Sunni, or a 
Sunni female, or a Shiia, or a Shiia female. That is the six 
categories.
  They know they are there to represent their ethnic group. And I have 
to believe that the women who are there know that they are there to 
represent women. And I would like to think that if they would have just 
simply carved up Iraq into representative districts without regard to 
religion, without regard to ethnicity, without regard to what sex, and 
let people run for office and guarantee them equal opportunity as 
individuals, like we do here in America, I have to believe that there 
would have been a different kind of mix in the parliament.

                              {time}  1645

  I know from my own experience that in the district that I represent 
there are people that are on the right and people that are on the left. 
I have sat down and talked with both of them, reasoned with both of 
them, compromised those disagreements that come, and come with a policy 
and come to this Congress as a voice for all the people in my district. 
So if there is a conflict that needs to be resolved, it is more likely 
to get resolved back in the 5th District of Iowa than it is to be 
brought here and create more disagreement here in this Congress.
  If I simply were a representative of the conservative wing of the 
party representing the 5th District of Iowa, I would not have an ear 
then for the people on the other side of the aisle. If I were a 
representative of, say, for example, the Catholic church in the 5th 
District of Iowa, and that is the viewpoint that comes if you are a 
Shi'a or if you are a Sunni, then you know which wing of Islam that you 
come from. You are there to represent that wing of Islam.
  So if I came here as a Catholic conservative and did not listen to 
anyone else and I had a full constituency base that was always chosen 
just to support me, my position is going to be more aggressive than it 
would be if I had to go home and meet all the groups and answer to all 
of the different divisions of viewpoints.
  In Iraq, it is segregated now, and the voices in that parliament will 
be more partisan than they would have been otherwise. It will be more 
divisive than it would have been otherwise, because they configured 
them based upon religion, ethnicity and also sex rather than upon the 
geography that might have done a better job to put more moderation into 
their parliament.
  We have our values here in this country, and we exported them to 
places like the Philippines and places like Japan, but I wonder if we 
had enough confidence in who we are as a people, Mr. Speaker, to export 
those values to places like Iraq or did we retreat from that? Did we 
lose our self-confidence? Are we afraid to teach the English language, 
the language of freedom, in Iraq? Are we afraid to bring our free 
enterprise capitalism there? Are we afraid to bring our Western 
civilization values and give Iraq an opportunity to learn from 
Americans?
  I gave a speech to the Baghdad Chamber of Commerce late last summer. 
As I walked into the room, they were introducing me to give the speech; 
and it was a bit of a hurry. I said, hold it, because I wanted to be 
introduced through my interpreter first. They said, you do not have an 
interpreter, so we are going to introduce you. I said, well, I do not 
speak Arabic. They said, it is not necessary; all of the people here in 
the Baghdad Chamber of Commerce speak English.
  They did, and I could tell, because they laughed at the right times, 
they responded at the right times, they applauded at the times I would 
say was appropriate.
  Afterwards, they crowded around with their business cards. They could 
not get enough conversation with a Westerner, with an American with 
some business background who had come to Baghdad to wish them well and 
to help guide them. They were looking for advice, listening carefully.
  We have a lot to give, a lot to offer, and they are a sponge to 
absorb it, and they will pick up a lot of these values.
  The American Chamber of Commerce that is over there actively are 
doing great things. We just need more people to be involved in the 
people business. We need to be more proud of who we are, Mr. Speaker, 
and yet we have so little confidence in what has made us great that we 
cannot bring ourselves to do some of the simple things like enforce our 
immigration laws.

[[Page H2169]]

  I have watched since 1986 when President Reagan signed the amnesty 
bill, and first they said it was maybe 1.3 million people. Now we hear 
they really amnestied about 3 million people or about 3.5 million 
people. And the argument was, well, we cannot find these 1.3 or maybe 3 
million people. We cannot find them. We do not know what to do about 
it. We cannot get them out of the shadows and into a bus to go back to 
their home countries. So what we need to do is have stepped-up 
enforcement for those that will try to come afterwards, and we will 
just give them amnesty. That solves the problem.
  President Reagan, in one of the few times he let me down, signed the 
amnesty bill in 1986 with a great big hard promise of enforcement.
  I remember the fear of that enforcement. I was hiring employees at 
the time. I took their I-9 form and I watched them fill it out 
carefully and asked them for their identification, for their driver's 
license and Social Security card at least, as a minimum, and I put that 
on the copy machine. I scrutinized it. I put it on the copy machine, 
took a copy of the driver's license, Social Security number, asked them 
a series of questions about their origins and who they were and where 
they had come from and took that I-9 form, put that copy in there, and 
I carefully filed it with their job application form if we put them on 
and hired them. Because I was just sure that around the corner was an 
INS agent, Immigration and Naturalization Service agent, who would be 
there to audit my books to take a look at the nationalities of the 
employees that I hired in the construction business and to see if we 
had done everything exactly right.
  I had fear of enforcement of the INS in 1986, and I still had it in 
1987, 1988. Maybe by 1990, by then I had just about forgotten about the 
idea that there was a threat that there would be an INS audit because I 
had not heard of any out there.
  Now there were some back in those days, but I will say, Mr. Speaker, 
that from 1986 when the amnesty bill was signed, and they called it 
amnesty, from that point on there was an accelerated enforcement. From 
that point on, that enforcement went down, diminishing over 20 years 
where we get to this point in 2006 up until just a few weeks ago, there 
was zero enforcement. No employers were sanctioned under penalty of law 
in 2004. There were some allegations there were three in 2005. I cannot 
identify which companies those are, and I am not sure whether it is 
truth or rumor. If it only averages 1.5 companies a year in a Nation of 
283 million people, then I would submit that that is not enforcement at 
all.
  So we are not enforcing employer sanctions, and we are not enforcing 
domestic enforcement. People can go out on the streets and not be 
questioned as to their lawful presence in the United States. We have 
city after city in America that are passing sanctuary policies that 
forbid their law officers from inquiring into the lawful presence of 
the people that they stop in traffic stops and accidents or that they 
incarcerate for other crimes. We have news of people in this country 
who are incarcerated in our prisons without any idea whether they are 
citizens or whether they are not. No one wants to ask the question.
  We are so intimidated by somehow or another this civilization of 
guilt that because America is a nation of immigrants that we cannot 
have a rational immigration policy. But I would submit, Mr. Speaker, 
that America is a nation of immigrants. I would ask the question of 
Americans. Name a nation that is not a nation of immigrants.
  In fact, as I had a discussion with a historian, a Japanese 
historian, last evening, he talked about how they have a better 
understanding of the migration that came into Japan and the ethnic 
groups that make up the very homogeneous Japanese people today, but 
they come from, some of them, different origins, and they have been 
blended together on that island as a homogeneous people, but still they 
are immigrants, some generations, many generations ago.
  The same goes for here in the United States. The same goes for Native 
Americans who came across the Bering Strait, by most accounts, perhaps 
12,000 years ago. They were immigrants then, Mr. Speaker, and they were 
here first, yes.
  But I do not think anybody asked Christopher Columbus when he 
discovered America, did you just consider touching bases there on the 
continent and then pulling back out of there and decided to leaving the 
Western hemisphere to be, let us say, preserved for indigenous people 
or what was Western civilization to do with this huge twin land masses 
and resources that we have?
  It defies logic to think that somehow Western civilization would have 
just pulled off, said, hands off, no, we found indigenous people here. 
They migrated here a time ahead of us. We are not going to challenge 
that or try to use the resources. We are just going to make it a big 
preserve for Native Americans to live here happily ever after.
  That was not going to be the case. The forces of history defined this 
Nation, and the alternatives can be argued plus or minus along the way. 
The result might have been configured a little bit differently, but 
there was going to be population growth. There was going to be a modern 
civilization built here, and if it had to be built by somebody, who 
better than the descendants of Western Europe, who better than the 
people who believed in free enterprise capitalism, Western civilization 
and Judeo-Christian values so that we could build this great Nation out 
of these strengths? Who better, I would submit, Mr. Speaker?
  So this great Nation has been built from those values, and we are a 
nation of immigrants, as all nations are nations of immigrants. We 
should be proud of who we are. We should be proud of our heritage. We 
should welcome people into this society in a legal fashion, and we 
should ask them, we should compel them to join in this great experience 
and this great experiment that we are by assimilating into this society 
and into civilization.
  For to come here to America and move into an ethnic enclave and not 
learn the English language and not move out of that enclave into the 
broader society but simply to live there for generation after 
generation is not being an American at all. That is the transplant of 
the donor culture to the host culture in the form of an enclave, and it 
is not constructive to the broader society.

  It does not mean you have to give up your culture. I mean, we know 
that. We appreciate the great variety of subcultures we have here in 
America, and it is an ever-growing and changing thing.
  And I would say also, Mr. Speaker, that we have an extra blessing. 
The filter system that we have had here in America for immigrants is 
something we do not talk about very much. But, by and large, throughout 
history, the people who came to the United States legally came here and 
I think knew why they came here. They knew what they wanted to leave. 
They wanted to leave the tyranny of the Kaiser, for example; they 
wanted to access religious freedom; they wanted opportunity; they 
appreciated the privilege of freedom of speech, religion and the press, 
all of those values. And sometimes the poverty, sometimes the potato 
famine, sometimes the fear, sometimes the persecution of a family or 
the political persecution of a belief or a persecution of their 
religious beliefs, those reasons drove people, and poverty is another 
motivator, to come to the United States.
  They took great chances to come to this country. They staked their 
claim on this soil. They built their future here. They were grateful 
for the hospitality, grateful for the opportunity, but they also were 
the vigor of the donor societies. The cream of the crop often came to 
the United States, and that vitality that we have is much the product 
of voluntary immigration, who sacrificed a lot and took great risks to 
come here.
  We find ourselves today in a little bit different kind of scenario. 
We have rolled out a red carpet across our southern border, and we 
refuse to enforce our border on the south, and we have immigration 
laws. We ask people to respect our laws, but 58 percent of the people 
on the south side of the border believe they have a right to come to 
the United States. They believe they have a right to come here. And if 
they believe that, Mr. Speaker, then we are not doing a very good job 
of conveying our sovereignty.
  We have become a Nation without a southern border. An average of 
11,000

[[Page H2170]]

people a day pour across our southern border, and our border patrol 
manages to stop perhaps a fourth of them, maybe on a good day as many 
as a third of them, but they reported for 2004 that they stopped on our 
southern border 1,159,000. For 2005, that number comes out to somewhere 
in the area of this statistical extrapolation of 1,188,000.
  Now, most of them were told to go back home, go to their home 
country. Many were taken down to the port of entry and said go back. 
Some, and I will say also many others, were caught and released on 
their own recognizance, released perhaps on a promise to go back to 
their home country, Mr. Speaker.
  But that is no border enforcement. The last time I went to the 
border, I was advised that the catch-and-release plan meant we catch 
them up to seven times before we adjudicate anybody if they do not have 
some other crime. So we will stop that same person six times, and on 
the seventh time then we will forcibly put them under control and 
perhaps take them back to their home country.
  I have gotten reports that as many as 20 times there will be a single 
individual that is caught and released, as much as 20 times. There is 
smuggling that goes across our border, this huge human haystack, 4 
million strong, pouring across our southern border in a given year; and 
out of that 4 million, our administration's policy is we are going to 
sort the needle out of that haystack, and needles will be the criminals 
and the terrorists and the people that threaten our American safety and 
way of life.
  So with good border control and with good surveillance and with a 
virtual fence that the administration talks about, we are going to 
somehow shine a spotlight on this huge haystack of 4 million humans, 
and in there we are going to try to pick out these needles that 
represent the drug dealers and the rapists and the murderers and the 
terrorists.

                              {time}  1700

  Well, I just can't imagine sorting out those needles out of a 
haystack while the hay is being picked out of my hair. That is what we 
are asking the Border Patrol to do, Mr. Speaker. It cannot work. It 
cannot be effective. We must shut off this human tide at the border, we 
must enforce our border, we must seal it up tight and then have ports 
of entry where we have good control and good surveillance in order to 
keep our trade open with Mexico, in order to have good relationships 
there.
  Good fences make good neighbors. We can build a good fence on the 
border, and we can do so so that it is effective. When people say, no, 
fences don't work, I argue that fences don't work because, after all, 
we have seen pictures of people jumping over them and we have seen 
tunnels that have been tunneled underneath them, Mr. Speaker, but we 
also know people can fly over them in airplanes and go around them in 
boats. But if you can increase the transaction cost, if you raise the 
level of difficulty, you are going to find that there will be many 
people that won't try and fewer people will be successful.
  Before barbwire was invented, cowboys rode their herds. They were out 
there making sure that they kind of kept the cattle turned in the same 
direction so they didn't get split up and taken out by predators and 
they didn't lose them in the process. So as the cattle moved across the 
range, they would go out and just ride herd and nudge them back in so 
they could keep a head count on them and keep them together.
  Then somebody invented barbwire, and those cowboys that loved to ride 
their horses, they got down on their cowboy boots with post hole 
diggers and they set posts and they strung wire and they drove staples 
and they built fences. And not because they liked building fences 
better than herding cattle or better than they liked riding their 
horses. They built fences because it was efficient and effective. And 
then they rode the fence instead of riding the herd.
  We can do the same thing on the southern border. We can get the 
Border Patrol to ride the fence instead of out there chasing around in 
the desert for 11,000 people a day scattered across in the night trying 
to bring them together.
  We need to build a fence, Mr. Speaker; and we need to end birthright 
citizenship. This chain migration grows and cannot be controlled if we 
do not. There are 300,000 to 350,000 babies born in this country to 
mothers who are illegal in America, that do not have a lawful presence 
here. But we, by practice, grant them birthright citizenship; and the 
chain migration begins. That baby then, when it reaches age, can 
petition for mother and father and siblings to come into the United 
States.
  Now let me submit that I believe that there are not 12 million 
illegals in this country, because I have been counting the noses of 
those coming across the southern border. I believe that number has been 
increasing by as many as 3 million a year for at least the last 3 
years, but it is accelerating. So if we have been saying that it has 
been 11 million people for 3 years, but the number has been 
accelerating by 3 million a year for the last 3 years, we are at 20 
million.
  This thing has gone on longer than that. It has gone on longer than 3 
years. The 11 million was never an accurate number. You cannot count 
people who live in the shadows. It is impossible to do so. But let us 
just say that population today is 11 million, plus 9 million, plus a 
couple million more, and I will take you up to about 22 million. That 
is the number I think is the right number of illegals that are here.
  If the Senate passes their version of guest worker, this guest 
worker/temporary worker plan that has three levels of being illegal 
instead of right and wrong, if they do that and grant a path to 
citizenship, they are going to grant a path to citizenship to however 
many might be able to qualify under the standards they set. They are 
not going to put a quota in there and say, well, if you have been here 
5 years or more and we think there are, oh, 3 million of you, we are 
going to give you a fast path to citizenship.
  And what will they do if there are 6 million that show up and say I 
have been here 5 years or more? They will grant that fast track to 
citizenship for all those people whatsoever.
  If it is 12 million that show up, they will grant that. If it is 22 
million that show up, they will grant that. Because the legislation 
will simply set the criteria. They don't have the foggiest idea of what 
the numbers are.
  Let us just pick my number for extrapolation purposes. Let us say 22 
million people here illegally. Their first act was to break the law in 
the United States. The second act, when they went to work, they broke 
the law again. It isn't a matter of making criminals out of people that 
are here illegally because we want to make them felons and we voted to 
do so in this Congress. They are already criminals by virtue of 
committing a criminal misdemeanor by violating the immigration laws by 
coming into the United States illegally. The next act is to get a job, 
and that is also a crime.
  So we have 22 million is my number. We grant them fast track amnesty 
to citizenship. Those 22 million access citizenship in, say, 5 to 6 
years, or whatever it is the Senate might decide. And of course that 
doesn't mean we will agree in this House, Mr. Speaker, but if that 
happens, think of 22 million people lined up looking around at their 
family thinking, well, mom is down here with dad. I am going to invite 
them both to come and bring the chain migration for mom and dad. And I 
have my two sisters down here and my brother over here, and I left my 8 
year old down in my home country.
  I can add this all up, but I don't need to add all these extended 
families. I just say, try to imagine any one of them not having four 
family members that they would like to bring here to the United States 
under chain migration.
  Now, take 22 million, multiply it times four, and you have 88 million 
additional entrants into the United States by virtue of the chain 
migration that comes from this fast track to citizenship that the 
Senate wants to give to America. So you add the 22 million to the 88 
million and you have, Mr. Speaker, emptied Mexico. You have taken 
everybody that wants to come from there and brought them here. The 
people that will be left will be the people that are too senile to 
travel, too old to work, and people that will asking for a check to be 
sent down there to take care of them.

[[Page H2171]]

  Some of them are living like that now, and some of the communities 
down there have been virtually emptied out of the working-age people. 
Senior citizens only sitting there waiting for the giant ATM America to 
zap a portion of the $20 billion that goes to Mexico or the overall $30 
billion that goes to Mexico and Central and parts of South America. 
That is $30 billion out of the wages earned here that are wired down 
there, and some to be saved in banks for retirement, as they plan on 
returning back, and some to be spent to maintain the senior citizens 
that are there, the parents and the extended family members.
  What does this do for Mexico if we set up a policy here that draws or 
magnetizes and attracts every willing person in Mexico and in Central 
America to come to the United States and empties out their communities 
and drains them of the flower of their youth and the productivity and 
the vitality of their Nation? What future then does that country have, 
particularly Mexico, with the vast natural resources, with the huge 
quantity of oil, much of it not developed to the extent it should be? 
This Nation would sit there on a massive supply of natural resources 
without the human energy, without the skills, without the education, 
without the technology to develop it.
  Nature abhors a vacuum. Something, Mr. Speaker, will fill that 
vacuum. We have the Chinese that are in Central America today, and they 
are involved in drilling for oil offshore of Cuba, between Cuba and 
Florida. They are involved in the Panama Canal. They are looking, I am 
convinced, at potentially filling a vacuum that could be created.
  I submit that we shut off the jobs magnet. I submit that, when we do 
so, there will be people making a decision to go back to their home 
country because that opportunity they came for is no longer here. If 
that happens, Mr. Speaker, we can send back to their home country a 
very skilled and educated group of people who can transform Mexico and 
take them into the 21st century.

                          ____________________